Starting off 2013.....

I hope that everyone's 2013 looks to be promising and full of potential in all possible areas.

While I did manage to post more in 2012, I think more substantive/research literature-oriented posts are called for here.  I suppose I should look into figuring out how to insert well-formatted equations to help with this goal, although I suspect I will find it easier to just generate the equations elsewhere and then insert them as images.  I do not expect to accurately predict one of the Nobel Prizes again, though. 

I contemplating bringing up the ACS panel suggestion to have people complete a doctoral degree in 4 (no more than 5) years to a couple of biological chemistry faculty I know, but I realized that this would cause such severe trauma they'd never recover.  Because - thankfully, this wasn't me - I know people who did a Ph.D. in chemistry (bio focus) who did take 8 or 9 years to finish the degree, and they were uniformly in certain labs whose aspirations were borderline insane.  If it takes your students that long to finish a Ph.D., you are doing something wrong.

We will see how far I get with my various scientific self-improvement goals this year (read up on relativistic QM/QC - I have a borrowed copy of Dyall & Faegri's text, kind of poking through it slowly; my going-on-a-couple-years goal of getting Shaik & Hiberty's text on VB theory under my belt; and more on my various programming self-study projects).

And now back to pushing the limits of knowledge further......