Displaying the most recent of 472 posts written by

Iddo

Paweł Szczęsny in TEDx Warsaw

Pawel on Open Science. Full disclosure: I consider sharing an office with this guy for over a year to be one of the best experiences of my postdoc.

Florence Nightingale, medical statistician

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate […]

Stupid Pi tricks for Pi Day

π approximation script, from Stephen Chappell. import sys def pi(): a, b, c, d, e, f = 1, 0, 1, 1, 3, 3 while True: if a * 4 + b – c < c * e: yield e a, b, c, d, e, f = a * 10, (b – c * e) * […]

JSUR is accepting submissions

I have written about the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results before and now this just popped in my inbox from JSUR’s Google group. Apparently JSUR is now open for business. JSUR Call for Participation Submit your short (2-4page) and full length manuscripts to the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results. Over the past month […]

Bioinformatics Blog Carnival #1

Yes! Why should the evolution people have all the fun with their blog carnival? (After all, it is only a theory.) It’s time for bioinformaticians to show what we are made of, and to have a carnival of our own. Bio::blogs had a good run some time ago. I decided to reconnect what is hopefully […]

A sh*tload of data

There are more microbial cells in our body than our own. Those microbes are not just passive hitchhikers or conversely, malicious agents of disease. They affect our well-being and health in a much broader spectrum than simply “bad” or “passive”. Among other things our gut microbes play an important role in digestion, have been linked […]

Blogosphere catches: Marco Island, finding Ada and blog carnivals

Some interesting events cropped up recently. The Marco Island Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting was heavily tweeted and blogged about.  Pacific Biosciences unveiled their third generation sequencer. Ostensibly, it can sequence reads of 20,000 length, but the fraction of actual long reads in a run, and their quality is still a bit hazy. […]

The Open Laboratory 2009: a Science Blogging Anthology

Haiku: A finer book of Blog posts the world has not seen Buy: you won’t regret

Henry Reed Feb 22, 1914-Dec 8, 1986

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day, To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens, And to-day we have naming of parts. — Henry Reed “Naming of Parts” To-day we […]

Most common weaknesses of grant applications

I’ve been cleaning out my Gmail from attachment-emails recently. (Why do people continue to send me video files when there’s YouTube?) Anyhow, Mickey Kosloff sent me this. In this pic, form meet function, being concise and to the point, as a good grant application should be.

Bioinformatics blog carnival

Byte Size Biology will be hosting the first edition of the bioinformatics blog carnival. All you bioinformatics bloggers, submit your entries by Mar 9, 2010 23:59:03  EST. Note the 3 second extension I have already given. There will be no more deadline extensions, I’ve been generous enough as it is. The carnival will be posted […]

Technical specifications for Little Red Riding Hood

This has been going around the intertubes for a while now. Still very cool.

“Codon” is now a four letter word

As part of the process of manufacturing  a new car,  the designers will take the blueprints to the factory floor. There they will set up an experimental assembly line, tinkering with the manufacturing process of the prototype until it is ready for mass-production. Can we do the same with the machinery of life — the assembly […]

Ancient Greenlander’s DNA reveals ugly mullet

Seriously, this is what I first thought when I saw the cover of this week’s Nature, and the associated drawings  in the press.  The dude’s haircut seems like it was even bad in the ’80s… 2080 BCE that is, which is when his body is dated. Approximately. A large group of researchers were involved in […]

Highly Evolved

If the title of this post makes you cringe, then you belong to a minority of people who realize why the phrase “highly evolved” is so wrong. Unfortunately, “highly evolved” (as an absolute term) and “more evolved” (as a comparative term) seem  to be used all-too frequently.  They are uttered not only by non-scientists and […]