nodalpoint.org

Nature is a whore. These are not my words, but the words of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana on the song In Bloom. What, exactly, did he mean?

I recently posted some scripts on my blog (match.py a Python script that calculates the RMSD of PDB structures). It's a little esoteric, but I thought someone out there might find it useful. Here's the rub. Hours after posting it, I got a comment. When I read the comment, I was rather surprised - it was someone advertising a program that does the same thing as mine. The question I want to ask, do you think this is kosher?

After a long hiatus SciView is back with a new interview with Dr Roderic Page from the University of Glasgow. Dr Page is the current Editor in Chief of Syatematic Biology and developer of TreeView(X), the beloved phylogenetic tree visualization software. He was also the editor of the Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.

As usual here is the link.

Enjoy.

BIT’s 1st Annual World Summit of Antivirals-2008
Theme: Combating Severe Viral Infections

Time: July 20-26, 2008
Place: Kunming, China

http://www.bitlifesciences.com/wsa2008/index_en.htm
http://www.bitlifesciences.com/wsa2008

Welcome to WSA-2008

Mon dieu! Doesn't time fly? Data Integration in the Life Sciences (DILS) is here again, see the Call For Papers. This time, DILS will be in Evry near Paris. The conference is on June 25-27, 2008 but if you're thinking of doing a paper, you've got until February 20th 2008 to submit your paperware.

I've been trying to come up with a nice way to mashup and process RSS feeds, mostly for the reason to be able to track articles from Journals that publish content that interests me. The best solution seems to be the workflows that can be constructed at Yahoo Pipes.

refactoremycode.com is another new web 2.0 service, this time aimed at helping programmers at receiving comments and feedback to enhance their code.

It works in this way: you are unsure about a portion of your code, or a library you are writing; so, you can upload it to the refactoremycode repository, and the other people, driven by a 'web 2.0 - free software' philosophy, will have a look at it and give you their suggestions and comments and feedback.

Here is the link: http://refactormycode.com/

Sometimes I wonder what what the point of blogging is and just how much time people (myself included) waste reading and writing them. Let's face it, most leading scientists are too damn busy to pay much attention to the blogosphere, especially when it descends (as it frequently does) into "uncontrollable verbal discharge". This unfortunate medical condition is also known as Blogorrhoea. A free-flowing blog is unlikely to directly increase a scientists productivity (as approximated by the infamous h-index), and might even decrease it. Now, we all know that powerpoint can be PowerPointless, so is blogging also a pointless activity? Or to put it another way: Nodalpoint or Nodalpointless?