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Everything is Almost Obvious
I am a great fan of Pulp Fiction, and one my favorite characters is Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel), the gentleman who “solves problems”. In the movie, Mr. Wolf is called to help out two hitmen (John Travolta and Samuel Jackson) who accidentally killed a minor character in their car. The ...
Adam Pah awarded PhD
On Thursday, May 23th Adam Pah successfully defended his PhD thesis before his committee. During his time at the lab he worked on using a global metabolic network to predict metabolite conservation on individual organisms. He also created some powerful data visualization tools.
Workshop organization 101.
Last March I was program chair for CompleNet2013 after attending as a speaker the previous year. I thought that my experience might help others understand what are the different organization roles, and also how the whole process looks like behind the scenes.
Bravely holding ground against the five paragraph essay
Ideas on why the structure we learned in middle school might not be the best option for blogging —Irmak
How we do time and task management
Traditionally scientists have managed their time using paper based tools including lab notebooks and agendas. Today we have a wider variety of offline and online tools available to organize ourselves. Here I cover how various members of the lab do their time and task management. —Arnau
A framework to understand cellular processes
Our new paper “Use of a global metabolic network to predict organismal metabolic networks” has been published in Scientific Reports. In this work we define a new framework, the global network, to use in analyzing cellular processes. The global framework springs from a concept put forth by Alfred Whitehead in ...
Pencil Lead, Shooting Stars, and Metabolism
Pencil lead is not lead, shooting-stars are not stars, proteome is part of the metabolome, DNA is also an enzyme. -Meilin
Lab blogging Part III - I was not joking about five paragraphs
Yesterday I wrote that I think we should keep our blog posts to five paragraphs. The five paragraph format is frequently derided. Today I explain why I advocate for it. — David Mertens
Lab blogging Part II - One audience, five paragraphs
One of the points of confusion for the lab blog is our audience. To whom shall we write? How sophisticated should our entries be? I believe that we should consider our own lab as our audience, and we should keep things simple. — David Mertens
Lab blogging Part I - We don't blog enough
One of my roles in the lab has been to encourage the members of the lab to write entries to the lab blog. How has that gone, you ask? In this first in a short series of blog posts, I simply want to state the obvious. We don’t write often enough for our own good. — David Mertens
Extraterrestrial Riches
A couple months ago I stumbled upon the website for a start-up company called Planetary Resources. On their site, they have a well-produced video explaining their goal of mining near-earth asteroids and bringing the resources back to earth.
A stress free career of course
As I get older I keep encountering the great discrepancy between theory/concept and reality in application. This comes to a head for me right now as I approach the twilight years of my graduate school career and have to answer people (read, strangers) as to what my career aspirations are. ...
Can a physicist fix a cell?
For those of you who haven’t read the article “Can a biologist fix a radio?” allow me to summarize: physicists and engineers are awesome, biologists are idiots.
Biologists hate math and other citation database stories
The conclusions reached by a study published in a recent issue of PNAS may not be entirely trustworthy. Well, maybe I need to be more specific so as to narrow it down to just one study. The paper I’m referring to is "Heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists" ...
The astonishing power of group pressure
I recently (finally!) found a short video showing one the “classical” experiments performed by the social psychologist Solomon Asch. If this name does not ring any bell, please take two minutes of your precious time and watch this Youtube video: I promise you will not regret. Pretty funny, isn’t it? ...
Rediscovery of knowledge: Pythagoras’ theorem, Stigler’s law and others
Pythagoras’ theorem is one of the most ancient, well known and studied mathematical theorems. It has a history longer than three thousand years as well as more than three hundred proofs. Although its first detailed description is in Euclid’s Elements, people often attribute its discovery to Pythagoras and named it ...
Rotten Tomatoes vs Metacritic
Two men enter, one man leaves In my younger and more vulnerable years my advisor gave me some advice I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like using statistics,” he told me, “just remember the assumptions you make.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve ...