mercredi, décembre 08, 2004

cat authorship in PRL

I have an encyclopedia article and an article about blood sensors using novel chemical materials, but it appears I've been rather upstaged...as a cat author, that is.

HETHERINGTON AND WILLARD ARTICLE

According to J.H. Hetherington:

“I had prepared the paper, now called Hetherington and Willard, and was rather proud of the work, considering it suitable for rapid publication in Phys. Rev. Lett. Before I submitted it I asked a colleague to read it over and he said “It’s a fine paper but they will send it right back”. He explained that this is because of the Editor’s rule that the word “we” should not be used in a paper with only a single author. Changing the paper to the impersonal seemed to difficult now that it was all written and typed; therefore, after an evening’s thought I simply asked the secretary to change the title page to include the name of the family cat, a Siamese called Chester, sired one summer by Willard (one of the few unfixed male Siamese cats in Aspen, Colorado). I added the initials F D in front of the name to stand for Felix Domesticus and thus created F D C Willard” (Weber, Robert. Droll Science, p.110)

see http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/crerar/exhibits/humor7.html
for more information.