This tweet from Neil Degrasse Tyson jolted me from a pleasant rest before tomorrow’s race: …which led to the (in)famous Scopes Trial. On May 5, 1925 John Scopes was charged and subsequently tried, found guilty, and fined $100 for teaching Evolution, a violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act. The trial became a battleground for science [...]
Found this in my inbox: Dear Dr.Iddo Friedberg, Greeting from OMICS Group! I came across your contribution entitled “Biopython: freely available Python tools for computational molecular biology and bioinformatics” published in the Journal of Bioinformatics and thought your expertise would be an excellent fit for Toxicology-2012 Conference that OMICS Group is hosting. I’m just wondering how many legitimate calls for [...]
Great meeting: Biocuration 2012, Georgetown University, DC. When I leave a meeting with my head exploding with new ideas and a need to try them all out at once, I know I got my money’s worth, and then some. Even a three hour flight delay followed by discovering my car with a dead battery [...]
I just received an email from Julian Gough , one of last year’s CAFA participants. He started a Wikipedia initiative on protein function prediction, which are barely stubs at the moment. EDIT: He alerted me to the fact that protein function prediction has virtually no presence on Wikipedia. So all you protein function predictors out there, please contribute. Yes, [...]
It is with no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of opinion that I have no other alternative. The subjects you propose for a series of Mathematical and Metaphysical Essays are so very profound, that there [...]
Hats off to Jonathan Eisen for hosting this activity on his blog. (I’ll keep mine on, thank you. It’s raining cats and dogs here right now). A couple of weeks ago I posted a discussion about two papers that challenged the ortholog conjecture. Briefly, both papers stated that orthologs may not be such great [...]
The manuscripts I review invariably fall into four categories: 1. This is crap. (Rare). 2. This is terrific. (Even rarer). 3. This can be OK, but they really need to fix A, B & C. (fairly common). 4. If I only knew what they meant in point A, I could say whether they need to fix A, [...]
The AFP/CAFA 2011 meeting was held on July 15 and July 16. Yes, it was a huge success, and I’m not just saying that beacuse I am one of the organizers. I will write up something more comprehensive soon; in the meantime, here are my tweets from the meeting. I am learning a lot about [...]
I have recently been invited to Google+, (thanks Ruchira!) and as social timesucks go, it is quite enjoyable. Here are my first impressions about g+. In a nutshell: g+’s attempt at compartmentalized communication is laudable, but falls short of the mark. Mainly because, no social network can emulate the real-life way we communicate (or not) with [...]
… because, um, I dunno. Just too nerdy I guess. Click here to send me one, if you are so inclined: http://is.gd/Ag43 Thanks! .
3quarksdaily are running their annual competition for best science blog entry. There are 87 really great blog posts competing there for the votes of 3QD readers. But who has the time to read through all of them? So let me make it easy for you: vote for me. This blog’s “Dead Salmon” blog post has [...]
There are some interesting developments regarding the February outbreak of Legionelliosis which was traced to the Playboy mansion. Reminder: over 120 delegates of the DOMAINFest in Santa Monica, California came down with symptoms of a respiratory illness. The convention included a trip to the Playboy mansion, which later was suspected as the outbreak source. [...]
Open Lab is a collection of the crème-de-la-crème of the science blog posts over each year. Meticulously edited, only the finest of posts make it. Out of nearly 900 submissions this year, 50 (plus six poems and one cartoon) were carefully selected. Truly an amazing achievement of Bora Zivkovic, and especially his co-editor this year, [...]
The personal genomics company 23&me is hosting a poetry contest. The winner receives a free pass to the Personalized World Medicine Conference. Poems should include a bunch of keywords having to do with 23&me, personalized genomics and all that jazz. I’m no poet (and don’t you know it), so here is my Haiku non-entry: My genome was seq- [...]
If you are a teacher / instructor in the broadest sense of the word and have used this blog in your instructional capacity, please take a couple of minutes to fill out this short survey below (Five questions only, short. Really! short!!) It is important for me to know the extent of BsB’s outreach and [...]
