This And That

I was away the week before last on annual leave with my wife, Jan, visiting Oregon. We spent two days in Portland, two in Hood River, and three in Bend hiking, touring, eating—boy, did we eat; they take their food seriously in Oregon—and drinking some of the state’s wondrous microbrews. So this is a week to catch up, get ready for the ACS national meeting in Boston, and write an editorial on this and that.

Did you know that ACS Executive Director and CEO Madeleine Jacobs has started a blog on the ACS Network? Her first post went up on Aug. 4, and she used it to praise ACS’s outstanding staff on the occasion of the retirement of Marlyne Carr after 29 years of service to the society, the past six-and-a-half years as a special assistant to Jacobs.

As most of you know, Madeleine was C&EN’s editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2004, and in that position she was renowned for her graceful, witty, and thoughtful editorials. She says in her second blog post that writing those editorials was harder than writing a blog post. As her managing editor and the first person usually to critique the drafts of her editorials, I can attest to how hard she worked to polish them. I know her well enough to know that she will work just as hard to polish her blog entries; they’ll just be shorter than an editorial.

Check out Madeleine’s blog. And make it a point to leave a comment. We need to encourage her to keep up her blogging in the face of the many other demands on her time.

Speaking of that meeting in Boston, C&EN, C&EN Online, and “CENtral Science” will have quite a presence there. George M. Whitesides of Harvard University and Felice C. Frankel of Harvard and MIT will be at the Publications Division/C&EN booth in the exhibition hall on Monday, Aug. 23, from 11 AM to noon signing their fascinating and beautiful new book, “No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale.” Copies of the book will be available for sale at the booth.

C&EN’s sales and marketing team are once again hosting the ever-popular “green screen” event at which you can update your membership information and receive a framed print cover of C&EN with your picture on it for free. The green screen event will be held on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday from 8 AM to 5 PM in the North Lobby Registration Area of the Boston Convention Center. It will also be held on Sunday evening at the Pubs/C&EN booth in the exposition.

It’s no secret that blogs are hot (see above). C&EN’s “CENtral Science” is a portal to seven blogs covering a variety of important scientific topics—sustainability, chemical safety, pharma, chemical business, and more. Six keywords will be hidden among the blogs between Aug. 15 and 22. Collect all six and bring them to the C&EN booth at the exposition and receive a free, bright-yellow (I mean bright) “CENtral Science” T-shirt. Wear your T-shirt in the exposition hall on Monday or Tuesday and you might be selected to receive a VISA gift card (worth up to $50) given out every half hour.

C&EN’s Carmen Drahl and Lisa Jarvis, who in addition to their fine reporting for C&EN are responsible for The Haystack blog on “CENtral Science,” will both be attending the Boston meeting and tweeting and reporting from it. Leigh Boerner, who writes the Just Another Electron Pusher blog on “CENtral Science,” will also be tweeting and posting from Boston. Drahl is moderating the “MEDI Lunch & Learn: The Chem/Pharma Conversations Blogs & Beyond” at the Convention Center on Tuesday, Aug. 24, from noon to 2 PM. This mini-symposium features noted chem/pharma bloggers Derek Lowe (In the Pipeline), Ed Silverman (Pharmalot), David Kroll (aka Abel Pharmboy of Terra Sigillata), and Michael Tarselli of Scripps Florida.

And finally, C&EN Online Editor Rachel Pepling is giving a talk on Sunday, Aug. 22, at 1:55 PM at a Chemical Education Division symposium titled “Social Networking: The Next Generation.” Pepling will discuss our decision to refocus “CENtral Science” earlier this year and the portal’s usefulness to chemical educators.

We hope to see you in Boston at one or more of these events.

Thanks for reading.

Rudy Baum
Editor-in-chief