Eric Spitznagel has recently asked me to provide my opinion on the mysterious Baby Yoda for an article in Popular Mechanics. The really cool piece was published today, but obviously Eric had to remove some bits for brevity, since he was trying to get the opinion of many different scientists. You should really read the […]
(With apologies to the memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning) How shall I license thee? Let me count the ways I license thee to be free to distribute and embed My code can be buggy, when I wrote it late last night “While” loops have been made without a stated end I license thee to change […]
Fakeference invitation: an email from Nancy, Sally or June, inviting you, for the second time (“perhaps you didn’t get my first invitation, there may be something wrong with my email”) to speak at a conference. The meeting has 5-10 Nobel laureates listed as invited speakers, and covers everything in science, from quantum mechanics to fish breeding. […]
So things have been busy in non-blog land. Putting together a tenure packet, some travel, teaching, and oh yes, even science. So no insightful post here, just some odds and ends I collected, in no particular order: There are quite a few species named after famous people: alive, dead, real or fictional. Wikipedia has a […]
Got this from a tweet by Casey Bergman
Three figures from the undergrad who is always high Seven tables from the lab tech with his heart of stone Nine supplements from the postdocs, with careers doomed to die One manuscript for the Editor on his dark throne In the journal submission form, where the shadows lie One paper to rule them all, one […]
It has not escaped Twitter’s notice that the Watson & Crick paper is 60 years old today . Sorry, too busy to be really creative, so here is a repost from 2009. Think of it as a transposon. Short quiz and a movie for DNA day. 1) We celebrate DNA day because: a) Congress said so […]
This is romantic! So listen up! A 3D heart shape may be drawn using the following implicit function: Or, in Python: def heart_3d(x,y,z): return (x**2+(9/4)*y**2+z**2-1)**3-x**2*z**3-(9/80)*y**2*z**3 Trouble is, there is no direct way of graphing implicit functions in Python. But anything can be found on Stack Overflow. Putting it all together: #!/usr/bin/env python from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import […]
See what happens when a Capuchin monkey receives unequal pay: The article in Nature (2004): Monkeys reject unequal pay Sarah F. Brosnan & Frans B. M. de Waal
I can’t believe I did not realize this before. Thanks to Mickey Kosloff for enlightening me by posting this on his Facebook. Of course grants are like homework. You don’t want to do them; anything is better, really; multiple excuses why not to do them right now; anything has more priority, suddenly. BUT if […]
This is simply brilliant. The best thing since Bad Project.
Too busy with grant deadlines, and preparations for the looming ISMB 2012. (Including, of course, the Automated Function Prediction meeting.) So here are two nice vids to pass the time. Jennifer Gardy and Tom Scott made this great A-Z of bacteria video. Guaranteed to freak out your kids, or yourself. So how many of those […]
Prepared by daughter. Not to scale. Species not yet identified. Delicious.
