“Quote” of the day
This is an archive of quotes from 2006, for the current version and further details see Today's Quote or search the quote archive.
- Friday 22 Dec 2006
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As a mathematician, I've dedicated my life to trying to find patterns, structure and logic in the apparent chaos that surrounds me. Yet this science of patterns seems to be built from a set of numbers which have no logic to them at all. The primes look more like a set of lottery ticket numbers than a sequence generated by some simple formula or law.
--
Read the rest in The Riemann zeta function: Prime Numbers get hitched, The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and The Prime Number Shitting Bear
- Thursday 21 Dec 2006
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The main conclusion of our study is that humans tend to respond realistically at subjective, physiological, and behavioural levels in interaction with virtual characters notwithstanding their cognitive certainty that they are not real.
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Read the rest in A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments and Is it human nature to conform and obey?
- Wednesday 20 Dec 2006
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Advice columns are always telling you to make your passion your career. That's what attracted most of us to science in the first place. We were the ones building batteries out of stuff we found in the garage and trying to culture microorganisms from the vegetable drawer. But that childhood passion never included writing grants, rushing to publish or scheduling your life around your experiments.
--
Read the rest in Roller hockey or science? Sometimes I wonder what I'd do instead of science
- Tuesday 19 Dec 2006
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I just hit the ball as hard as I can.
--
Read the rest in Joga Bonito: Play Beautiful and Wayne Rooney scores a hat-trick against Fenerbahçe on his Manchester United debut at Old Trafford
- Monday 18 Dec 2006
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Woogle offers novel methods for searching for web services as well as methods for detecting similarity among web-service operations.
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Read the rest in Woogle: Similarity Search for Web Services and Dude, Where's My Service?
- Saturday 16 Dec 2006
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W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML.
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Read the rest in Relax: Don't Schema It and Expressiveness of XSDs: from practice to theory, there and back again
- Funday 15 Dec 2006
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Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
--
Read the rest in Infrequently Answered Questions (IAQ) about Java
- Thursday 14 Dec 2006
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It has always seemed to me that the many parts that make up the subject of biology are related to each other more like the nodes of a web than as a linear collection of independent topics. So I believe that the power of hypertext will be better suited to learning about biology than is the linear structure of a printed textbook.
--
Read the rest in Welcome to Kimball's Biology Pages
- Wednesday 13 Dec 2006
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The Semantic Web forces us to rethink the foundations of many subfields of Computer Science. This is certainly true for my own field (Knowledge Representation), where the challenge of the Semantic Web continues to break many often silently held and shared assumptions underlying decades of research.
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Read the rest in Where Does It Break? or Why the Semantic Web Is Not Just “Research as Usual”
- Tuesday 12 Dec 2006
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We are in the middle of an expansion of information access, with the internet providing democratic access to billions of pages of text. Most of this is mediated by search engines. The only other comparable expansion started in 1456, with the introduction of the printing press.
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Read the rest in Peter Norvig predicts the future and Theorising from Data with Peter Norvig: Avoiding the Capital mistake
- Monday 11 Dec 2006
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There are these great collaboration tools that 12-year-olds are using. It's all back-to-front.
--
Read the rest in myExperiment: mySpace for dudes in labcoats and myExperiment
- Funday 08 Dec 2006
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Look out for the forthcoming games, Pfamopoly, Happy Pfamilies and Pfam Charades.
--
Read the rest in Top Pfams is a fun card game for all the family: Protein families database of alignments and HMMs
- Thursday 07 Dec 2006
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Three is the magic number.
--De La Soul
Read the rest in The Magic Number, The number 3 and The magic constant
- Wednesday 06 Dec 2006
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Computation is the fire in our modern-day caves.
--
Read the rest in Eric Horvitz predicts the future and Brilliant minds predict the next fifty years
- Tuesday 05 Dec 2006
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More cameras are now distributed by Nokia than by any other camera manufacturer in the world.
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Read the rest in Caterina Fake interview: What the future holds for Flickr and Most Popular Cameras in the Flickr Community
- Monday 04 Dec 2006
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PSI-BLAST is like the Model T Ford of this kind of sequence comparison. There were a lot of cars before the Model T, and perhaps even better cars, but the Model T was accessible to everyone.
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Read the rest in Stephen Altschul on Bettering BLAST
- Funday 01 Dec 2006
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Fred Sanger once came and sat down next to me at a conference and I chatted to him. I didn't actually recognise him until people started to ask for his autograph. I was too scared to talk to him after that.
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Read the rest in PostBloggery: Because it's sh*t being a PostDoc and PostDoc Hell and Climbing the slippery pole of academic careers
- Thursday 30 Nov 2006
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I'm the post-doctoral ontology wonk at the Center for Computational Pharmacology
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Read the rest in Mike Bada's home page
- Wednesday 29 Nov 2006
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The fact is that organisations change direction, people move, machines break or are reorganised and so too does the web that echoes this. I have always found that the web reflecting what is current is usually ok, but the web reflecting the past state of things is much much less so.
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Read the rest in BioRDF: URI best practices
- Tuesday 28 Nov 2006
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Many biologists complain that current IR [information retrieval] systems tend to produce a lot of false positives - they may have high Recall but very low Precision.
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Read the rest in Better searching of MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online)
- Monday 27 Nov 2006
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Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley estimate that the world generated five exabytes of data in 2002, double the output in 1999. To translate that into something more familiar, absorbing five exabytes of data on TV would require sitting in front of a screen for 40,700 years.
--
Read the rest in Why the web will win and How much new information is created each year?
- Funday 24 Nov 2006
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Aberystwyth: A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.
--
Read the rest in The meaning of liff
- Thursday 23 Nov 2006
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All we know is that we don't know.
--
Read the rest in The Masterplan and Oasis Masterplan
- Wednesday 22 Nov 2006
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A rose by any other name is still a rose; you just cannot find it in the database.
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Read the rest in 'Blue collar' Science: standardising the standards and What's in a name? that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet
- Tuesday 21 Nov 2006
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To answer the question 'What is Science?' is almost as presumptious as to try to state the meaning of life itself.
The answer proposed in this essay is suggested by its title: Science is Public Knowledge. This is, of course, a very cryptic definition, with almost the suggestion of a play upon words. What I mean is something along the following lines. Science is not merely published knowledge or information. Anyone may make an observation, or conceive a hypothesis, and, if he has the financial means, get it printed and distributed for other persons to read. Scientific knowledge is more than this. Its facts and theories must survive a period of critical study and testing by other competent and disinterested individuals, and must have been found so persuasive that they are almost universally accepted. The objective of Science is not just to acquire information nor to utter all non-contradictory notions; its goal is a consensus of rational opinion over the widest possible field.
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Read the rest in Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science, What is this thing called “Science”? and Drosophila tales: A behind-the-scences look at a public genome project with Michael Ashburner
- Monday 20 Nov 2006
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Almost all AI [Artificial Intelligence] is about reasoning and solving problems; what Strong AI is is the philosophical belief that ultimately AI can match and surpass human intelligence (“Weak AI”, on the other hand, treats AI as a field of computer science, with AI techniques as useful additions to the computer scientists arsenal of techniques that can be used when building software). If the Semantic Web is about AI (and some of it definitely is), it is about Weak AI.
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Read the rest in Web 3.0 and the semantic web
- Funday 17 Nov 2006
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...the SiteMaps protocol. It's a small step for a machine, but a bigger leap for machinekind.
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Read the rest in The big search engines have agreed on a SiteMaps protocol turning the Web into a “giant brain”
- Thursday 16 Nov 2006
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Astronomy began when the Babylonians mapped the heavens. Our descendants will certainly not say that biology began with today's genome projects, but they may well recognise that a great acceleration in the accumulation of biological knowlege began in our era.
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Read the rest in Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic Models of Proteins and Nucleic Acids
- Wednesday 15 Nov 2006
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After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology.
--
Read the rest in Against the Odds: James Dyson Autobiography
- Tuesday 14 Nov 2006
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Escherichia coli has been fully sequenced for almost 10 years now, but we still don't know what all the genes do.
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Read the rest in From biochemical models to biochemical discovery and The Complete Genome Sequence of Escherichia coli K-12
- Monday 13 Nov 2006
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Experimental biologists envy the speed and effectiveness of computational biology publishing, “all these people do is push a button and spend the rest of their time writing papers”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
--
Read the rest in Three myths about bioinformatics: “Anyone can do this”, “You will always need an experiment” and “it's only technology”
- Funday 10 Nov 2006
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...so I am officially an “e-Scientist”. I'm still waiting for my lab coat to arrive.
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Read the rest in Stian Søiland's work page
- Thursday 09 Nov 2006
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Although web services are far from being the one-stop solution to the problems of life-sciences integration, they have proven to be good enough, in the sense that their presence has already forced people to rethink the way in which their research informatics are working. Whether this technology will be called web services, grid services or something completely different in ten years is irrelevant. The key paradigms established in recent years will remain the foundation for future efforts.
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Read the rest in Web Services in the Life Sciences and List of all BioMOBY Web Services
- Wednesday 08 Nov 2006
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If you wait until you're an expert, it's too late.
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Read the rest in ETech: Mark Pilgrim and Never trust experts
- Tuesday 07 Nov 2006
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Eventually, everything will be freely and instantly available, so (updating Andy Warhol) in the future every paper is going to be famous for 15 milliseconds.
--
Read the rest in Interview with Jonathan Hodgkin
- Monday 06 Nov 2006
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I don't have big ideas. I sometimes have small ideas, which seem to work out.
--
Read the rest in Interview with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, The people behind the next generation internet: “Web 2.0”, People 2.0 and Fluffy Web 2.0 demo
- Funday 03 Nov 2006
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Some of his [Francis Crick's] best thoughts came to him in pubs rather than labs.
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Read the rest in Alun Anderson reviews Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code book by Matt Ridley “an excellent, fast-paced tale of a long, astonishing life”, Horace Freeland Judson reviews Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code book by Matt Ridley “marred by factual errors and missed a unique opportunity”, Francis Crick Biography aims to inspire a wider audience and Pub Science: Journal Club for Gunslingers
- Thursday 02 Nov 2006
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I believe companies should make a positive difference to the world. When 52 of the top 100 GDPs [economies] in the world are companies, of course companies can make a big difference.
--Carly Fiorina
Read the rest in Carly Fiorina interview
- Wednesday 01 Nov 2006
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When the DNA database was initially established, it was to database DNA from criminals so if they re-offended, they could be picked up. Now hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people are now populating that database, people who have come to the police's attention, for example by being charged with a crime and subsequently released.
--Alec Jeffreys
Read the rest in Fears over DNA database, Suspect Nation: Britains national DNA database is a detective's dream and a citizens nightmare and Profile of Alec Jeffreys
- Tuesday 31 Oct 2006
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Imperfect technology in a working market is sustainable, while a perfect technology without a market will vanish.
--Clemens Szyperski
Read the rest in Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming
- Monday 30 Oct 2006
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Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.
--Sydney Brenner
Read the rest in Biology in the 1980s, plus or minus a decade, Metabolomics, machine learning and modelling: towards an understanding of the language of cells, It is very ego-warming to be recognised by quotation, but not always easy to find the original source and Sydney Brenner: ideas for sequencing the human genome
- Funday 27 Oct 2006
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I've started balding. It will only get worse as I get older.
--Bijan Parsia
Read the rest in Logical common sense and Common sense problems page
- Thursday 26 Oct 2006
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Hasn't this genome lark become a bit ho-hum? From dogs to trees to microbes and, of course, people, the US National Human Genome Research Institute lists more than 50 genome projects either complete or under way. The publication of a genome sequence used to be so exciting. Is it now destined to be dull?
--Anon
Read the rest in Plan bee: Another day, another genome, From hive minds to humans: Honeybee genome offers insight into social behaviour, Insights into social insects from the genome of the honeybee Apis mellifera and Getting a buzz out of the bee genome
- Wednesday 25 Oct 2006
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We have come a long way in our understanding of sexual dimorphism since 355 BC. In those days, Aristotle suggested that the difference between the two sexes was due to the heat of semen at the time of copulation: hot semen generated males, whereas cold semen made females. Thankfully, we now know a little more about the molecular events of sex determination.
--Anon
Read the rest in Genes and Disease, Male-Specific Diseases (SRY) Sex determination
- Tuesday 24 Oct 2006
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The good thing about digital media is that you can save everything. The bad thing about digital media is that you can lose everything.
--Brewster Kahle
Read the rest in World Wide Web History Centre: Know the past, invent the future
- Monday 23 Oct 2006
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Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives writing, debugging, and maintaining software, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this effectively: after a couple of introductory courses, they are left to rediscover (or reinvent) the rest of programming on their own. The result? Most spend far too much time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.
--Greg Wilson
Read the rest in Scientific software development is not an oxymoron
- Funday 20 Oct 2006
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Speed Collaborating Event: Like speed dating only more scientific and less embarrassing.
--Anon
Read the rest in Current events at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) October 2006
- Thursday 19 Oct 2006
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Within a decade we will see 100 billion transistor chips. That is the good news. The bad news is that 20 billion of those transistors will fail in manufacture and a further 10 billion will fail in the first year of operation.
--Steve Furber
Read the rest in Living with hardware failure: Lessons from Nature?
- Wednesday 18 Oct 2006
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I personally don't know of any (successfully) commercial or production uses of OWL-S, WSMO, or the like, at least off hand. I wouldn't take that as conclusive, but I do take it as not a healthy sign.
--Bijan Parsia
Read the rest in Are there any commercial or “real-world” Semantic Web Services?
- Tuesday 17 Oct 2006
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My dad was upset about me abandoning my PhD for music. He thought being a scientist was a better career. Thankfully, though, he came around. He worked as a draughtsman on the development of Concorde, and one of the great pleasures of my life was flying him over to New York on Concorde for the first concert Queen played at Madison Square Garden.
--Brian May
Read the rest in Interview with Queen guitarist Brian May, We will, we will doc you and Bang! The Complete History of the Universe by Brian May, Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott
- Monday 16 Oct 2006
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Most UK Prime Ministers of this and the last century have attended University. It is clear however, that most of those know little of what a university is trying to achieve or how it is organised within the local, national and international context. This is our fault. Our negligence in setting the context for politicians, when they are students, has led to a misunderstanding of the role of a university. As a consequence, piecemeal governmental funding has compromised teaching, research and the educational aspirations of students.
--Ron Morrison
Read the rest in Why university research is fundamental to a modern knowledge based economy.
- Saturday 14 Oct 2006
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IMHO, SOA's value proposition begins with the A in its acronym: architecture.
--Grady Booch
Read the rest in Snake oil oriented architecture, Snake oil is a term used for fake, fraudulent, and usually ineffective potions and nostrums and Why have snake oil when you can have a whole snake?
- Funday 13 Oct 2006
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It's not ‘e-Science’, it's ‘me-Science’.
--Carole Goble
Read the rest in ‘me-Science’ the new e-Science and The Seven Deadly Sins of Bioinformatics
- Thursday 12 Oct 2006
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These results suggest that black tea consumption may have benefits to health, in part, by aiding recovery from stress.
--Andrew Steptoe et al
Read the rest in The effects of tea on psychophysiological stress responsivity and post-stress recovery, Black tea soothes away stress, a good place for a cup of tea and think and a nice cup of tea and sit down
- Wednesday 11 Oct 2006
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Our brains aren't wired to deal with randomness - there's even a huge industry that takes advantage of people's inability to deal with random distributions. It's called gambling.
--
Read the rest in Just how random is the iPod shuffle? and The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness by Steven Levy
- Tuesday 10 Oct 2006
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Whenever I see something I regard as illogical, I will protest. I've got into lots of arguments as a result, but I am more than happy to take the risk of being blown up in exchange for saying what I believe in.
--
Read the rest in The Young Ones: Laurie Pycroft interview
- Monday 09 Oct 2006
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Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?
--
Read the rest in Meno by Plato and Knowledge representation class
- Funday 06 Oct 2006
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Science is a broad church full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about ever less.
--
Read the rest in The Single Helix: A Turn Around the World of Science
- Thursday 05 Oct 2006
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All models are wrong, but some are useful.
--
Read the rest in Robustness in Statistics: Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building and Automated generation of heuristics for biological sequence comparison (Exonerate)
- Wednesday 04 Oct 2006
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When in doubt and communicating with logicians we revert to FoL [First order logic] as the ultimate reference. It would be rare to do so with biologists or even bioinformaticians. Most would run away in fear and dread.
--
Read the rest in Property-values in logic
- Tuesday 03 Oct 2006
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Living here might be some people's idea of hell, but I love it.
--
Read the rest in Good to meet you: Michael Prior-Jones. Guardian print edition 2006-09-30 page 40 and Michael Prior-Jones Antarctica blog from Rothera research station, 67° South
- Monday 02 Oct 2006
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A long, long time ago in a country far, far away ... there was a young girl who had her eyes fixed on the twinkling stars of the night skies over Tehran.
--
Read the rest in The road to Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazaksthan and Anousheh Ansari: A passion for space travel
- Funday 29 Sep 2006
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There are very few things in life that are better than sex, but in the long run, gardening just beats it. For half an hour I'll have the sex, but for the rest of the day I'll take gardening.
--
Read the rest in A life in the day of Bob Flowerdew
- Thursday 28 Sep 2006
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I'm a professional cynic but my heart's not in it.
--
Read the rest in Country House
- Wednesday 27 Sep 2006
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If you hit the Amazon.com gateway page, the application calls more than 100 [web] services to collect data and construct the page for you.
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Read the rest in Werner Vogels interview: Learning from the Amazon web technology platform
- Tuesday 26 Sep 2006
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I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. It's just that if I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. Pen and paper wick ideas.
--
Read the rest in The Island Test: What are you addicted to?
- Monday 25 Sep 2006
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Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing a meditation.
--
Read the rest in Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Funday 22 Sep 2006
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You gotta love Google's classification of our “business”. Apparently we are “Education, Religion”. Is that because I mentioned Perl?
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Read the rest in Asychronous JavaScript And XML (AJAX) interface to GBrowse, a genome browser and Ian Holmes lab at Berkeley are hiring software engineers
- Thursday 21 Sep 2006
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[e-science] depends on collaboration and making connections between ideas, people, and data. It depends on finding and interpreting results and knowledge generated by scientific colleagues you do not know and who do not know you, to be analysed in ways they did not anticipate, to generate new hypotheses to be pooled in their turn.
--
Read the rest in Using the semantic web for e-Science: Inspiration, Incubation, Irritation
- Wednesday 20 Sep 2006
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Maps turn everyone into field-marshals.
--
Read the rest in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese of Greece and Πελοπόννησος
- Friday 01 Sep 2006
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The scary thing is that when you scratch the surface, you find you need all these new sciences that don't exist yet, combining machine learning, artificial intelligence and microeconomics with traditional computer and data sciences.
--
Read the rest in Usama Fayyad Interview: searching for the next internet hit at Yahoo! Research! Laboratories! and Lemuel Gulliver's adventures with the Yahoos
- Thursday 31 Aug 2006
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In short, when the [human] genome project was foundering in a sea of incompatible data formats, rapidly-changing techniques, and monolithic data analysis programs that were already antiquated on the day of their release, Perl saved the day. Although it's not perfect, Perl seems to fill the needs of the genome centres remarkably well, and is usually the first tool we turn to when we have a problem to solve.
--
Read the rest in How Perl saved the Human Genome Project and BioPerl: Desperate Perl Hackers?
- Wednesday 30 Aug 2006
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The internet panders to closed minds.
--
Read the rest in Useful old media is disappearing: A cause for concern, but not for panic and Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded
- Tuesday 29 Aug 2006
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There's no data like more data.
--
Read the rest in Machine translation at Google labs
- Monday 28 Aug 2006
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Nonetheless, given the emphasis they place on connectivity and an interdisciplinary approach, practitioners of systems biology may benefit from the realisation that if they 'have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants' (Newton, 1676) rather than by toppling them out of the way.
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Read the rest in The long past of systems biology: neither a revolution or a paradigm shift and An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Uri Alon
- Funday 25 Aug 2006
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Economics is just models and to use it successfully you need to hum 'lalalala' in the places where the model does not mesh successfully with your perception of the world.
--
Read the rest in I just had a nightmare that I still hadn't finished my PhD
- Thursday 24 Aug 2006
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The scientific method is changing from “hypothesize, design and run experiment, analyse results” to “hypothesize, look up answer in database”.
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Read the rest in Databases and Scientific Progress, Biological databases: not waving but drowning, One Thousand Databases High (and rising) and Tomb Raider: Raiding Chemistry's Data Tombs
- Wednesday 23 Aug 2006
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A [Fields] medal was also awarded to Grigori Perelman, an eccentric Russian mathematician, who has received widespread acclaim for a proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, one of mathematics' most celebrated problems.
As had been widely rumoured, Perelman turned down the medal saying he has become disillusioned with mathematics. He has also resigned from his post at the St Petersburg department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics and subsequently disappeared.
--
Read the rest in Prestigious 2006 Fields Medals for mathematics awarded, Millenium problems: Seven one million dollar prizes and The Mystery of Grigori Perelman
- Tuesday 22 Aug 2006
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Our discovery of DNA fingerprinting was of course totally accidental... But at least we had the sense to realise what we had stumbled upon.
--
Read the rest in The 2005 Clinical Medical Research Lasker Award winner Alec Jeffreys and Alec Jeffreys Desert Island Discs
- Monday 21 Aug 2006
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My big contribution to science was the discovery that blotting paper could be used to soak liquid out of jelly.
--
Read the rest in The 2005 Medical Research Lasker Award winner Edwin Southern
- Saturday 19 Aug 2006
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The real risk is not dumbing down, but an unduly narrow focus which rewards spoon-feeding over critical teaching and leaves stressed students with little time to read round. Pupils may reject subjects that interest them in favour of those they think are easier to do well in.
--
Read the rest in A-level results: The wrong row and Rise in the number of top 'A' grades the second highest in ten years: Universities 'can no longer pick out the brightest pupils'
- Funday 18 Aug 2006
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Question: What do you get when you cross a mobster with an international standard?
Answer: Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand.
--
Read the rest in The Internet Message by Marshall T. Rose and The Godfather: Making an offer that can't be refused
- Thursday 17 Aug 2006
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Why did you become a plant scientist?
I fell in love with trees whilst walking in the Wyre Forest as a small boy. My first friend was a sycamore tree. I was truly astounded the first time I saw seeds germinate and it's still miraculous to me.
--
Read the rest in Ginkgo: Department of Plant Sciences newsletter
- Wednesday 16 Aug 2006
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Internet people on the other hand prefer anarchy as a matter of principle. However, with hundreds of millions of people all doing their own thing, little communication can occur. Thus, standards, however regrettable, are sometimes needed.
--
Read the rest in Computer Networks, Fourth Edition
- Tuesday 15 Aug 2006
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What I've got in my head you can't buy, steal or borrow.
--
Read the rest in Higher Than The Sun
- Monday 14 Aug 2006
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The thing I've always liked about the English is that they never care about what people think of them.
--
Read the rest in Irvine Welsh interview
- Thursday 10 Aug 2006
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Unless hospitals can be certain that the information recorded by doctors and nurses applies to a unique patient, the government's vision of electronic health records accessible from anywhere in the NHS is a castle in the air.
--
Read the rest in Getting hospital data to connect to the National Health Service 'spine'
- Wednesday 09 Aug 2006
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Language is everywhere. It permeates our thoughts, mediates our relations with others, and even creeps into our dreams. The overwhelming bulk of human knowledge is stored and transmitted in language. Language is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted, but without it, society as we know it would not be possible.
--
Read the rest in Language and its structure: some fundamental linguistic concepts and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Tuesday 08 Aug 2006
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Governments of industrial countries are not facing up to the huge energy challenges that lie ahead...some commentators have argued that the energy challenge demands a high-profile response analogous to the Manhattan [project] or Apollo project, but on a global, rather than national, scale.
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Read the rest in The G8 on Energy: Too Little and International Apollo project needed to stimulate new energy technologies
- Monday 07 Aug 2006
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You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you program.
--
Read the rest in Epigrams in Programming: ACM SIGPLAN September 1982
- Funday 04 Aug 2006
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There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.
--
Read the rest in The Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) Project
- Thursday 03 Aug 2006
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The nature of the cell is an entirely molecular problem. It has nothing to do with biology.
[Apart from the fact that cells are living things, and Biology is the Science of Life!?!?!]
--
Read the rest in What Chemists Want To Know: Are there still major chemical questions to crack?
- Wednesday 02 Aug 2006
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There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humour or stylish writing.
--
Read the rest in This Boring Headline Is Written for Google, Computers don't do jokes and Clever word-play, punning and novel terms don't always help your search engine ranking
- Tuesday 01 Aug 2006
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At a time of increasing conern over the future of the global environment, a book about plant communities might appear an academic irrelevance, an ostrich-in-the-sand avoidance of the crucial issues. Yet a knowledge of how plants have responded to environmental changes in the past is our principal source of evidence for predicting how they might respond to the new environments of the future.
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Read the rest in Plant Community History: Changes in plant distribution and diversity in the last 65 million years, Tony Blair and Arnold Schwarzenegger discuss climate change and Scientists give their personal opinions on climate change
- Monday 31 Jul 2006
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Forty years ago, the Nobel-prize winning immunologist Peter Medawar declared that all scientific papers were frauds, inasmuch as they describe research as a smooth transition from hypothesis through experiments to conclusions, when the truth is always messier than that.
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Read the rest in What if replication of published scientific results proves difficult or impossible?
- Funday 28 Jul 2006
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Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.
--
Read the rest in Relatively Einstein
- Thursday 27 Jul 2006
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The [peer review] process is not perfect, for reasons ranging from cronyism to capriciousness, yet long experience has shown it to be better than the alternatives.
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Read the rest in Peer review debate: Scientific publishers should let their online readers become reviewers
- Wednesday 26 Jul 2006
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AI researchers have devoted little effort to passing the Turing test, believing it is more important to study the underlying principles of intelligence than to duplicate an exemplar. The quest for “artificial flight” succeeded when the Wright brothers and others stopped imitating birds and learned about aerodynamics. Aeronautical engineering texts do not define the goal of their field as making “machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool even other pigeons.”
--
Read the rest in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Google and the Semantic Web and http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
- Tuesday 25 Jul 2006
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Instead investigators rely on the candidate gene approach, which basically means “examine the good candidates first”.
That's it - it's not a formal methodology, just common sense with a puffed-up name.
--
Read the rest in the Hunting for Disease Genes
- Monday 24 Jul 2006
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Viewing data integration as simply an “IT problem” underestimates the novel and serious scientific and management challenges it embodies
--
Read the rest in the Data Integration: Challenges for Drug Discovery and A view form the dark side by David Searls
- Wednesday 19 Jul 2006
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Somehow, we human beings have a wondrous capacity for being both rational and irrational, detached and passionate, deliberate and spontaneous, craving of certainty and uncertainty, seeking questions with answers and questions without. We are a splattering of contradictions. In my own case, I have always felt these juxtapositions as a creative tension necessary for my work, a continual rumbling in my gut, an unsettled joy.
--
Read the rest in the Artists on Science: Scientists on Art
- Tuesday 18 Jul 2006
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The impossible has been achieved.
--
Read the rest in the Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge led by Sebastian Thrun, Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge (video) and AAAI'06: Highlights and Conclusions
- Monday 17 Jul 2006
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Databases [and ontologies] are much more difficult to validate [than algorithms]. How do we know that a database is good? Do we judge it by the quality or quantity of its data, its usability and its ability to integrate with outside resources? Should we also consider the technical architecture and the user support mechanisms and documentation? What about the impact on science, the number of web hits, and total gigabytes of data that a database transfers?
--
Read the rest in the Editorial: Building successful biological databases and Opportunities for Pharmacogenomics and Personalised Medicine
- Sunday 16 Jul 2006
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The computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum says the idea [of Artificial Intelligence] is obscene, anti-human and immoral. Various people have said that since artificial intelligence hasn't reached human level by now, it must be impossible. Still other people are disappointed that companies they invested in went bankrupt.
--
Read the rest in the What is Artificial Intelligence? Basic Questions
- Funday 14 Jul 2006
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The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that “whenever you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount”. This is silly, when there are other, far more productive options:
- Changing riders
- Appointing a committee to study the horse
- Arranging a visit to other countries to see how others ride dead horses
- etc ...
--
Read the rest in the Dead Horse Syndrome: Am I flogging a dead horse? and Flogging a dead horse
- Thursday 13 Jul 2006
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When I give talks to young scientists seeking advice about areas of future intense scientific excitement, computational biology is my number one recommendation.
--
Read the rest in the It's sink or swim as a tidal wave of data approaches and Francis Collins on science vs faith debate
- Wednesday 12 Jul 2006
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The World Wide Web combines three kinds of technologies: data formats, protocols, and identifiers that tie the two together. The relationship between data formats such as XML and HTML is relatively clear, as is the relationship between protocols such as HTTP and FTP. But identifiers seem to be a bit trickier to pin down.
--
Read the rest in the Untangle URIs, URLs, and URNs: Naming and the problem of persistence, URI: Uniform Resource Identifier and Identity, Reference and the Web
- Tuesday 11 Jul 2006
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There will always be a trade-off between the grounding cost of agreeing up front to use the same standards and the clean-up cost of resolving the differences later. You can choose whether to pay for your lunch in advance or afterwards, but there is no free lunch.
--
Read the rest in the Ontologies, terminologies, vocabularies and data integration
- Monday 10 Jul 2006
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Find an area you love and dive into a PhD. You'll end up despising most of what you thought you loved but ... that makes what's left over all the sweeter.
--
Read the rest in the Perpetual Student: how many degrees can you do?
- Saturday 8 Jul 2006
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Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati™ blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500.
--
Read the rest in Top Five Science Blogs and Top 50 Science Blogs on the Web
- Funday 07 Jul 2006
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Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
--
Read the rest in the Endgame, a play by Samuel Beckett and Watch for the laughter behind the nothingness
- Thursday 06 Jul 2006
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When I was doing research in physics I think the thing I found hardest is that some parts of science are really exciting - they'll be the moments, the eureka moments, where you see something nobody's ever seen before and you run up and down the corridors at midnight screaming - and then there are also loads and loads of hours of really dull stuff. And it varies according to the kind of science that you do, but there's always some really dull stuff that doesn't involve any intellect. And it's that dull stuff which is the hardest to cope with.
--
Read the rest in the interview with Kathy Sykes
- Wednesday 05 Jul 2006
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Science, perhaps more than any other human endeavour, stretches around and through the Earth. It reaches places where commercial activity is banned, such as the South Pole, and where politics are meaningless, such as the night sky, aglow with the faint passage of cosmic rays.
--
Read the rest in A tale of one world: Celebrating science on the summer solstice. and Every day, all over the planet and beyond it, scientists try to make sense of the world in which they live
- Tuesday 04 Jul 2006
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The study found that generally, younger researchers, those in departments rated 5* by the RAE [Research Assessment Exercise], and those in research-only appointments, undertook less public engagement activity compared with senior researchers, those in departments rated 1-5 under the RAE and those in research and teaching positions.
--
Read the rest in Research pressure in universities is barrier to scientists communicating work to public, Survey of factors affecting science communication by scientists and engineers
- Monday 03 Jul 2006
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The European League will come and the top clubs will gain in power. One day there won't be national teams any more. They will be replaced in the World Cup by club sides.
--
Read the rest in Chelsea Football Club win the FIFA World Cup
- Sunday 02 Jul 2006
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I'm angry and frustrated. I would use one word to sum up the Sven-Böring Eriksson era: waste. It's one thing if you don't have talent at your disposal. But Eriksson had fantastic players.
--
Read the rest in Sobs and suffering on the sofa: Experts' view, Sven-Göran Eriksson pockets £24 million and England beaten on penalties for the fifth time in sixteen years
- Funday 30 Jun 2006
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In modern Greek, the word malakas is used metaphorically in everyday speech to define the individual that uses no common sense, who instead repeats the same mistakes many times over, while maintaining an attitude of self-righteousness.
--
Read the rest in Malakas / Μαλάκας
- Thursday 29 Jun 2006
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At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can't do, teach.”
--
Read the rest in The Power of the Marginal, Garage Bioinformatics on the margins and Those who can, teach
- Wednesday 28 Jun 2006
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For me, football is just a game, not a drama.
--
Read the rest in Michel Platini interview: Never forget, football is just a game, France snatch late win over Spain and Bend it like Bezier
- Tuesday 27 Jun 2006
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I doubt that there is any experiment that could be done to prove my [selfish gene] claim.
--
Read the rest in The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
- Monday 26 Jun 2006
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More than 90% of televised games aren't worth watching. There's a lack of invention, everybody plays in the same stereotyped way and I feel for the fans who enjoy creativity. These days, everyone is afraid of making mistakes and you see 200 back-passes in every game. My idea of football is the way people like Del Piero, Totti, or Baggio play it. When I watch Raúl, Figo and Zidane at Real Madrid, I feel as though I'm living again.
--
Read the rest in Paolo Rossi interview: Italy vs. Brazil in 1982 was an unforgettable experience and David Beckham fires England to a drab and uninventive win over Ecuador
- Funday 23 Jun 2006
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Pimp My Paper!
--
Read the rest in Pimp My Paper and Pimp My Ride
- Thursday 22 Jun 2006
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I think the whole world enjoyed seeing a 38-year-old score four goals at the [1990] World Cup finals.
--
Read the rest in Roger Milla interview and The Roger Milla “wiggle” goal celebration
- Wednesday 21 Jun 2006
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Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
[That whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.]
--
Read the rest in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Tuesday 20 Jun 2006
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I think the best way to improve your skills is to play football on a smaller pitch. I didn't play 11-a-side football until I was 13. In Brazil most kids play what we call Futebol de Salão, which is similar to five-a-side.
--
Read the rest in Juninho Paulista shares his football tips
- Monday 19 Jun 2006
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If I could have my time again, I'd still be a footballer.
--
Read the rest in interview with Colombian footballer Carlos Valderrama and King Carlos Valderrama
- Funday 16 Jun 2006
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DNA, you know, is Midas' gold. Everyone who touches it goes mad.
--
Read the rest in The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, Won for All: How the Drosophila (fruit fly) Genome was sequenced: Book review by John Sulston, DNA mania, DNA maniac and Francis Crick: Pubs vs. Labs
- Thursday 15 Jun 2006
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To the north was just poverty, and that seemed to go all the way into Lancashire, whereas to the south there was quite a lot of wealth into Cheshire, and the division appeared right in the middle of Manchester.
--
Read the rest in Ten years ago, an IRA bomb left the centre of Manchester utterly devastated, Every Cloud: Ten Years after the Manchester Bomb and June 15th 1996: Huge explosion rocks central Manchester
- Wednesday 14 Jun 2006
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I stared death in the face and I wanted it to embrace me, to soothe me. But it wasn't to be, heaven will have to wait.
--
Read the rest in Diego Maradona's last chance, “Final chance” for Maradona, Argentina 2-1 Ivory Coast and The 'Hand of God' church several years AD: After Diego
- Tuesday 13 Jun 2006
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These days we're seeing a levelling of the playing field. You can't say this or that match is won in advance. Modern football is less exciting to watch and more physical. It's difficult to put three passes together because the other team will be pressing you so tight.
--
Read the rest in Where are they now? Salvatore Totò Schillaci and Italy claim world cup triumph in 2006
- Monday 12 Jun 2006
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Rapid improvements in technologies such as DNA microarrays and proteomics applications have produced a climate where the challenge is no longer collecting high quality data but rather managing and analysing it.
--
Read the rest in It is time to end the patenting of software
- Saturday 10 Jun 2006
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If Ronaldo, Adriano and Ronaldinho played at their best for 90 minutes, Brazil would win 23-0.
--
Read the rest in Brazil set to call the shots
- Funday 09 Jun 2006
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If you like football, then let it be known that five stars stand above my heart, and every four years I hunger for one more.
--
Read the rest in Brasil Pentacampeão and June 9th 2006: Spectacular opening to Football World Cup
- Thursday 08 Jun 2006
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Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.
--
Read the rest in Measure for Measure
- Wednesday 07 Jun 2006
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But if you could just see the beauty
These things I could never describe
These pleasures a wayward distraction
This is my one lucky prize
--
Read the rest in Isolation, Control (directed by Anton Corbijn) and I Love Joy Division
- Tuesday 06 Jun 2006 (06-06-06)
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The idea of a 'semantic web' - this notion of adding machine-readable tags to web pages so that a computer can read and 'understand' the text and data - has been around for years. But, like nuclear fusion, it always seems to be 'just around the corner'. Is it ever going to happen?
--
Read the rest in The next wave of the Web: gurus and geeks descend on Edinburgh for WWW2006
- Monday 05 Jun 2006
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Bethe became a visiting lecturer at Manchester University for a year, sharing a rented house in Didsbury with Peierls and his family, and cycling the six miles or so to the university on a second-hand bike.
He remembered the greyness and griminess of Manchester, its appalling fogs, the coldness of houses, the warmth of the people and the excellence of the physics department, then under WL Bragg.
--
Read the rest in Hans Bethe obituary and Hans Bethe, nuclear physicist, died on March 6th 2005, aged 98
- Saturday 03 Jun 2006
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Manchester has an unusual record in the competition [University Challenge] - in the mid-1970s a team of Manchester students, including broadcaster and columnist David Aaronovitch, protested against the 'elitist' nature of the programme by answering 'Trotsky' or 'Lenin' to every question.
--
Read the rest in The University of Manchester wins the 2006 University Challenge title and Manchester wins University Challenge
- Funday 02 Jun 2006
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The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.
--
Read the rest in The Observer 1994-07-10
- Thursday 01 Jun 2006
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With a hundred trillion cells, each one storing 6GB of data in its DNA, the body of typical living animal stores a grand total of 600YB, making it the world's most redundant storage device.
--
Read the rest in Yottabyte
- Wednesday 31 May 2006
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Computing is Free. The world's most powerful computer is free (SETI@Home is a 54 teraflops machine). Google freely provides a trillion searches per year to the world's largest online database (2 petabytes [250 or 1015 bytes]). Hotmail freely carries a trillion email messages per year.
--
Read the rest in Distributed Computing Economics and The petaflop challenge: Future supercomputers could leave scientists scrabbling for software
- Tuesday 30 May 2006
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Plants are not as inanimate as they sometimes appear. Thousands of kinds of chemical reactions are underway in every living cell, transforming water, mineral salts, and gases from the environment into organised plant tissue and organs. Plant physiology is...the study of water.
--
Read the rest in Plant Physiology: Salisbury and Ross (Fourth Edition)
- Funday 26 May 2006
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Work like you don't need the money
Love like you've never been hurt
Dance like nobody's watching--
Read the rest in Dance and Leeds Postcards
- Thursday 25 May 2006
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Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box.
--
Read the rest in What I Am and What I Am is What I Am, Are You What You Are Or What?
- Wednesday 24 May 2006
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Old philosophical issues never die, and only unimportant ones fade away. The fact that questions concerning the nature of linguistic meaning, reference, truth, etc. should arise in the context of the Semantic Web is neither surprising nor unwelcome.
And while some may take that as a sign of a lack of fundamental scientific or technological progress, the fact is that most, if not all, great scientific theories tend to butt up against fundamental issues that go beyond the narrower confines of a particular field.
--
Read the rest in The Big Schema of Things and Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box
- Tuesday 23 May 2006
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We are not experimental philosophers, we are philosophical engineers.
--
Read the rest in The meaning of Uniform Resource Identifiers
- Monday 22 May 2006
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And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form - 'www' - takes three times longer to say than what it's short for).
--
Read the rest in Beyond the Brochure or Build it and We Will Come
- Saturday 20 May 2006
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Over 350 human diseases are associated with disruptions in the sequence to chromosome 1, including neurological and developmental disorders, cancers and Mendelian disorders, for which many of the corresponding genes have not yet been identified.
--
Read the rest in Human Chromosome 1: Project Overview, The DNA sequence and biological annotation of human chromosome 1 and Study of the largest and last chromosome of the human genome published
- Funday 19 May 2006
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People think of neurosurgery as something highly intellectual. They use phrases like “it doesn't take a brain surgeon”. Of course, you have to be smart and make quick decisions, but, in part, a neurosurgeon is a kind of mechanic. We cut heads open, we use drills.
--
Read the rest in Confessions of a brain surgeon: Katrina Firlik interview and Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A brain surgeon exposes life on the inside
- Thursday 18 May 2006
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From age 16 on I found school boring and failed A-level Physics at my first attempt.
--
Read the rest in Richard J. Roberts Autobiography, Physics A-level loses momentum and Information access. Building a “GenBank” of the published literature
- Wednesday 17 May 2006
-
--
Read the rest in Constructing a campus for a world-class university
- Tuesday 16 May 2006
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All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
--
Read the rest in Rutherford at Manchester by John Betteley Birks (1962)
- Monday 15 May 2006
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Other kids realised it annoyed me and so they started calling me Pelé even more. Then I realised that it wasn't up to me what I'm called. Now I love the name - but back then it wound me up no end.
--Edson Arantes do Nascimento
Read the rest in From Edson to Pelé: my changing identity, How a teenage Pelé took the world by wizardry, Pelé: The Autobiography and World Cup Stories: Brazil, The Golden Team
- Funday 12 May 2006
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Home is where the books are.
--
Read the rest in Home is where the books are
- Thursday 11 May 2006
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150 years down the line, we still don't have a workable definition of gene, species, organism or even life.
--
Read the rest in Proposal for standard NCBI database URI
- Wednesday 10 May 2006
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The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
--
Read the rest in As You Like It
- Tuesday 09 May 2006
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Web Search, School Report Card
Media Grade Comments Text pages A Single pages Music A- © and access issues Images B+ Lacks precision Video C+ Promising start Personal info C Splintered / imprecise Services C- Need to play together better Data F Not working at Web scale --
Read the rest in From Atom's to OWL's: the new ecology of the World Wide Web and One Document to Bind Them: Combining XML, Web Services, and the Semantic Web
- Monday 08 May 2006
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The average European says, with dread: “How do we stop people doing x?” The average American says with excitement: “When will I be able to do x?”
--
Read the rest in We've never had it so good - and it's all thanks to science
- Funday 05 May 2006
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My hobbies include eating, drinking and arsing about with computers.
--
Read the rest in David Hancock's homepage
- Thursday 04 May 2006
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We should never take anything as a given truth. There is only ever a better kind of lie.
--Terry Pratchett
Read the rest in Relatively Einstein: Fantasy Physics and Relatively Einstein
- Wednesday 03 May 2006
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Mr. Pharmacist, can you help me out today?
In your usual lovely way
Oh Mr. Pharmacist, I insist
Give me some Vitamin C.--Mark E. Smith
Read the rest in Mr. Pharmacist / Lucifer Over Lancashire and Mark E. Smith on John Peel
- Tuesday 02 May 2006
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Rule 5: Learn to live with rejection.
--Philip E. Bourne
Read the rest in Ten Simple Rules For Getting Published
- Monday 01 May 2006
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Γυμναστική (yimnastiki) is a general word for exercising, not just gymnastics, from the word γυμνάζομαι (yimnazome) ‘to train both physically and mentally’. In classical times, physical and intellectual exercise were always seen as inseperable.
--Markella Callimassia
Read the rest in Lonely Planet Greek Phrasebook, Philosophy Football: Sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction and Monty Python Philosophy Football
- Funday 21 Apr 2006
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Even if you have conquered the Atlantic in a small boat, if you are English, you are expected to do no more than comment: “I do a little sailing.”
Force English people to trumpet their achievements and they will feel uncomfortable, and even resent you for it. But indicate that you are aware of their achievements, they will modestly acknowledge them, and love you forever.
--Antony Miall and David Milsted
Read the rest in The Xenophobe's® guide to the English and The Xenophobe's® guide to the Greeks
- Thursday 20 Apr 2006
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Self-control - although invented by the ancient Spartans - is not only unknown but also incomprehensible to the modern Greeks. They are eager in everything: their joys, their sorrows have no moderation.
--Alexandra Fiada
Read the rest in The Xenophobe's® guide to the Greeks, The Xenophobe's® guide to the English and Zorba the Geek
- Wednesday 19 Apr 2006
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Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And Eloquence, native to famous wits.--John Milton
Read the rest in Paradise Regained (1671), Athens: Paradise Lost (2004)? and Αθήνα / ΑΘΗΝΑ
- Tuesday 18 Apr 2006
-
Let there be light! said Liberty
And like sunrise from the sea
Athens arose!--Percy Shelley
Read the rest in Hellas by Shelley (1822) and Time Out Athens (2005)
- Monday 17 Apr 2006
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I'm going where the sun keeps shining
Through the pouring rain
I'm going where the weather suits my clothes
Backing off of the North East wind and
Sailing on summer breeze
Skipping over the ocean like a stone--Fred Neil
Read the rest in Everybody's Talking
- Easter Sunday 16 Apr 2006
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Don't waste your words I don't need anything from you
I don't care where you've been or what you plan to do--Ian Brown
Read the rest in I Am The Resurrection, The Day that Jesus came to the Manchester Arndale Centre, Re-enactment of the Easter story: “Manchester Passion” and Religion will tear us apart
- Saturday 15 Apr 2006
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It's Grim Up North.
--Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty
Read the rest in It's Grim Up North, It's Grim Down South and It's Nice Up North
- Good Funday 14 Apr 2006
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If rain makes Britain great then Manchester is greater.
--Paul Heaton and David Rotheray
Read the rest in “Manchester” song lyrics by the Beautiful South and Why does it always rain on me?
- Thursday 13 Apr 2006
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Manchester is the place for all men of bargain and business. The gambling trade in bills no doubt belongs to London, but the real trade of making, collecting, and selling belongs to Manchester. For Manchester is the place where people do things.
It is good to talk about doing things, but better still to do them. As a great teacher used to say to his art students: “Don't talk about what you are going to do—do it.” That is the Manchester habit. And in the past through the manifestation of this quality the word Manchester became a synonym for energy and freedom, and the right to do and to think without shackles.
--Judge Edward Abbott Parry
Read the rest in What the judge saw, being twenty-five years in Manchester by one who has done it (1912)
- Wednesday 12 Apr 2006
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Certainly Manchester is the most wonderful city of modern times!
--Benjamin Disraeli
Read the rest in Coningsby or the New Generation by Benjamin Disraeli
- Tuesday 11 Apr 2006
-
It is from the midst of this putrid sewer [Manchester] that the greatest river of human industry springs up and carries fertility to the whole world. From this foul drain pure gold flows forth. Here it is that humanity achieves for itself both perfection and brutalisation, that civilisation produces its wonders, and that civilised man becomes again almost a savage. [tranlsated from French]
--Alexis de Tocqueville
Read the rest in Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835 and England during the Industrial Revolution, according to Disraeli, the “Workshop of the World”
- Monday 10 Apr 2006
-
Do you like Manchester in general? Yes.
Why is this? It's my home city, it's part of me and it has lots of things going for it, despite many faults.
--Aidan O'Rourke
Read the rest in Letter from Manchester and Eye On Manchester
- Saturday 08 Apr 2006
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And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.
--William Wordsworth
Read the rest in I wandered lonely as a cloud by William Wordsworth
- Funday 07 Apr 2006
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--Anon
Read the rest in The can is mightier than the sword!, The web is mightier than the sword and The pen is mightier than the sword
- Thursday 06 Apr 2006
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The web is mightier than the sword.
--Anon
Read the rest in Wild, Wild Web (dub-dub-dub), The can is mightier than the sword and The pen is mightier than the sword
- Wednesday 05 Apr 2006
-
The pen is mightier than the sword.
--Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Read the rest in Richelieu; or, the conspiracy: a play, in five acts, The can is mightier than the sword and The web is mightier than the sword
- Tuesday 04 Apr 2006
-
‘All advice is perfectly useless,’ my father told me when he sent me away to school. ‘Particularly advice on the subject of life. You may, at a pinch, take your schoolteacher's word on the subject of equilateral triangles, or the Latin word for “parsley”; but remember that life’s a closed book to schoolteachers, if you want my honest opinion.’
--John Mortimer
Read the rest in Where there's a will
- Monday 03 Apr 2006
-
When you see a good move, wait, look for a better one.
--Emanuel Lasker
Read the rest in An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation by Mark Levene
- Funday 31 Mar 2006
-
We're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.
--Adam Livingstone
Read the rest in BitTorrent and encryption, Why might Apple Computer Inc. hate the French parliament?, Rupert Murdoch and new media, Old media vs new media and Economist Survey: New Media
- Thursday 30 Mar 2006
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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle / Αριστοτέλης
Unavailable source
- Wednesday 29 Mar 2006
-
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
--Samuel Beckett
Read the rest in Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett Centenary Festival review and Beckett Centenary festival
- Tuesday 28 Mar 2006
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It might be helpful to remember what the goal is, what we're trying to accomplish. We want to build applications that work across networks, where the networks have unpredictable scale and performance and reliability, and the computers in the networks aren't all the same. That's all...
I think we should take the “Web Services” label into the jailyard, strap on a blindfold, give it a last cigarette, and shoot it. It doesn't mean much any more, and to the extent that it does, it's misleading: WS-* doesn't have much of the Web about it.
--Tim Bray
Read the rest in “Message-Exchange Style” would be a better name than “Web Services”
- Monday 27 Mar 2006
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You're in the middle of the most fantastic countryside and suddenly there it is. It is so far from modern life it's like a medieval fair. You come back from Glastonbury [festival] and you feel like you've been away for a fortnight.
--Max Heywood
Read the rest in Glastonbury festival: The fun, the filth and the fury, Glastonbury festival documentary directed by Julien Temple and Down on Worthy farm with Julien Temple
- Saturday 25 Mar 2006
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Today's scientists can't aspire to the transient ultra-celebrity of soap stars and footballers. We may not even want to erect statues of them. But there seems no reason why our top scientists and engineers shouldn't have the profile of our leading architects [Norman] Foster, [Richard] Rogers and the rest and be equally seen as exemplars for the young to emulate.
--Martin Rees
Read the rest in Britain must celebrate its achievements in world science and Celebrating British Science
- Funday 24 Mar 2006
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Scotland is an excellent place for outdoor activities of all kinds, especially getting rained upon.
--Ben Green
Read the rest in Ben Greens favourite places in Britain
- Thursday 23 Mar 2006
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For me being online is everything. It's my hi-fi, it's my source of income, it's my supermarket, it's my telephone. It's my way in.
--Lynn Holdsworth
Read the rest in implementing website accessibility for visually impaired users
- Wednesday 22 Mar 2006
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The system not only finds absolute matches, but finds related matches. Variation in DNA sequence is vital in disease studies and we needed to build in the ability to find all sequences related to the query sequence.
--Adam Spargo
Read the rest in Google the genome with TraceSearch, a DNA search engine and SSAHA: a fast search method for large DNA databases
- Funday 17 Mar 2006
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My most severe allergy, however, is my allergy to hype. The severity of this allergy has diminished somewhat over the last few years due to continual exposure to the allergen.
--Peter Patel-Schneider
Read the rest in Peter Patel-Schneider's talk on Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web at Google Labs
- Thursday 16 Mar 2006
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Cynics - a class that includes nearly all scientists - even claim that the editor selects papers just because they are eye-catching.
--Steve Jones
Read the rest in New and unexpected science stories at the click of a button
- Wednesday 15 Mar 2006
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Oh my god I can't believe it I've never been this far away from home.
--Kaiser Chiefs
Read the rest in Oh My God
- Tuesday 14 Mar 2006
-
If it is good to have one foot in England, it is still better, or at least as good, to have the other one out of it.
--Henry James
Read the rest in Blighty
- Monday 13 Mar 2006
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Ironically, despite the standard introduction to genetics in school textbooks, we have only recently gained insights into the genes underpinning those most diverse of human characteristics: skin and hair colour.
--Jonathan Rees
Read the rest in People with red hair have a variant in just one gene and The “ginger gene” and the scottish
- Saturday 11 Mar 2006
-
You get some papers where the authors haven't done a scrap of work themselves, it's all down to the technicians acknowledged at the back.
--Anon
Read the rest in Did Ian Wilmut really clone Dolly the Sheep? and Scientists dispute credit for cloning Dolly the Sheep
- Funday 10 Mar 2006
-
--Damian Steer
Read the rest in Conan the Barbarian
- Thursday 09 Mar 2006
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If I hadn't seen such riches I could live with being poor.
- Wednesday 08 Mar 2006
-
One of my favourite metaphors about life is the one that compares it to an ever more challenging expedition. According to this metaphor each challenge or task in our life is a mountain that we climb. At its time, each mountain seems the most important and the hardest to conquer, however, when we reach its top we realise that there are so many even higher mountains to climb ahead.
--Marta Sabou
Read the rest in Building Web Service Ontologies
- Tuesday 07 Mar 2006
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For every drug made today, 5,000 other chemicals will have been tried, only 5 of which will be deemed safe for human testing.
--Laurie Pycroft
Read the rest in a few facts regarding animal research, Tipu Aziz interview and Demonstration backs animal lab in Oxford
- Monday 06 Mar 2006
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Every time I jump on a plane I think, “oh no, I'm doing it again”.
--Tony Wheeler
Read the rest in Lonely Planet and Rough Guides discourage casual flying
- Funday 03 Mar 2006
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Before beginning a Hunt, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it.
--Alan Milne
Read the rest in Winnie the Pooh
- Thursday 02 Mar 2006
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Professors are inclined to attribute the intelligence of their children to nature, and the intelligence of their students to nurture.
--Roger Masters
Read the rest in Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human
- Wednesday 01 Mar 2006
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What does SPARQL add? Not much. But what it adds is essential: URIs. By using URIs to identify the data structures it becomes possible to escape from the little closed islands of each database, and query them in a global manner with a unified interface.
--Henry Story
Read the rest in One page introduction to SPARQL, Querying the Semantic Web with SPARQL and A Comparison of RDF Query Languages
- Tuesday 28 Feb 2006
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[We invest] around £500 million a year in a broad range of subjects. The knowledge and expertise gained maintains a technological leading edge, builds a strong economy and improves people's quality of life.
--Anon
Read the rest in About the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
- Monday 27 Feb 2006
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Computing will be one of the defining concepts of the 21st Century, transforming our world - the way we work and play and areas from healthcare to manufacturing to government.
--Anon
Read the rest in Why study computer science at the University of Manchester? and Why is there a decline in Computer Science when the field has never been more exciting?
- Funday 24 Feb 2006
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If something bothers you and you cannot do anything about it, there is no point of stressing over it, so instead, you should just ignore it. Forget your stress and consciously disregard the shoddy state of Greek society, and try to have a good time with what you have. Make lemonade with your lemons, but keep the lemonade entirely for yourself.
--Anon
Read the rest in Je m'en fous / Zamanfou / Ζαμανφου
- Thursday 23 Feb 2006
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Any attempt by a private company to assert its rights over a plant as fundamental to humanity as rice is wholly wrong and completely immoral.
--Michael Ashburner
Read the rest in Fears over rice genome access, The map-based sequence of the rice genome and Rice genome “completed”
- Wednesday 22 Feb 2006
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Sounds familiar?
- Editor war: Emacs versus vi
- Services war: Web services versus REST services
- Arguments are not dissimilar:
- vi fans believe that Emacs is bulky and an operating system in itself
- Emacs fans believe that Emacs is so much more powerful than vi
--Hugo Haas
Read the rest in Reconciling Web Services and REST services and Web Services: hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate and hard to secure
- Tuesday 21 Feb 2006
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One man's semantics is another man's syntax.
--Anon
Read the rest in Syntax vs Semantics and Three notoriously slippery “S” words: syntax, semantics and schema
- Monday 20 Feb 2006
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Law's First Law: The first step in developing a new genetic analysis algorithm is to decide how to make the input data file format different from all pre-existing analysis data file formats.
Law's Second Law: Error messages should never be provided.
corollary: If error messages are provided, they should be utterly cryptic so as to convey as little information as possible to the end user.
Law's Third Law: The number of “unique” identifiers assigned to an individual is never less than the number of Institutions involved in the study... and is frequently many, many more.
--
Read the rest in Law's laws and Thirty different ways to represent a DNA, RNA or Protein sequence
- Funday 17 Feb 02006
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The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
--Anon
Read the rest in the world's slowest computer
- Thursday 16 Feb 2006
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Read it, forget it;
Watch it, remember it;
Do it, understand it.--Anon
Read the rest in Karen Eilbeck: The ABC's of Bioinformatics
- Wednesday 15 Feb 2006
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Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and the instructions afterward.
--Anon
Read the rest in
- Tuesday 14 Feb 2006
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Having apocalyptic breasts that can topple empires is all very well, but why was
--
Read the rest in Phwoar! What a lovely set of genes
- Monday 13 Feb 2006
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As it turned out, many of my colleagues were as confused by biology as I was by Bayesian statistics.
--Mark Yandell
Read the rest in Mark Yandell: Blending Biology and Bioinformatics
- Funday 10 Feb 2006
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It's no surprise that NERC is a four-letter word.
--Anon
Read the rest in Research grants: The nightmare before funding
- Thursday 09 Feb 2006
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I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
--Johnny Cash
Read the rest in Folsom Prison Blues and Walk the line film reviews
- Wednesday 08 Feb 2006
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Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started.
--Richard Hamming
Read the rest in You and Your Research and Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming
- Tuesday 07 Feb 2006
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The potency that makes searches invaluable to citizens, also makes them irresistible to their governments.
--Anon
Read the rest in Googling for integrity, Saint Lawrence of Google and Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index
- Monday 06 Feb 2006
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Personally I hope that if the semantic web delivers one thing it's a respite from this kind of ad-hoc one-off-script data integration which is unfortunately the norm in bioinformatics.
--Chris Mungall
Read the rest in Semantic queries for homologues of yeast proteins with Gene Ontology identifiers (GOIDs)
- Sunday 05 Feb 2006
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I've travelled the world and the seven seas, everybody is looking for something.
--Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart
Read the rest in Sweet Dreams (are made of this) who am I to disagree?
- Funday 03 Feb 2006
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Have you heard the joke about the Physics researchers?
Researchers in Physics have come up with a model that will help them predict which horse will win a given horse race. They hope to use this model to become rich betting on horse races.
The problem is, their model only works for spherical horses travelling in a vacuum.
--Anon
Read the rest in Physics jokes
- Thursday 02 Feb 2006
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Genes in the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) can differ dramatically between people, and the differences among us affect medical events as diverse as tissue transplant rejection, arthritis, asthma and disease resistance. A detailed study of this region in different people will shed light on which genes are most important.
--Anon
Read the rest in Genetic Analysis of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), Chromosome 6 contains the 'holy grail' of immunology, the MHC and Histocompatibility Molecules
- Wednesday 01 Feb 2006
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If you can think and not make thoughts your aim...
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.
--Rudyard Kipling
Read the rest in If— a poem by Rudyard Kipling
- Tuesday 31 Jan 2006
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We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them.
--Anon
Read the rest in MIT Project Oxygen: Pervasive Human-Centred Computing
- Monday 30 Jan 2006
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All bubbles burst, or the wave moves on, but genomes aren't going to go away. Analysing them is going to be a challenge for decades to come.
--Terri Attwood
Read the rest in Meet the scientists: Bioinformatician
- Sunday 29 Jan 2006
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Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!
--Tim Berners-Lee
Read the rest in Give yourself a URI
- Saturday 28 Jan 2006
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Each Solid Rocket Booster ejects 400 tons of exhaust gases, leaving the rocket at about 3600 metres per second, in 2 minutes.
--Tony Hull
Read the rest in Rocket Science for Secondary and High School students and Seven myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster
- Funday 27 Jan 2006
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I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incesssant barking.
--Anon
Read the rest in Lost in the geekosphere
- Thursday 26 Jan 2006
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Innovation is our history and our future.
- The ARPANET, forerunner of todays internet
- the first router
- the first person-to-person network email
- the @ sign icon for the digital age
all were invented here at BBN
--Anon
Read the rest in BBN archive from 2003, A Brief History of BBN and H@ppy Birthday to you: email celebrates 30th birthday
- Wednesday 25 Jan 2006
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Most people probably think DARPA's role was to meet the needs of the army, navy and air force, but nothing could be further from the truth. The armed forces had their own labs and programmes to do that. DARPA spun out ideas that the forces said they didn't want, or hadn't even thought of.
--Anon
Read the rest in DARPA dreaming
- Tuesday 24 Jan 2006
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Wait for the midnight hour, baby.
--Wilson Pickett
Read the rest in Wilson Pickett Obituary and The Commitments
- Monday 23 Jan 2006
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I see the semantic web as a potential mechanism to allow me to spend more time contemplating interesting scientific hypotheses, by sparing the time and effort I currently must expend on munging and integrating the various datasets that interest me.
--Frank Gibbons
Read the rest in read the rest in HCLSIG Introductions: Frank Gibbons
- Funday 20th January
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High energy demands on male bats prevent them from generating both large genitals and large brains. Male bats with larger testicles but smaller brains stand a greater chance of having offspring than their smaller testicled, bigger brained rivals.
--Paul Lewis
Read the rest in The bigger the testicles, the smaller the brain and Mating system and brain size in bats
- Thursday 19 Jan 2006
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The sequence information from the Human Genome Project is like an alphabet. The next step is to figure out the syntax and the grammar.
--Rick Young
Read the rest in Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Distinguished Lecture Series 2006
- Wednesday 18th January
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It is possibly the biggest single (acknowledged) scientific RDBMS database in Europe, if not the world.
--Martin Widlake
Read the rest in Around the World in 800 Billion Bases, 22 terabytes and one billion records and Genomics: from Terabytes to Petabytes
- Tuesday 17 Jan 2006
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[Wheat] has six copies of each gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six times as much as maize and five times as much as people.
--Anon
Read the rest in The story of wheat: man's staple food and polyploidy
- Monday 16 Jan 2006
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Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.
--Paul Graham
Read the rest in Good Procrastination
- Saturday 14 Jan 2006
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Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars.
--Frank Sinatra
Read the rest in Fly Me to the Moon and Virgin Galactic
- Funday 13 Jan 2006
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“Semantic Web” specifications ... seem at times to live in the world of metaphysics rather than information technology.
--Michael Kay
Read the rest in XML Five Years On: A Review of the Achievements So Far and the Challenges Ahead
- Thursday 12 Jan 2006
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I did used to be addicted to computer programming... However, I now view programming as a vice, so I don't allow myself to do it.
--Richard Dawkins
Read the rest in Richard Dawkins profile and Richard Dawkins: The Root of All Evil?
- Wednesday 11 Jan 2006
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Although many grandiose schemes for the “integration” of biological databases have been proposed over the years, none have been practical to the point of implementation.
--Michael Ashburner
Read the rest in Ontologies for biologists - A community model for the annotation of genomic data and Biological Database Integration
- Tuesday 10 Jan 2006
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The sequencing of the human genome is certainly one of the most significant events on a long historical timescale that has happened in the past five years.
--Martin Rees
Read the rest in What have been the defining events of the “noughties” so far (2000-2005)?
- Monday 09 Jan 2006
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We're not fighting guerrillas taking pot shots here. This is a sophisticated army with astonishing weapons. And each time we develop something new, they develop a defence for it.
--Richard James
Read the rest in interview with Richard James, biological warfare expert and War on terror could cost over $2 trillion
- Saturday 07 Jan 2006
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I'm doing this for my own daughter, who I hope will grow up in a world where culture is free, not proprietary, where control of knowledge is in the hands of people everywhere, with basic works they can adopt, modify, and share freely without asking permission from anyone.
--Jimmy Wales
Read the rest in A personal appeal for donations from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
- Friday 06 Jan 2006
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[E = mc2 means that...] four million tonnes of the Sun literally vanishes every second, only to reappear in the form of sunshine - energy that lights up our lives.
--Simon Singh
Read the rest in John Keats claimed physics destroyed beauty. Keats was being a prat and Relativity for the Layman
- Thursday 05 Jan 2006
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A number of widely varying perceptions of computing are...
- One of the most significant advances of the 20th century
- Of vital importance to the future ecomonic prosperity of the UK [and any country]
- The agent of chaos when projects fail
- Now in nearly 60% of households
- Not the subject I want to study at university
--Anon
Read the rest in Perceptions of Computing and Grand Challenges in Computing: Education
- Wednesday 04 Jan 2006
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The Institute's successful Cancer Genome Project will focus on three cancer types - breast, lung and kidney - to try to identify the majority of mutations involved in disease development.
--Anon
Read the rest in Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute awards itself £340 million to tackle cancer, malaria and diabetes
- Tuesday 03 Jan 2006
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We have discovered a treasure trove of new and important genes in Aspergillus .
--Arnab Pain
Read the rest in Ubiquitous, essential but deadly: Genome sequence of fungus reveals its weapons and Genomic sequence of the pathogenic and allergenic filamentous fungus Aspergillus fumigatus