What a mouthful!
Well, happy new year to everyone. I thought I’d make it a matter of public record that I support the continuation of public access to peer-reviewed scientific productions where it already exists, and the implementation of better access where it doesn’t. Continue reading
Occam’s Typewriter has seemed like a home to me since I started this gig about a year ago. Always controversial, always avant-garde, always energizing. And it still is. But lately I’ve found that my energies for putting a tolerable piece together seem to have been dwindling. Why? Continue reading
It was good to hear the reports of Stephen Hawking’s speech at his 70th birthday celebrations at the weekend. The Independent ran the story under the headline “I owe it all to my father” and noted that
Hawking spoke movingly of the role his father played in picking him up from the devastating diagnosis when he was just beginning h Continue reading
I warned you there’d be some car racing appearing here, and here’s the first of it. Don’t worry – I won’t be at any more races until the end of May, at the earliest.
It’s partway through winter, and although there’s plenty going on in warmer parts of the world, here in Southern Ontario we’re mired in Continue reading
Recently I had a rather upset email from a younger colleague who was worried because she had publicly disagreed with me in a discussion and feared she had been ‘strident’. What made it worse, she said, was that I had been something of a scientific heroine for her and she clearly was bothered that this made it inappropriate for her to express any d Continue reading
Taken earlier today in North Charleston, SC. In the end I decided to dine elsewhere.
A little while ago I promised you an announcement. Well, here it is.
Music has always been a big part of my life. I have been in, around, through and between rock bands (and blues bands, and pop bands, and orchestras, and jazz bands, even a side of Morris men) prepositionally and particulately, since my school days. Continue reading
I can still remember the first time I found out what a “blog” was.
In the early part of this century, in a fit of pique at a former employer, I typed the word “twat” into Google, for want of anywhere better to type it. Much to my surprise, one of the top hits was a website about a single mother named Zoe, living in Belgium, and claiming Continue reading
A contentious paper came out towards the end of last year in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. That is a reasonably respectable title in its niche field and the author, Gunther Eysenbach, is a respected medical informaticist and e-health guru.
At first I loved the paper for its wonderfully silly and memorable neologisms. It talks of “ Continue reading
The Western blot – an assay that allows you to separate all the proteins in a sample by size using gel electrophoresis and then detect the presence of a particular protein using an antibody that (hopefully) binds specifically to it – is a staple of molecular biology. I see dozens of Westerns in an average week, and I dread to think how Continue reading
