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.
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 [...]
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” & [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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.
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 [...]
