Vintage Mason

Most of you have probably witnessed what I consider to be vintage examples of my sarcastic wit. One MTBI student (Carlos Torres) even came up with the term "Mason moment" to describe verbal instances of such incidents in the context of scientific discussions (such as seminar questions and comments), although those were intended to be pointed but not necessarily sarcastic. (Admittedly, some of those comments have occasionally ended up being less mild than I intended.) Several of you probably have also witnessed the depths that my sarcasm can reach more often than you'd like. :) Here is the latest in a continuing series:

A few months back, one of my collaborators passed a paper on to me that was sent to him by his former Cornell advisor (who is on the editorial board of the journal that published the paper), who I also know pretty well. The reason that paper was brought to my collaborator's attention was that it concerned a nonlinear oscillator model of bipolar disorder, about which we wrote a paper in 2003. We never were actually able to publish this paper (though a few people have cited it anyway and at least a couple of psychologists seemed to be interested in it), but we posted the paper on the arXiv preprint server in 2003.

It turns out to be a very good thing that we posted the paper publicly in a manner that includes a time-stamp, because the article that was forwarded to us had a lot of very familiar ideas, analysis, etc. Once we saw this, we contacted the author to let him know about our paper and asked for his thoughts and to add a reference to it if at all possible. (His paper is already published online, but it's "in press" in the sense that it has not yet been assigned volume, issue, or page numbers.) We waited around a month or so and got no response, so we contacted the editor of the journal and gave him the link to our paper (and indicated the time stamp). To his credit, the journal editor immediately saw a problem and e-mailed the author later that day and asked him to comment on the differences between the two manuscripts. Another month (roughly) passed and the author still hadn't responded, so we asked the editor what we should do. Based on consulting with him, it was agreed that we should write a Letter to the Editor. Perhaps the final version will be edited by the folks at the journal, but here is the way it currently reads. Pay special attention to the last two sentences. As I mentioned, it's vintage Mason.

Anyway, sometimes one has to fight the good fight.

Update: The receipt of our Letter to the Editor was acknowledged at 3:54 pm (pacific time) and it was accepted without comment at 3:55 pm. I'm still waiting for my first negative-time paper acceptance. :)