nodalpoint.org

LISP Hacker and Painter Paul Graham writes entertaining essays about technology. His latest piece, discusses how important and sometimes lucrative ideas usually come from the “garage” outside rather than the inside, what he calls The Power of the Marginal.

Hi, how about a regular entry: worst paper of the month?? That would be more fun than "best paper of the month" (as it is usually easier to criticize than to praise research, hehe...)

My best paper at the moment is this: http://www.nodalpoint.org/2006/04/15/algorithms_algorithms_everywhere_0#... Can you challenge it? (No, Katoh/Katoh papers don't count.)

...that you have 3 days to send in your Bio::Blogs submissions. You don't have to write a huge essay - in fact, you don't have to write anything if you can find something interesting on someone else's blog. It'd be great to see this initiative work, so get posting.

update: 2 days...1 day...last day :)

Do you ever get that feeling that doing bioinformatics is like Herding Cats?

Hello people. Could you let me know how do you go ahead with genome assembly. What are the best practises. What are the traps... What are the tricks.
Thanks. I will keep you updated on the progress.

I would like to announce a new blog carnival related to bioinformatics/computational biology called Bio::Blogs (blame Stew for the tittle ;). I propose a monthly carnival accepting any submission of bio.comp related post. In good carnival tradition the editor will rotate to a new blog in each edition. To keep track of all of the editions I am working on a webpage for Bio::Blogs in wordpress. I will be kicking it off over at public rambling (shame on me :) so please send me your own bio.comp related posts to bioblogs(at)gmail(dot)com before the end of the month. Don't be shy, send links to your posts with tutorials, rants about bioinformatics papers, your mash up ideas, bird flu tracking systems, tips and tricks, etc. Also, if you are interested in hosting the next editions send me a mail and I will make a list.

Football informatics, theory and practice: Germany 2006

The frenchman Pierre Bézier knew a thing or two about curves. But as World Cup fever tightens its grip around the globe, it is the footballers in Germany who are showing us just how much they know about the practical science of curving and bending the ball into the goal. Is there any essential curve-theory for World Cup stars like Beckham, Ronaldinho and Thierry Henry to read and brush-up on in their German hotels this summer?

Pedro - thanks for leaving some information about Nodalpoint on the UsefulChem blog. I've added it to our list of open source science sites:
http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com

Our contribution to the open science movement is to make our organic chemistry lab available to worthy chemistry projects. Currently, the primary project at UsefulChem involves the synthesis and testing of new anti-malarial compounds based on the inhibition of enoyl reductase. For more information:

http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com (Project Summaries)

Way back in Nodalpoint history (probably about a year ago), we had "paper of the month" posts. They were rarely monthly and often involved more than one paper, but I always thought that it was a nice idea. So here's a few that caught my eye this month.

NewScientist of all places are talking about ontologies. Specifically An ontology for scientific experiments.

"Called EXPO, it can be used to translate scientific experiments into a format that can be interpreted by a computer."

Wow! translate experiments, that's impressive I would love to find out how the scrawny hand-writing, contained inside the standard lab notebook, dog-eared and drenched in all manner or reagents, gets translated into an ontology, that's more impressive than the ontology itself.