Author Archives: rpg

When something unusual happens, perhaps like for example (completely at random) one’s weblog post at NN getting 20 comments, an ordinary person might say, or think, “Cool! Lots of traffic!”. A scientist, on the other hand, is more likely to … Continue reading →

bq. A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead Having, in the last three days, edited a manuscript when I should have only been checking for tyops … Continue reading →

I should like to point m’learned colleagues, who if they don’t know about it damn well should, at http://lablit.com/ . It is a small, but important battle in the war on ignorance. And I am not entirely disinterested: I’ll just … Continue reading →

If you haven’t seen any of the discussions about ‘double-blind’ peer review then you’re probably living under a rock (and not reading this, anyway). I happen to disagree with the philosophy that says that the methods of doing research should … Continue reading →

Everyone is visited by the F-Up Fairy, once in every while. And it happens to the best of us, including, I’m delighted to say, Nature‘s web team: We have had a number of complaints regarding the Nature Register page. After … Continue reading →

I’d like to take this opportunity to give feedback on the feedback that the students gave on their feedback. With me? No? The Honours students gave their proposal talks last week. A random panel of academics assessed and made written … Continue reading →

bq. When I started writing a weblog I made a conscious decision to avoid the cesspit of stupidity that is both sides of the evolution:creationist ‘debate’ (it’s not a debate if there are no cogent arguments). But this is too … Continue reading →

Members of Joel Sussman’s lab at the the Weizmann Institute have developed Proteopedia (direct link ), an online tool for making structural biology clearer for chemists and biologists by linking textual content to 3D structures. Impressive. For a born-again structural … Continue reading →

Textism is crap, as I discovered when trying to format the code snippets that I wanted to put into this post. The post I wanted to write is at http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/labrats/2008/03/on_randomization_monte_carlo_a_1.html It describes how I took a Perl implementation of the … Continue reading →

We have just had two days of Honours proposals talks, in which all our fresh-faced young students have to talk for ten minutes about what they intend to do while in the lab for the next six months. These talks … Continue reading →