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Andrew Lang › Comments
He Should Be Fired - http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2009...
Andrew Lang liked this
My first ever lesson I taught as a TA was a disaster, it humbled me, a good thing.
- Andrew Lang
Talk:Black hole - Conservapedia - http://www.conservapedia.com/Talk:Bl...
Hilarious and sad (a few brain cells might die after reading the discussion)
- Rajarshi Guha
from Bookmarklet
Have you read the article itself? It's terrible. I'd correct it, but they'd revert it I'm sure. Only makes me sad. http://www.conservapedia.com/Black_h...
- Andrew Lang
Oh well, last one out of the lab turn the lights off...http://www.newscientist.com/blogs...
Peter Miller, Jo Badge, Duncan Hull and 2 other people liked this
the lights will go out automatically due to having no money to pay the bills
- Frank
Aw crap.
- Bill Hooker
"UK is spending less on research today than in 1986, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, when CASE was first launched as Save British Science (SBS)."
- Andrew Lang
Ouch!
- Kubke
To put this in context for people overseas this is somewhere between 2 and 10% of the total UK research spend depending on what pot it is coming out of. Probably looking at hundreds to thousands of job losses at academic level and closure of either many departments or a few universities.
- Cameron Neylon
that is AWFUL. any chance it's just grandstanding?
- D0r0th34
Dorothea- no, not really. Unless it's high end, immediate impact get-it-on-the-news stuff, governemtn doesn't get science. And scientists have been flat out told to 'demonstrate impact'
- Pete, Enabling Force
Maybe we could pawn our share of the LHC?
- AJCann
If it were grandstanding it would be more than a single line in a 200 page document unfortunately.
- Cameron Neylon
Damn!
- Björn Brembs
"like" as in don't like
- Duncan Hull
Wow. That's quite a blow. Maybe you should all leave the country. Hard to believe that happened in the UK of all places. Means it could happen to any of us.
- Heather
Well I think there will be large numbers of ex-pat scientists looking at options in China, Australia, US tonight. Been significant incoming population over last ten years but that might start to reverse.
- Cameron Neylon
I guess I won't be moving back any time soon :-(
- Sarah Kendrew
Most Ugly & Useless Infographic Competition: The Winners - http://infosthetics.com/archive...
Rajarshi Guha and Jean-Claude Bradley liked this
To me, this shows a need for quantitative literacy across the disciplines.
- Andrew Lang
I have some ugly chem data to highlight after my class is over...
- Jean-Claude Bradley
UT educator pushed technology as teaching tool - http://www.statesman.com/news...
Jean-Claude Bradley and Peter Miller liked this
Sad news on the passing of Leslie Jarmon - UT educator and SL pioneer. She was the editor for my journal of virtual worlds paper and she did a fantastic job.
- Andrew Lang
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1980 30-year prediction contest: entries finally un-sealed. The Winner: http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2009...
Andrew Lang liked this
"Only a tiny minority chose something bad, typically, "thermonuclear war; I'll be dead.""
- Andrew Lang
It wasn’t supposed to be this way… - http://blog.openwetware.org/science...
Bill Anderson, Jan Wessnitzer, Duncan Hull and 12 other people liked this
Ah - found a clearer statement from Met Office on data release: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corpora...
- Cameron Neylon
I must admit that until 48 hours ago, I never realized the Met Office data was secret. I'd always assumed it would be in the public domain. Silly me.
- AJCann
You basically have to send them an email saying what you want and what you're using it for. If you are an appropriate accedited researcher you can get access to the thing you want, but not distribute it I think. Its a classic demonstration of public domain benefits in some ways.
- Cameron Neylon
blimey - I never knew that met office data wasn't public record. Is the idea that Ordinance Survey introduced deliberate small mistakes into their map to protect their copyright? Or is that an urban myth. Depressing is about right.
- Jo Badge
Brilliant post Cameron.
- Andrew Lang
*applause*
- Bill Hooker
I've heard from people who do mapping type stuff that the OS errors are real. Can't say I've ever checked myself though.
- Cameron Neylon
in the US NOAA NWS data is open, but there's a cost recovery model for some of the historic data sets. I think the art around these parts is to combine NWS stuff with Navy stuff and stuff from the literature, but that's just my impression.
- Christina Pikas
My understanding was that most of it was provided at cost - but a lot is in formats that are not terribly useable or useful so they charge for transfer to media and some reformatting. Bottom line is that most of it is government data and therefore in the public domain by definition.
- Cameron Neylon
Some interesting comments on the blog itself - first time I've had that many comments in ages!
- Cameron Neylon
A Presentation to Students at Drexel University Via Webex and Skype - http://www.chemspider.com/blog...
Alexey, Peter Miller, Graham Steel and 3 other people liked this
It was an inspiring talk Tony - thanks for taking the time. In all the talks we had at U of Ottawa 20 years ago I don't think we could have guessed that this what would be happening to chemical information today.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I like the way you can click on different parts of the InChIKey and have it do searches automatically - I didn't know that before - very cool.
- Andrew Lang
JC...if you'd asked me almost 20 years ago whether I'd be working on a project like ChemSpider the answer would be a big no. I certainly wouldn't have envisaged the progress that we have seen in computer-based chemistry....the internet wasn't even a term we had heard back there in Ottawa!
- Antony Williams
yes we actually physically went to the library back then :)
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Chromoscope - http://www.chromoscope.net/
JoeCamel, Daniel Mietchen and Matthew Todd liked this
Chromoscope is amazing - view the Milky Way at many different wavelengths.
- Michael Nielsen
Cool. I think it is only based on 6 wavelengths and then does a weighted average in between.
- Andrew Lang
Why Doesn’t Size Matter…for The Brain? - http://www.scientificblogging.com/mark_ch...
Jean-Claude Bradley, Björn Brembs and Steve Koch liked this
"So, here’s a plan. I would like to hear your hypotheses for why brains increase so quickly with body mass (namely as the 3/4 power). I will let you know if the idea is new, and I will see if I can give your idea a good thrashing. What’s at stake here is our very framework for conceptualizing what the brain is. Perhaps you can say why it is a computer, and that greater body size brings in certain subtle computational demands that explain why brain volume should increase as it does with body mass. Or, more exciting, perhaps you can propose an altogether novel framework for thinking about the brain, one that makes the enigmatic “size matters” issue totally obvious."
- Daniel Mietchen
from Bookmarklet
Have yet to go through the comments but will probably join the discussion, as I am collecting interesting tidbits to put into http://en.citizendium.org/wiki... .
- Daniel Mietchen
First thought is that this might be the fractal dimension of the nervous system and that brain growth is just a response to nervous system growth.
- Andrew Lang
I'm going to do a round of looking at some of the Science Social Networking sites again. Is anyone active on ResearchGate, Epernicus etc. and interested in testing functionality?
Jack H. Pincus, Dan Hagon, Elizabeth Brown and 23 other people liked this
I'm interested in joining the testing. Need to agree on criteria for comparison before starting, though.
- Daniel Mietchen
I'm willing to keep an open mind but so far FF surpasses these in terms of networking and ease of use. But if you want to experiment I have accounts in many of these and I would be willing to try.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I'm really just looking to make sure that things haven't moved on and improved significantly, particularly in the light of the NIH projects.
- Cameron Neylon
I tend to migrate to social networking sites based on "pull" - virtually the only time I go on LinkedIn or Facebook is when I get an email alert to something relevant to my interests. I would assume that if there was anything really cool going on in these new sites I would get these alerts generated by actions by you and my other friends.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
BTW Cameron - that is one of the issues I'm finding with Wave - I tend not to check it because I don't get alerts that there are updates - is there a way to get an email alert for Wave updates?
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Yes, there is an email alerter. I'll add you and it to Wave...
- Cameron Neylon
Agreed to the general point though - if there isn't a pull, I'm not going there really. And I think that is a big issue with Wave - people just aren't checking in.
- Cameron Neylon
@Jean-Claude I don't think there's currently a way of doing this with the current interface without adding a robot but I saw there's a robot on the Haskell public wave which has similar support http://wave-xmpp.appspot.com/public...
- Dan Hagon
I'd be interested in testing (I recently started looking over Epernicus for an article on NGS). Where is the email alerter for Google Wave? Currently, I'm using Waveboard (Mac), which alerts you when there's activity. However, it needs to be running in order to do so.
- Walter Jessen
Just added you to a Wave with the email notifier Walter...
- Cameron Neylon
New SNS from American Institute of Physics, got email invite today: http://www.aipuniphy.org/
- Andrew Lang
I have accounts on Epernicus, SciLink, Laboratree, and maybe could consider BenchFly a social networking site too, but like JC, I don't go to any sites besides FF and Twitter (and those are typically through 3rd-party apps), not even Facebook or LinkedIn, unless I get some alert. But I would be happy to see if anything's changed in those science-oriented sites I mentioned
- Shirley Wu
from twhirl
I do get alerts that new people have joined the organic chemistry group in Research Gate but there is no discussion and my questions have not been answered there by anyone so not much motivation to check in.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I have accounts at NN, Epernicus, BioCrowd and SciLink. I have begged for account deletion at the latter for months, to no avail and have not visited most of the others for as long as I can recall. So: active - no, interested - no. It's all FF/Twitter for me.
- Neil Saunders
It's alright - this is a benefit of the doubt exercise - making sure that things haven't changed or that we've missed something. My brief look around yesterday suggested that nothing much has but I wanted to make sure I'm not missing something.
- Cameron Neylon
What about the criteria for comparison other than some "pull" functionality (which they all seem to have, to different extents)? Does usability boil down to feed import/ export and (hierarchically) threaded conversations ordered by novelty and importance, as at FF?
- Daniel Mietchen
When considering the usefulness of the individual platforms, perhaps discipline-specific ones should also be on the list? Besides http://polymathprojects.org/ (maths), these would include, for instance, http://openanthcoop.ning.com/ (anthropology), http://www.apecs.is/ (polar research), or this very life science group at http://friendfeed.com/the-lif....
- Daniel Mietchen
It would be worth doing a compare and contrast - also things like Math Overflow and even some of the chemistry blogs act more like community sites. Seems particularly apposite with respect to Pawel's blog post yesterday about the idea to set up a next generation sequencing community site.
- Cameron Neylon
I have a ResearchGate account but don't actively use it. I currently do some FriendFeed, Nature Network (where my blog is hosted) and Google Wave, but mostly Twitter.
- Martin Fenner
The last issue (November 23) of the German computer magazine c't has an article on social networking for scientists. They like ResearchGate and Mendeley, but also include ResearcherID, Scholarz (a German network), Nature Network, SciLink and Scientist Solutions: http://www.heise.de/ct...
- Martin Fenner
That c't article (which shall come out in some OA fashion soon) may serve as guidance but I found the choice of networks therein rather arbitrary, and the comparison between sites was done on a more general level rather than on the basis of specific criteria.
- Daniel Mietchen
The article makes two obvious omissions: a) no mention of CiteULike (or Connotea), b) no mention of the recent $12 Mio social networking NIH grant to U of Florida/Cornell University. There are some more things in it I don't like, so I wrote a letter to c't magazine.
- Martin Fenner
Cameron, what criteria were you thinking of using?
- Mr. Gunn
Key questions: a) What is the immediate impression on signing up? Is there a pull for people to come back? b) What functionality is being offered? Is it immediately available? How dependent is it on having a network in place? c) Funding model and stability d) User numbers, ideally active users and accounts, but whether we can get those is another question. Those aren't very objective criteria and they are built on my biases but nonetheless
- Cameron Neylon
Sorry if this is slightly tangential to the discussion, but I was imagining a new kind of social network for publication of research results here: http://virtualchrisleonard.co.uk/blog...
- Chris Leonard
Chris - when you talk about "credit" are you expecting tenure and promotion committees to count it or do you have some other system in mind? If you set something up I have content that might be suitable to play with. As for citability - in our last few papers we have used blog posts and wiki pages as references and have not had any problems with that - so I think the system is quite flexible and can accommodate the types of activities you are proposing.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I think Chris means system credit or karma. The idea as I understand it is somewhere between Friendfeed and Stack Overflow
- Cameron Neylon
Thanks Cameron, yes, that's what I meant by 'credit' - however, by quantifying and metricising that credit, there is a possibility that one day tenure and promotion committees may want to use it as another measure of a scientists influence in a field. Apologies to Cameron for hijacking his thread. There is another discussion on this blog post here: http://friendfeed.com/chrisle...
- Chris Leonard
That's fine, it's not my thread, it the communities thread :-) Pointers are good, they link up the information.
- Cameron Neylon
Blog postings to replace (journal) papers and (in-depth) peer review a luxury that can only be acquired if paid for and to be replaced by blog comments instead? Weakening both readability and certification? That does not sound like a healthy idea.
- Wobbler
Wobbler: why should blogs lack any aspect of peer review? the standard of any publication depends on how editorial powers are used
- Mike Chelen
...and we already pay for peer review. It just isn't a cost transferred as actual cash.
- Cameron Neylon
But blogs do not have any editorial powers? What advantage do blog postings have over (journal) papers? They lack format = lack of consistency = lack of efficiency = lack of scalability. Are you seriously suggesting that blogging/blog posts have the potential to replace journal publishing/ (journal) papers as the primary scholarly communication model/channel? Upgrading the traditional...
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- Wobbler
@Cameron: that's true, but now peer review is at least mandatory for the primary scholarly communication model i.e. scholarly publishing. Replacing that with something else and having peer review only on request/payment is a very different story.
- Wobbler
Wobbler - there is a difference between requiring the peer review to be performed before making some information public and allowing it to take place after that. I do not see why the latter option would generally fare worse than the former. In fact, we already practice it here at FF, with numbers of likes and comments roughly indicating the popularity of a topic, while the quality has to be sought in the individual comments (and of course the source item that started the thread).
- Daniel Mietchen
... it isn't a cost transferred BY YOU as actual cash. Yet. It should be, in my not-terribly-humble opinion, however, because the market disconnect in the current system has proven ridiculously unsustainable. Wobbler, some of my blog posts have had more measurable impact than anything I've ever written. Sure, it's a lightning-strike sort of thing, and most of my blog posts languish in...
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- D0r0th34
@Daniel: I'm not talking about post-"publication" peer review. That's still different from random blog commentary on blog posts. There's no evidence that what we're doing here isn't just a "niche" thing that works well because we're a niche. There's certainly no consistency in quality in our blog postings (well, at least not in mine :p ). Not to mention a lack of consistency in...
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- Wobbler
@D0r0th34: No, we should absolutely not ignore lighting strikes. But we should see them as lightning strikes and consider them to be an exception more than a rule and focus our attention on something that provides that level of quality more as a rule than an exception. Blogs as a complement to (journal) papers is great. But once you start to see it as a primary source, a replacement for...
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- Wobbler
We don't know about our OA bets. As for slow-and-steady, a well-run blog isn't? Lightning strikes aside, building a reputation and a readership is hardly an immediate thing.
- D0r0th34
@D0r0th34: That's one more reason why blogging as the primary scholarly communication model is a broken idea. "Popularity" and "building a readership" will be important for blogs (and other post publication peer review models) to be visible/significant. But aren't we going after journals for using their JIF to attract peeps to read their stuff? How is "blog (poster) popularity" to get a...
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- Wobbler
I think the most important property of non peer-reviewed scientific communication is that the content be easily indexed and searchable. Relying on comments and rankings can be very misleading indicators for utility in long tail systems. For example we get over 100 searches a day for our solubility data via Google and Wikipedia but we have never had a comment or any type of feedback from the people who searched for and found information.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Shrug. System-gaming goes on everywhere; there are a number of studies of citation-impact gaming, if you look. Also, why is connectivity a bad thing? We are talking about scholarly *communication* after all, right? Restricting "what counts" only to what goes through the baroque serials-publishing process is IMO an extraordinarily blinkered and limiting view of how knowledge really advances. Sure, it's not easy to come up with more inclusive views -- but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
- D0r0th34
The problem is that I'm not sure we can talk about "gaming the system" rather than "an intrinsic part of the system that everybody will be forced to play or greatly risk invisibility" when it comes to blogs and other models relying on postpublication "peer review". PLoS ONE is, intentionally or not, already trying to stake their claim on an as large a readership/community as possible....
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- Wobbler
@D0r0th34: And connectivity can be unfair if your serious/scientific works are getting more attention than others simply because you've managed to draw a bigger crowd through non serious/scientific stuff. On a slightly more personal note: for someone who occasionally complains about the (lack of) readability of (journal) articles, I had expected that you, of all people, would appreciate...
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- Wobbler
I have to say reading down this I am unsure of whether the complaints apply to blogs or journal articles. Consistent structure and copy editing would be nice but it is rare for both blogs and journal articles. Quality is an issue across the board. Going back to peer review - it's only mandatory for the author, refusal rates for reviewers are going through the roof and unless we acknowledge that cost the system will collapse sometime soon.
- Cameron Neylon
@Cameron: Consistent structure and copy editing are rare for journal articles? They are? Not entirely sure about copyediting, but surely most, if not all, journal papers have a recognizable structure? And I don't think they're as rare or rarer than for blog postings. I also think the issue is with peer review, and not with the (journal) paper (format). As such, we should find ways to...
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- Wobbler
Of my recent papers, only one received close copy editing by anyone but me. And that was the Nature piece for which to be honest I would have been happier if the editor had got a co-credit. And formats are all over the place - maybe consistent for a single journal but that's not use to me. The costs of both peer review and publication are so high we need to find a way to lower them -...
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- Cameron Neylon
@Cameron: I'm not sure that's a convincing enough argument for me. Maybe your other papers were written clearly enough already? You're a prolific blogger/writer, Cameron. It's not weird to assume that your ability to communicate concepts clearly is higher than the average scholar. Maybe high enough to not warrant copyediting (in a lot of journals)? My impression of journals is that...
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- Wobbler
Well others can pitch in but perhaps a different anecdote. Until I started getting into arguments with Maxine Clarke I didn't even realise that journals might do copy editing. Nature and similar are very different beasts to the average of course.
- Cameron Neylon
So, generally speaking, only the high profile/impact journals provide copyediting services? Hmm, that is definitely not what I expected. If you had to estimate the % of journals that provide copyediting services, what % would that be? The (top) 10% of all journals?
- Wobbler
I have the same experience as Cameron - the only time my manuscript was copyedited was when I published in Nature
- Jean-Claude Bradley
So far as I'm aware, no-one here wants to replace peer-reviewed journals entirely by blogs. Yet that seems to be what you're arguing against, Wobbler. For some functions, journals are a lot better than blogs. But for other functions, blogs are a lot better than journals. At the least, I really can't imagine how, say, DHJ Polymath or Galaxy Zoo or the Open Dinosaur Project or [fill in...
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- Michael Nielsen
Most of this is as a response to an FF comment by Chris Leonard on the 23th of November in this thread, who is arguing for exactly that.
- Wobbler
Cameron, any progress on the roundup? Is there any information I can provide from Mendeley?
- Mr. Gunn
Right - getting there slowly! Have set up a wiki page (ignore the state of the rest of the site I am working on it!) at http://wiki.cameronneylon.net/index... You should be able to login with openids, any problem give me a yell. I would suggest a week by week schedule to dive into and try and use a specific site, give it a good shot and then report as we go. I...
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- Cameron Neylon
Cameron, what do you mean by "stability" - things like a service being bought/shut down vs. server outages? What about one week to agree on parameters and sites to check? I added data portability.
- Daniel Mietchen
I was thinking more of medium to long term financial stability - but technical stability is a good criterion in terms of functionality. Data portability is a good point!
- Cameron Neylon
Cameron, I spoke with Drew Endy, Bill Flanagan, and a couple other PIs that use OpenWetWare (Maureen, Pam) last week about the future of OWW. There are two major issues (a) funding and (b) overhauling the platform. I think funding will work out, if we can figure out what is the best way to do (b). Bill and Drew have some good ideas at this point, but in my gut I think we're still not...
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- Steve Koch
I guess my easy question for everyone who's familiar with OWW: Do you think with the resources we have (one full-time excellent lead developer) we can transform OWW into a killer openscience resource for many more people going forward? One thought that keeps coming to me is that something could be (needs to be) done to tap into the energy of the user base. I.e., obsessed students who...
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- Steve Koch
Another thing that keeps coming into my head since the conference call last week: FriendFeed is quite possibly very similar to what many people need for OpenScience. As far as science goes, we generate information from all kinds of different sources (Machine-specific data; gel photos; microsoft word; evernote; scratch paper; blogging; etc.). This needs to be aggregated and shared in a...
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- Steve Koch
Oh, and to clarify a bit: I don't want to replace FriendFeed with OWW. I want to use the FriendFeed model as a starting point for the new OWW. As an OpenScienceAggregator / Networking tool. As others have pointed out, much of the value of friendfeed is that it's not limited to scientists generating data.
- Steve Koch
Steve, that's a great way of asking the question. I'd go one step further and say how can we make it the framework in which we can integrate all the other things we do on other services. It's never going to be a no-brainer to move from what you use to something else - there is always the simple problem of the activation barrier to change - its a question of the balance. But my guess is...
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- Cameron Neylon
Cameron, I agree with you exactly: I don't want people to switch, and indeed I want to think "one level above." Do you think there's a real possibility for doing that?
- Steve Koch
If we could coordinate a series of activities and get proper funding then yes. Quite a lot of interest in the pieces of this (including the grant I'm currently rushing to finish), Chris's ideas further up this thread, OWW obviously, Mendeley/Citeulike/Zotero. But coordination is the hard bit - and getting agreement that its what enough of us want. Do I think we have a clear idea of what...
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- Cameron Neylon
Should we include some discipline-specific ones or are we going for general-purpose only?
- Daniel Mietchen
Physicist Max Planck on how the truth will out (Die Naturwissenschaften) - http://qotd.me/q2009-1...
Andrew Lang liked this
#qotd "New scientific truth usually becomes accepted, not because opponents become convinced, but because opponents die, and because the rising generation is familiar with the new truth at the outset. "
- Duncan Hull
Interesting phrase "new truth."
- Andrew Lang
@Andy I hadn't noticed that. It is translated from German, so maybe something has been lost (or gained) in translation?
- Duncan Hull
Stolen e-mails show no conspiracy; better support needed for climate researchers. Nature Editorial (free online) http://www.nature.com/nature...
Mr. Gunn, Joe Dunckley, Björn Brembs and 3 other people liked this
Language was a little strong for me "...climate-change-denialist fringe..." not so (http://tr.im/Gw5p). Seems based on ideology as is somewhat condescending, e.g. "This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill." The real solution is doing this research in the open.
- Andrew Lang
Also felt that the "actions more important than words" argument around preventing the IPCC report referring to those two papers is a little disingenuous. Who stopped the block happening? Nor does this address the fact that it isn't just what did happen but what is perceived to have happened as far as the media/public are concerned that is important. Substance and perception are both...
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- Cameron Neylon
Open Access In Medicine - http://www.slideshare.net/mfenner...
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Björn Brembs, Jean-Claude Bradley, Graham Steel and Peter Miller liked this
A presentation given in my department today.
- Martin Fenner
It is mostly in English. Is this normal?
- Andrew Lang
I make all my slides in English. But I gave the presentation in German.
- Martin Fenner
from iPhone
Put all scientists in jail! - http://bjoern.brembs.net/news...
Jan Wessnitzer, Paul Dobson, Duncan Hull and 5 other people liked this
You think 'Open Access' means changing the way we do science? You think "Open Notebook Science" is the ultimate way to do modern science? Let me show you some people who want to *really* change the way we do science.
- Björn Brembs
At all costs do not tell this group about ONS, lest they actually start supporting it. The last thing Open Anything needs is to be associated with these double-barreled douchebags.
- Bill Hooker
oh boy - well that kind of writing is automatically self-destructing anyway
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I already know one person who thinks we need to get behind these guys and 'clean up' science. I told him exactly what Bill wrote - we want to change the way science is done, but not into what they want!
- Björn Brembs
In case some people missed it this is from the Discovery Institute
- Jean-Claude Bradley
How sad.
- Andrew Lang
Chiral Dice - http://intermolecular.wordpress.com/2009...
Jean-Claude Bradley, Dan Hagon, Andrew Lang and Cameron Neylon liked this
There are 30 different ways to number a die. By stereoisomer do you mean a pair of opposite sides have switched numbers whilst all the other sides are the same?
- Andrew Lang
No, opposite sides have to add up to 7. Stereoisomer here means different spatial arrangements of spots on the faces or arrangements of the faces themselves. Same connectivity, different in space.
- Matthew Todd
Thanks Matt - good problem.
- Andrew Lang
A brief survey of R web interfaces - http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2009...
Marcos de Carvalho, Anna Croft, Daniel Mietchen and 3 other people liked this
Qian at Indiana wrote a little service that does linear regression for JC and I.
- Andrew Lang
@Andrew, do you have a link?
- Rajarshi Guha
@Rajarshi, just sent you his email instructions.
- Andrew Lang
thanks
- Rajarshi Guha
The Fine-tuned principle in chemistry « Henry Rzepa - http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa...
Egon Willighagen, Rajarshi Guha, Andrew Lang and Jean-Claude Bradley liked this
Rzepa applies the anthropic principle to amide bond rotation. [Note to self - how do dipoles help explain the Me inequivalence of dimethylformamide?]
- Matthew Todd
from Bookmarklet
It is interesting that we sometimes see rotamers for our Ugi products in the H NMR spectra - an example 173G containing and alkyne bond http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp173
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Couldn't you change the parameters in the model he mentions to see what chemistry would be like in a 'different' universe? I think that would be very interesting.
- Andrew Lang
Space ships powered by dark matter or baby black holes could enable reaching Andromeda in a human lifetime - fun little article http://www.newscientist.com/article...
Andrew Lang liked this
The piece mentions Bussard's ramjets which is much more sensible than using dark matter or black holes. Reminds me of the Elite-type fuel scoops on Stargate Universe. :)
- Andrew Lang
Are you talking about when the SGU ship goes inside a star to get fuel?
- Jean-Claude Bradley
yep - lot of fuel in stars.
- Andrew Lang
Scientific American: Splitting Time from Space--New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime: Was Newton right ... http://www.pheedcontent.com/click...
Andrew Lang, Dan Hagon, Jean-Claude Bradley and Mickey Schafer liked this
Interesting idea.
- Andrew Lang
'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009 - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Jan Aerts, Rajarshi Guha, Kubke and 2 other people liked this
wow - amazing talk on knowing the universe is flat, civilizations evolving in 50 billion years will see no evidence of the Big Bang, the total energy of the universe is zero and the mass inside of protons is in the voids
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Yes, Krauss gave a talk at Sydney last year, and I was surprised by that idea that future civilisations will have no decent evidence of the Big Bang.
- Matthew Todd
I didn't know he was so funny.
- Andrew Lang
Mat well to be more precise: they won't have any evidence using the techniques we've been using for a few hundred years at most. Lots of people are famous for claiming that things are impossible only to be proved wrong by using methods previously unimaginable. Still this doesn't make the talk any less powerful.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Andy- yes he had some good material - a few Bush jokes never hurt
- Jean-Claude Bradley
IMHO, it is one of the best presentations on YouTube
- Björn Brembs
Benitez backs placenta treatment - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2...
Does this make any sense?
- Andrew Lang
not to me
- Jean-Claude Bradley
blathering nonsense based on the report but you know that's what the world works on these days.
- Cameron Neylon
Abstruse Goose » Landscape (Most Scientific Research is just like this) - http://abstrusegoose.com/211
Chris Lasher, Dan Hagon, Daniel Mietchen and 2 other people liked this
Sound familiar?
- Duncan Hull
from Bookmarklet
My office mate in graduate school was doing his PhD in Algebraic Geometry whereas mine was in Quantum Field Theory (math version). One day we looked for fun to see if there was anything the fields had in common and we found a paper: "Quantum Field Theories on an Algebraic Curve." So I think in reality there is a continuum but it is true that two people far enough apart can have trouble talking to each other - especially if they're mathematicians who usually have trouble talking to people anyway. :)
- Andrew Lang
@Andrew was your office mate in the judean peoples front or the people's front of judea? http://video.google.com/videose...
- Duncan Hull
@Duncan. Funny because its true. :)
- Andrew Lang
ANN: Chemical Structure Resolver with TwirlyMol - Easily add molecules to your webpage - http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2009...
Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, Andrew Lang and Rajarshi Guha liked this
Pretty nice - especially, because, there is no Java start up involved!
- Rajarshi Guha
Noel, that's awesome!
- Andrew Lang
Actually, I would say the main advantage is that absolutely no technical ability is required. In contrast, adding a Jmol applet of benzene to your website is not trivial.
- Noel O'Boyle
@Noel, oh definitely!
- Rajarshi Guha
Needless to say, best viewed with anything but IE (very sluggish).
- Noel O'Boyle
Works flawlessly in Chrome under linux which is more than I can say for a lot of these widgets...
- Cameron Neylon
Phew! But the real corner case is actually IE on Windows. Which is always a surprise unless you've ever written Javascript.
- Noel O'Boyle
Yup, just an irritatingly big corner :-)
- Cameron Neylon
Mathematics: To Everywhere in 42 Minutes - http://www.time.com/time...
Jean-Claude Bradley liked this
<p>Although he is now 36, and a mathematician for Sylvania, Paul Cooper has never lost his boyhood enthusiasm for the fanciful science-fiction stories of Jules Verne. While musing about...
- Andrew Lang
and students say math isn't fun - it reminds me of the space elevator in terms of exciting concepts - I wonder which is more likely to be built
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Fwd: Open Notebook Science Solubility: the SPARQL end point - http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2009... (via http://friendfeed.com/egonw...)
Jean-Claude Bradley, Andrew Lang and Cameron Neylon liked this
Brilliant Egon
- Andrew Lang
Comment by Egon Willighagen - http://blueobelisk.stackexchange.com/questio...
Hi Jean-Claude, but this information is already digitized... I want articles with interesting data which can be converted into an electronic form without chemistry knowledge. Like a simple table with SMILES in one column and property in a second...
- Egon Willighagen
Egon - is it a problem because there are two columns E,G (solute, solvent) with SMILES with solubility in H? You want tables with only one SMILES column? http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc...
- Jean-Claude Bradley
JC, no, I want something on paper (or hamburger PDF) which is not already in a spreadsheet :)
- Egon Willighagen
What about a beilstein search?
- Andrew Lang
OK got it Egon. If I come across anything I'll let you know. The Seidell book has plenty of tables but those do require chemical knowledge to process as we discussed.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
3D Mandelbrot Fractal (via @timohannay ) - http://www.skytopia.com/project...
François Dongier, Rob Syme, Neil Saunders and 13 other people liked this
This is totally amazing! Need to get my hands on one of these programs and render!
- Björn Brembs
Some of them look organic.
- Andrew Lang
Cheminformatics Tutorial using Python and Silverlight - http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2009...
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Peter Miller, Andreas Steffen, Jean-Claude Bradley and 2 other people liked this
A nice educational resource
- Rajarshi Guha
Cool Noel.
- Andrew Lang
Solvents clustered by Abraham solvation parameters using happieclust. ref: http://friendfeed.com/danielm...
Jean-Claude Bradley liked this
This should help us pick sets of diverse solvents.
- Andrew Lang
Is there a reason to use approximate clustering over an exact method? The dataset isn't very large if I recall. Is there a big difference with say standard hierarchical clustering methods?
- Rajarshi Guha
from iPhone
For small datasets it should do exact. Just to make sure I used the the flag --all-pairwise. Didn't seem to change but you're right - I needed to make sure.
- Andrew Lang
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