h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK Lentilla, all the corrections have been done (I even spotted some more spelling mistakes )...

In my opinion this article is excellent. I am quite familiar with this topic and it's accurate, informative, interesting and gets straight to the point. I think all that I wanted to comment about the article has already been mentioned in the peer review already.

I loved the bit on Alexander Fleming. I must admit, I never knew that before. Looks like there's hope for me afterall.

If the unbalanced and poor article on 'A156511 - Frankenstein (Genetically Modified) Foods' can get into the edited guide, then it is a crime to not allow this in as soon as possible.

Thanks Ste

Don't give old Alexander Fleming too hard a time. Most people when they see a contaminated plate would simply throw it away - he did have the presence of mind to actually notice that the contaminating mould was actually killing the bacterium he wanted to grow - sounds insignificant but it was an important observation.

Well, Orcus, congratulations! As a scout, we're required to pick three entries a month from Peer Review, and I'd already picked mine before I read your entry.

However, because of various organizational problems (no surprise there!) one of the entries I picked was already in the Edited Guide. So I suggested your entry as a replacement - here's what they said: "This is a superb entry, Lentilla - I love the way folk contribute their hard-won knowledge, stuff connected with their studies, to the h2g2 cause. Nice pick."

So your entry has been chosen for the edited Guide. It'll go to the sub-eds for some editorial tweaking, then you'll get an e-mail notifying you when it's due to appear. Great job!

Yippee! Congratulations Orcus!

Thankyou Lentilla
And sorry for getting impatient, not the done thing I know...next article then...

anyone

A very well written article. I think it deserves a place in the edited guide. You go into enough detail, but not too much. I have one minor comment. Should the paragraph 4 in the section headed The Emergence and Spread of Drug Resistance, start with:

'Epidemic MRSA infections within hospitals are now endemic...' Are the two instances of epidemic in the sentence needed?

Apart from this, I think this is a very good entry.

umm, he hasn't used epidemic twice.

Oops. I didn't read it properly. Thanks for that.

Well, that was a lot clearer than five lectures' worth of my Pharmacology course last year (I'm studying medicine at Cambridge) and with not a lot less information in it. Of course, it's how it reads to the non-biosciences-trained that counts, but it generally gets my vote.

Personally the long list of antibiotic types was a bit of a turn-off, but then I guess people actually taking an antibiotic will want to look it up and see how it works... Just a point though, does telling people that erythromycin is a macrolide help anyone? I suspect that everyone who has a clue what a macrolide might be knows erythromycin is one, and the rest will just be confused. Using an equally obscure and undefined term isn't really an explanation for me. Likewise the bit about the mechanism of THFA synthesis - I found it almost unreadable, and I'm supposed to know it already. Could it possibly be left until there's an article on THFA, which can discuss its synthesis in all its wonderful detail?

I know it's heartbreaking to leave information out of a summary when you've spent months researching it in the first place, but perhaps some of the very densest bits could be sacrificed to readability?

Maybe I'm just biased because I hated every minute of having to cram the enormous and arcane language of pharmacology into my head to pass my exams. Your call. The rest of the article I thought was excellent - clear coverage of a tricky subject.

Sorry - through my own unfamiliarity with the new threading system (no goo/alabaster comments please!) I failed to see the message saying this one has gone to the subs. Congrats, and I guess my 2 cents was worth exactly that.

Editorial Note: This thread has been moved out of the Peer Review forum because this entry has now been recommended for the Edited Guide.

If they have not been along already, the Scout who recommended your entry will post here soon, to let you know what happens next. Meanwhile you can find out what will happen to your entry here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/SubEditors-Process

Congratulations!