The post before Christmas

Heathrow airport is not a happy place this week, especially as I spent several hours trying to get back there this week. I'll spare you the details but if I were tagging the experience, it would run something like this: airport BA cancelled fog bastards redirect dusseldorf cancelled retry amsterdam wrong_voucher pleading hooray landed dealyed_again home taxi m4 breakdown fifty_quid.

Obviously not ideal and its still going on. If you have any options, avoid LHR for the forseeable future.

In other news, it seems that arXiv are delaying the implementation of their 4-figure archive identifiers, until March 2007 at least, to allow for proper testing [from an email from admin]. Seems reasonable enough, especially for librarians who have yet to update systems based on 3-figure identifiers. I wonder if this launch will coincide with the launch of the new archive names and super-archives in astrophysics, high-energy, nuclear and condmat/AMO?

PLoS One has launched. I'll post some more on this soon.

Nature's experiment with open peer review has come to a halt due to a lack of enthusiasm for it.

Using blogs in a research environment for physics.

I also did a brief interview with First Author about PhysMath Central this week. Q&A to follow...