If you ever wanted to know how potentially lucrative it would be to be an unethical journal editor, read on

I've blogged before about offers journal editors get to be unethical.

The offers continue:

Dear [editor in chief],

I hope you are doing well. My name is Ivy Yang, and I work as a publishing development editor focusing on academic journal collaborations and manuscript resources.

I am reaching out to explore the possibility of private cooperation with you regarding submissions to your journal. We have a stable number of manuscripts in related research areas and are looking for an experienced editor who can help oversee the handling process in an efficient and professional manner.

Our expectation is that submitted papers can receive timely attention, be assigned to suitable reviewers, and move through peer review smoothly. Where appropriate and in line with journal policy, we may also recommend qualified reviewer candidates for your consideration, which could help save time in the reviewer selection process.

For successfully accepted manuscripts, we would also be happy to offer a cooperation fee or honorarium. The specific arrangement can be discussed privately based on mutual understanding.

We highly value long-term cooperation based on mutual trust, efficiency, and professional communication. If this possibility is of interest to you, I would be glad to discuss details with you privately at your convenience.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Ivy Yang

I've bolded the most dubious part: a “cooperation fee” “discussed privately”.  Okaaaaay, that sounds legit.

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Well, Ivy is nothing if not persistent.  And the next email was much more explicit.  Actual dollar amounts.

Our work focuses on helping authors identify suitable journals and supporting them throughout the submission and peer-review process. This is a paid collaboration, and the compensation is provided on a per-paper basis, depending on the journal category:

EI-indexed journals: USD 200–1000 per paper;

SCI-indexed journals: USD 500–2200 per paper;

SSCI-indexed journals: USD 1000–3000 per paper.

The exact amount depends on the journal level, workload, and degree of involvement.

If you are interested in this opportunity, I would be happy to discuss further details with you. We can continue via email or any platform convenient for you.

Ivy Yang

Up to 3000 USD under-the-table remuneration per paper!  Pay-to-publish takes on a whole different meaning.  No wonder there are so many junk journals.  (Although, like any such scam, I would bet the numbers change once an "agreement" is in place.)

Remember, gentle reader, just because a paper is “in the literature” and has been “peer reviewed” doesn't mean it is of any value whatsoever (scientifically that is; clearly there is a monetary value!)  Junk journals, paper mills, AI slop.  The literature is not merely being polluted, it is being swamped with drek.  Is this how progress ends?  Sinking into the shoulders of Swamp Thing?

and yet it rotates

 Two pictures of a spotty sun, taken roughly 24 hours apart.

2026-05-29 16:48 GMT

2026-05-30 15:10 GMT

Look closely, and you can see that the spots have the same pattern, but have moved.  The sun rotates!

No matter how much we improve our ability to take photographs through our telescopes, we will never achieve anything to rival this amazing video, taken in October 2014 from NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory:

bugs in bloom

Photos from the garden.

Some tiny bugs in tiny flowers: 

A red damselfly perched on a bamboo cane:

A blue damselfly perched on the same bamboo cane:

This is what the internet is for

This popped up in my feed today.  Darth Vader's theme as a fugue.

A wonderful fugue.  And played on a guitar, no less!!  How does he have enough fingers?

At the end, there was a lovely bonus.  The next video up was Stayin' Alive as a Madrigal.

Sheer joy.

It was 30 years ago today...

 … that my first fully dated item appeared on my website: a review of Clannad’s 1996 tour at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, attended a week earlier.

I blogged about this piece of history 10 years ago.  What's changed since then?

Back in 2016 I was working at the University of York.  I have since retired, although I still have Emerita status there.

To date, on my website I have 623 non-fiction book reviews, 1094 science fiction reviews, and 82 other fiction reviews.  That's about 5 reviews a month averaged over the 30 years, although it had been decreasing, and was particularly low in 2016.  Over the last 10 years, that's a further 189 non-fiction, 250 science fiction, and 7 other fiction reviews, so a reading rate of about 3-4 book per month over that time period.  I hadn't decreased my reading, just my reading of books, as reading research papers took up a lot of my time at York.  There's a visible spike in number of book reviews last year as retirement kicked in, back to the previous rate of 5-6 a month.

There haven't been any major changes in the design of the website, just more material, mostly in terms of reviews, research publications, and solar power statistics.  So, maybe just more of the same in 2036, too?  Let's see!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLX

 The latest batch:

A friend was having a clearout, so we got a few old classic computer books.  And the ZWO SeeStar User Guide should help us make better use of that telescope.

reMarkable review

I've had my reMarkable Paper Pro Move for just over 6 weeks now, so how's it going?

It's had a good tryout: taking notes at a science fiction convention, on a couple of plane trips, and on a train journey.

My first serious use was at the science fiction convention.  The note taking went well, but I was surprised at the short battery life (about half a day of full on writing), given it is advertised to last much longer.  However, the convention rooms are typically dimmed to make it easier to see the speakers, and so I needed to use the backlight to see what I was doing, and this does drain the battery quite quickly.  The plane rides and train journey were much brighter, and I could easily take notes without using the backlight, and the battery seeming lasts forever then.  On those journeys I was mainly using it to take notes on a non-fiction book I was reading, and to sketch some diagrams when thinking about some technical ideas.  It's a bit small for sketching, but okay for simple figures.

At the convention, I was taking notes seated without anything to rest the notebook on.  Its small size was helpful here, as it is easily graspable.  After several hours of holding it, however, it does start to bite into my fingers.  On the planes and train, I could use the "table" provided, and it was fine.  The train was a little shaky at times, and so the erase option was put to good use!

There are several pen tools avaialable: ball-point, fineliner, calligraphy, marker, pencil, brush, highlighter, shader, each in different thicknesses, each with a different behaviour.  There are also several page backgrounds: plain, lined, squared.  I played around a bit, and eventually settled on the medium thickness fineliner on narrow lined paper for ordinary writing.  

The writing feel is good, but, despite the advertising, I would not say that it feels just like writing on paper, unless maybe you are writing on a single sheet of thin paper on a hard surface.  It's certainly not like writing in a notebook.  But it's also certainly far superior to writing with a stylus on a tablet.  

One issue for me is that the marker attaches magnetically to the right side of the notebook.  I'm left-handed.  So if I want to take notes intermittently (which I do particularly when reading), I can either lay the marker down and potentially lose it, or keep reaching across the device to attach and detach it.  However, as a lefty I am totally used to the world not being built for me in so many ways that this is a relatively minor inconvenience.

It's easy to add folders, notes, new pages to notes, and to rename and rearrange things.  Having some structure is better than having a bunch of random notes in a heap.

There's a handwriting to text conversion feature.  This is surprisingly good, given I have notoriously bad handwriting.  (I am expecting/hoping that my handwriting might improve after using this for a while, just so that I can exploit the conversion more easily.)  It doesn't always work, but occasionally it works when even I can't easily read what I have written!  But if you use the conversion and it mis-converts things, it can tricky to recover what the reality was.  To get round this, I use the desktop app on my PC.  The notebook syncs with this very smoothly.  On the PC, I go to the handwritten page, convert to text, ctrl-A ctrl-C ctrl-Z, so I have selected and copied all the text then immediately reverted to the handwriting form.  I paste the text into the relevant Evernote or Obsidan note, then lightly edit where needed, referring back to the handwritten version if required. I keep the handwritten form on the notebook.  (If you don't ctrl-Z to undo the conversion immediately, you can't get it back later.)

This desktop app and accompanying cloud storage requires a subscription.  Buying 2 years at a time works out to £2.99/month.  Whether you want this depends on whether you are happy to risk keeping your notes on the notebook without backup.  I, on the other hand, backup my backups.

There are some online tutorials on the product website, ranging from introductory (how to make folders and notes) to more advanced (how to use it in various scenarios, none of which are relevant to me, however).

So, overall, I am definitely happy with this.  It isn't perfect, but then paper isn't perfect either.  It's very light and portable, easy to use, a good feel to the writing process, and the handwriting recognition means the end of transcribing notes.  I will continue to use my laptop for taking notes in seminars and lectures (I can type faster than I can write legibly), and ordinary paper for sketching larger diagrams at home.  But for notes on the go, this is the device for me.