Little time for blogging the last day or two. I've been finishing up a paper to send to Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, the first one I've written in a while, and I'm checking over another paper that I'm a coauthor on. We're deciding on where to send that one - the lead author suggested Tetrahedron Letters as a possibility, and I thought "Hmm. I haven't had a paper in Tet. Lett. for quite a while." Which was true - a moment later, I realized that the last time was twenty years ago this year! I'm just glad that I usually don't feel as old as that makes me sound. (Talk to me twenty years from now.)

Matthew Holt has a long article on his site that's well worth reading. I'm going to write in response to it this week, because I think a few of its assumptions are incorrect, but it's a good piece nonetheless. It's yet another in the saga of drug prices and research costs, whichs bids fair to be an inexhaustible topic. I am not, though, an inexhaustible blogger. After this round, I'm going to take some time off the topic to recharge my argumentative batteries.

I have a number of other topics backed up in my queue. And I'm going to start off a new occasional feature, a complement to my "How Not to Do It" series of lab stories. This one will be "Things I Won't Touch", and will feature a different reagent each time that I refuse to ever work with. It's a fairly lengthy list, and I'm only a moderately cautious guy. (If anyone else out there has made fluorosulfonic acid from scratch, starting with concentrated hydrofluoric acid and KOH pellets, I'd be glad to hear from you. We can start a club. Admittedly, I was young and foolish at the time, but I made it through without destroying any property. Mostly.)

And one more thing tonight: I'd like to thank everyone for making February by far my highest-traffic month ever. There were about 25,000 page views, which is a roundoff error for the likes of Glenn Reynolds, but thoroughly broke my old record. Much of that was due to my broadside against Gregg Easterbrook, which he certainly seemed to recover from nicely.