It’s the first weekend of 2013. The Christmas break is always a great opportunity to get on with things that have been left unfinished during busier times of year. This means that I now have three papers in submission. Aris resubmitted the breeding season evolution paper just before Xmas and I managed to submit both the TREE article on the philosophy of modelling and the paper on environmental and genetic sources of variation on great tit immune function and growth. It will be a minor miracle if all three are accepted but I can only hope. Apart from that the only news is that I managed to make one day at the BES meeting in Birmingham. I presented the first talk on SORTIE-UK, which went fine but was always going to be unexciting. Remarkably though I was only there a short time I met a lot of old friends - including Dan Tomkins (who I supervised at Cambridge, and knew well when he was a PhD at Oxford and a post doc at Stirling) who has been in New Zealand since the late 90s. Off to Pennsylvania next week on a trip designed to help the development of the University’s Life Science Strategy.
