Ubuntu Linux: “You can have your sandwich any way you like, but recently we started wrapping it in this really ugly wrapper. Still yummy though, and you can ask for a different wrapper. But you have to ask”. Mac OSX: “We only serve ham & cheese on white bread. If you don’t like it, go […]
Prepared by daughter. Not to scale. Species not yet identified. Delicious.
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 […]
MIRA is a really cool sequence assembly software, developed and maintained by Bastien Chevreux. MIRA has a large and active community, led by the funny and gracious Bastien, for whom no problem is too small, or too large. Recently MIRA seemed to have developed a stochastic bug, one of those which are a serious headache […]
Insane Clown Posse and Jack White are working together. That, by itself, should send people to stock on water and non-perishable food. But having them cover Mozart (which they pronounce “MOHZZZ-art) is worthy of a trip to the gun store as well. Having rediscovered “Leck mich im Arsch” (lick my ass, Mozart’s scatological party hit […]
Springville University’s Genome Center in collaboration with Prof. I. M. A. Bigschotte from IvyLeague University have announced that the genome of Mr. John Smith from Centertown, USA has been sequenced and is now available online. Dr. James Williams, director of the Center said: “We were running out of things to sequence, but I still had […]
OK, I think the tree of life is obsolete. I have been spending a lot of time looking at horizontal gene transfer, reading about it, looking at it in genomes until my eyes water and my brain dessicates, occasionally blogging about it and soon to be publishing about it. Life is not a tree. […]
“The Science Network”: who stole PubMed? Well, their accents don’t exactly fit the population in the NLM….
…you find this on the top of the paper pile on his desk:
No apologies to Lady Gaga necessary.
The PhD Challenge asks graduate students to do their utmost in their submitted papers. You thought getting a paper accepted is hard? Try getting a paper accepted which contains the sentence “I smoke crack rocks”. That was the PhD challenge for 2010, and Gabriel Parent from Carnegie Mellon University has lived up to it with […]
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- […]
Iddo: Following an earlier post on the hype cycle of genomic and other technologies, Leighton Pritchard has suggested producing a more elaborate phase diagram of predicted vs. actual usefulness of, uh, stuff. We kicked around the idea back and forth over the weekend, and here’s the result. Over to Leighton, who gets the lion’s share of […]
I received this email today today. I especially appreciate the personal touch in the salutation. Dear Dr. [NAME] Currently, we are involved in organizing “International Conference and Exhibition on Proteomics & Bioinformatics” (Proteomics-2011), will be held during 6–8 June 2011 Hyderabad, India. The main theme of Proteomics-2011 is to “Promote foster & enhances (sic) research […]
