Byte Size Biology

In no particular order or context. No personal stuff and by no means a complete list:

WordPress (like, duh).

Wikipedia (default for looking up new stuff)

Wikis in general (great lab management tool. Don’t need LIMS)

Open Access Publishing and Creative Commons licensing.

FLOSS licensing (90% of the software I use, and 100% of what I write)

Science Bloggers (too numerous to link)

Science tweeters and FriendFeeders (too numerous to link. That’s how I keep up with things)

BLAST (Sometimes it feels like bioinformatics is should be renamed to blastology)

LaTeX (Wrote my dissertation in LaTeX, and never looked back)

OpenOffice.org (because not everyone uses LaTeX).

CiteULike (Keeping my reference library up to date and in good order)

Delicious (Keeping my bookmarks up to date and in good order)

Gmail (because finding that document you sent me a month ago would be impossible otherwise)

Google Scholar (For standing on the toes of Hobbits. Or something like that)

GIS (for blogging and making class slides)

Vim (because emacs blows)

Python (ease & power)

Biopython (OK, conflict of interest here, since I contributed a bit)

Friendly colleagues (They certainly are!)

Good students (gotta make my lab page).

Goulash for dinner. Can’t stand oven Turkey.

Music. Especially the latest song that is going around in my head:

Stephen Colbert had an interesting lineup for the past two nights: Richard Dawkins on Sep 30, and Francis Collins last night. Enjoy the vids:

Sooo… NIH and NSF started Tweeting. Nice. A good way to keep up with grant programs, funding opportunities, yadda yadda. Here’s my @ tweet :

@NIH protein catalytic site evolution health implic: good for drug design.
Young scientist, need $0.7M 2010-2013, 2xpostdocs+cluster+travel. 
Prev pubs: http://is.gd/vnPN; kthxbi

I hope I won’t get killed at the renewal…

Credit: n4sim on Flickr

Following  Shirley Wu’s excellent post on the stimulus money at the NIH, I decided to do my bit, and post some bioinformatically relevant programs from the  Challenge Grants. I am defining bioinformatics rather narrowly here, and excluding most biomedical informatics, imaging technologies, clinical data management, etc. Also, many other topics would be supported to some extent with bioinformatics. I picked those that seem to have bioinformatics as the core applicable field.

Read more…