“Don’t even get me started” is a powerful and direct, yet vague and meaningless, expression. What if you reply: “By all means, please, get started”. I believe that this will stun your opponent (it may be a friendly discussion, but if you don’t believe the other person is an opponent, you will never win.). Then, you can quickly grab his/her nose and yell: ”Twos before eights, and one bird in the bush”. It can be very entertaining unless the other person is your boss or your psychiatrist. In any case, this column dares to go where no column at CCR has gone before. It is all about getting started. And by that, we mean starting start-ups.

They say that music and mathematics are intertwined. I am not sure this is true, but I always wanted to use the word intertwined. The point is that my call for poetry received a overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from at least five people.

It is clearly a time of change. Naturally, I am talking about the change of person in the top post: “Le Boss Grand” Christophe Diot is replaced by “Canadian Chief, Eh?” Srinivasan Keshav. Coincidence? No, my friends.

The proof is in the pudding. Never have truer words been spoken. If only research was a lavish meal that concluded with a pudding. But now, what is a researcher to do?

For those of us in academia, tenure is great. Unless you don't have it, in which case it pretty much sucks. In fact, it goes beyond sucking: it kills. Mainly your personal life, sometimes your spirit. I claim that assistant professors are an endangered species.

The goal of this column this time was to address major scientific issues and propose novel scientific methods for doing the same thing under different names. However, it turned out to be too complicated as it required mastery of the english alphabet.

Humor is something that I take very seriously. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about it. It all started with a pet peeve of mine that got spurred on by a comment from a student. Then, I started writing and it came out completely different from what I expected. It could be mean or pointless. Or it could be both, you be the judge.

We did it! A few CCR issues back, this column argued in favor of an all open review. At the time, most people thought that it was a joke. Quite frankly, we meant it as a joke. It is a crazy world we live in. No, seriously, it was not so much of a joke, as a wild attempt to think outside the box. Or else, desperate times call for desperate measures. Something like that. Apparently, we were so desperate that we actually tried it. And it worked. Beautifully. But then again, we may be biased.

I would like to apologise to both of my fans (which I will call Tom and Jerry respecting their request for anonymity for obvious reasons) for missing my column in the last issue. Their response was extremely flattering although the points of “silence is gold” and “measure twice, speak once, fool you thrice” kept appearing in their emails.