This is one of those nights I warned about, when there's not much time for blogifying. My book chapter is headed out via overnight delivery tomorrow, full of corrections. That's not as bad as it sounds - they're things like a missed patronymic initial on a Soviet-era reference's co-author's name. A few are larger than that, but not too much larger. Considering some of the galley-proof horror stories I've heard, I consider myself quite fortunate.

And this is another one of those times I'd like to be able to talk about my work without being fired, because there's a lot of interesting stuff happening on that front, too. Oh, well, you'll have to wait to read the J. Med. Chem. paper. Who am I kidding - you'll probably read it in "Acta Retracta", if at all (you can tell if someone's a scientific literature geek by whether or not they laugh at that line, in much the same way that no synthetic organic chemist can avoid cracking a smile at the phrase "plutonium enolate.")

Or you can, if you're a real masochist, read the patent when it comes out. Speaking of which, I just downloaded a key patent the other day, with a lot of bearing on my current work, which turns out to an unrelieved torrent of hundreds of pages of Japanese. I truly hate it when that happens, because a patent that huge is bad enough in English. I can actually plow through katakana, which a lot of chemical names and concepts are rendered in, but there's no remedy for this beast, other than really being able to read Japanese. Fortunately, a couple of my co-workers do, being Japanese themselves. Unfortunately, they tend to shut their doors when they hear me coming.<