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Ingridients:
Water, chocolate, wool, chlorophyll and additives.

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email: i(at)jamver.id.au

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    • Links
    These are a few of my favourite links.

  • James doesn't write much, but if I tell complete lies about him, his version will be here.
  • Prasenjit is my favourite astrophysicist.
  • Bruno is my favourite web comic.
  • Yarnharlot - even if you're not a knitter, this is one of the funniest descriptions of perfectionism from the inside.
  • LanguageLog is where the linguists go to play.
  • Earthquakes in California, and around the world, as they happen.
  • Misia is writing a book about the history of virginity.
  • Respectful of Otters - politics, HIV, getting the facts straight.
  • Making light on being a leftish science fiction editor
  • UserFriendly is my favourite geeky web comic.
  • NCBI for all your genomic sequence needs
  • Creating Text(iles) - knitting in academia
  • String or Nothing - knitting and sharing knitting resources
  • Keyboard biologist - knitting while living with a geek
  • QueerJoe's knitting blog is exactly that
  • When knitting was a manly art in the wilds of Oregon
  • And she knits too along with running a family and postdoc.


    		•         
    Mon, 28 May 2007

    Because I need to share.

    Vasa. Gustavus. Oskar. Valois. Armitage. Bruno. Cup. Tudor. Nanos. Pumilio. Fog. Gurken. Rhino. Bloody fingers. Cloche. Moonshine. Vlad tepes. Gremlin. Sonic hedgehog.

    Sometimes, I wouldn't mind it if gene naming was taken a little bit more seriously. I don't think breaking into giggles regularly is going to convince anyone I'm actually trying to do research. On the other hand, maybe the names will help me remember what does what and to whom. But at the moment, it's just overload, like too many bright clashing colours drawing my attention at once.

    [/meta/biol] permanent link

    Job description

    Sean Eddy, who is one of the Good Guys as far as I'm concerned, has written a wonderful article about interdisciplinary science and what is wrong with the way the funding agencies are treating it at the moment. Along the way, he writes something which I wish I had written, and I assume that it is within the bounds of review to cite this one paragraph:

    I've been a computational biologist for about 15 years now. We're still not quite sure what "computational biology" means, but we seem to agree that it's an interdisciplinary field, requiring skills in computer science, molecular biology, statistics, mathematics, and more. I'm not qualified in any of these fields. I'm certainly not a card-carrying software developer, computer scientist, or mathematician, though I spend most of my time writing software, developing algorithms, and deriving equations. I do have formal training in molecular biology, but that was 15 years ago, and I'm sure my union card has expired. For one thing, they all seem to be using these clever, expensive kits now in my wet lab, whereas I made most of my own buffers (after walking to the lab six miles in the snow, barefoot).
    Apart from the fact that I don't spend the majority of my time actually writing software (it seems to be teaching, instead), and it's a bit less than 15 years since I abandoned the wet lab (but I did make all my own buffers, and only got to try an expensive kit once, not that it worked, because, I'm guessing, I'm at the extreme end of the RNAase production spectrum for humans because RNA was never to be found around me), this feels like my life history.

    And I also agree strongly with his point that "inter-disciplinary" is really "ante-disciplinary" - bringing together different things into a new field that doesn't really exist yet. I think I'm going to have to persuade a few people around here of that if I want a permanent job.

    [/meta/biol] permanent link