Don't ever do this

Books are big complex things, the more so because smaller presses require the author to basically do everything.  Three parts all have to agree with each other: the text, the figures, and the figure captions.  For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of resolution, and too little of it, TPP finds himself redoing a lot of figures, but along the way not everthing works out just exactly the same.  You find a better image over here.  You don't want to pay a publisher to use an image over there, so you have to get a replacement to avoid plagiarism.  A colleague helps you out with an image, a terrific image, one that you have to use even though it means modifying a plate, again.  And worst, as a result you think of a better way to present things, and this requires you to shuffle a couple of other items to make this work. You make this one little change in all of this and it's like knocking over one domino in a long row or a large network of dominos.  Something like 32 individual images or illustrations were arranged into 16 plates, and when you get done you've got something like 31 individual images and illustrations arranged into 13 plates, so now the chapter text and figure captions have to be updated, corrected, jiggered around, the figures renumbered and reorganized to make everything come out even again.  It took all day, and TPP is exhausted.  Only one more chapter to go, plus all the tough items that were passed over along the way.  And the appendices, all the appendices, containing another 62 figures! 

Joseph Hooker - Botanical Explorer, and plant quiz too!

Joseph Hooker was one of the most prominent botanists of Darwin's day.  His exploits and travels are the stuff of adventures.  So hang on to your pocket books and credit cards because this new book about Hooker is going to be hard to resist, and since it is actually quite reasonable in price, why not indulge a bit in some botanical history.  Hooker probably named more plants than anyone since Linnaeus.  So here's the link if you're interested.  And dang the Phactor loves that hat, rakish angle and all.  Yes, botanists are dashing sorts, especially in the field.  And do you recognize the plant that is being illustrated?  If so, what sex is it and where was it growing (country)? 

Snow Day - Sort of

Well, the university along with every other entity is the area has whimped out, scared by dire weather predictions, as they are scared by dire economic and social predictions, and declared a snow day. Of course if we really do get snow, then it's tomorrow that should be and will be cancelled. This is a great annoyance because Tuesday afternoon's lab is ready to go, now alternative arrangements will have to be made. So the Phactor just picks up on several ongoing projects and makes some progress on them. Writing a science book is quite a task especially because the field just doesn't stop and wait for you, and even when writing for a non-technical readership, you want things to be reasonably current, and worse, you make one change to accommodate new phylogenetic relationships among prokaryotes and it's like dominoes falling, and you have to change this too and then that and so on. So that's today's task; finding all the dominoes and fixing them up. But it requires changes to at least 2 figures, and that takes real time. At some point in time, it will be cut and run or truly this will be the never ending story. So here's a nice image symbolic of the weather, and something that the robins, who foolishly just arrived a week ago, from the north or from the south (?) will consume as soon as the ice melts.