The new lazy: non-field specific meeting and journal invitations

We came across your contribution entitled <name of your paper here> published in <journal name here> and thought your expertise would be an excellent fit for <name of this unrelated – to your specialty – congress>.

We invite you as speaker at <full name of congress with dates>.

It is becoming a new form of either spamming or phishing (I still haven’t decided yet) or actually maybe a combination of both, especially that most seem to come from meeting organizers on topics that are completely unrelated to my field of expertise for the said meeting. I now received 7-10 of such invitations per week.

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Is the definition of smart going down the drain?

 

There’s these things called books, it’s like television for smart people

Bill Bryson, Movie A Walk in The Woods

 

A few days ago, we watched the movie A Walk in the Woods, bearing some similarities to Wild (a much better movie in my opinion). It, however, had a wonderful exchange which I jotted down immediately and reproduced as the quote above.

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An Efficient and Fun iOS E-mail App: Spark by Readdle

Except for a few months of BitNet e-mail on a VAX mainframe server, I have been using the default UNIX mail app for almost 25 years now. Started with a SUN workstation, moved from SunOS to Solaris, Linux RedHat distribution (and a few others) and ended up on OSX. The nice thing about this is that all my e-mail archives transferred easily from one UNIX flavour to the other!

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O Captain! my Captain!

To Jean Pouliot (1958-2015)

Berkeley 1985 (left) and more recently (right)

The title of this post is from a wonderful and powerful poem by Walt Whitman, delivered to a large public by a passionate performance in the movie Dead Poet Society.

It is here dedicated to my PhD thesis co-supervisor whom, through the years, became of a colleague, a co-conspirator in many fruitful scientific projects for which we successfully “tricked” numerous students to undertake them (as we acted as co-supervisors), and more importantly a dear friend.

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