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Funny

#DNA60

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 [...]

Some omics words we would like to see

Advertisomics: environmental sequencing aimed at obtaining popular press coverage with little or no scientific value. Samples obtained from an environment otherwise not of microbiological interest. “Hey, did you hear they swabbed  the car wheels in the building’s parking lot and found that the microbes all cluster by tire brand name?” Celebromics: sequencing the genome or [...]

A Belated Valentine’s Day Post

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 [...]

Equal pay for equal primates

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

Grants are the scientist’s homework

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 [...]

Spaghetti Western Blot

This is simply brilliant. The best thing since Bad Project.

Intermission: two vids

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 [...]

Dirty Genomics

Microbial Pancakes

  Prepared by daughter. Not to scale. Species not yet identified. Delicious.  

Nobody knows you

With deepest apologies to the memory of Jimmy Cox. EDIT: I got a couple of concerned emails. No, this did not happen to me. Yet. Once I lived the life of a PI so rich, Research was going along without a hitch. Lab manager, four postdocs and grad students eight, My lab took up the [...]

Seriously?

I get the weirdest emails sometimes….   Dear  professor  Iddo Friedberg,          First of all, I would like to introduce myself, my name is _____, 30 years old I  occupy a staff position of instructor at the department of pharmaceutical microbiology, faculty of pharmacy, ____ University, _____. I was graduated in 2003 with an overall grade “excellence with honors” & [...]

The genomics programming language

Genomics is a new and exciting programming language based on Brainfsck. Here are the commands: g Move pointer to the right. e Move pointer to the left. n Increment the cell at the pointer. o Decrement the cell at the pointer. m Jump forward past the matching i if the cell at the current pointer [...]

Brainf**k while waiting for a flight

Warning: NSFW language. Brainfuck is a Turing-complete programming language consisting of eight commands, each of which is represented as a single character. > Increment the pointer. < Decrement the pointer. + Increment the cell at the pointer. – Decrement the cell at the pointer. . Output the ASCII value of the cell at the pointer. [...]

Music Monday: Whole Lotta Love

This excellent cover of “Whole Lotta Love” went viral last week. Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame gives his interpretation to the Led Zeppelin classic: And if that gave you a taste for the original, go here.

Funny Science Friday: The IgNobels, Wall Street Journal

The IgNobel prizes were awarded this week. Yes, the Nobel prizes too, but the IgNobels are the really interesting ones. (For an thoughtful piece about why the Nobel Prizes in the sciences do not enhance or may even hurt scientific recognition, read Carl Zimmer’s piece at The Loom) . The IgNobel prizes are awarded annually for [...]