nodalpoint.org - Science and Art - Comments

Life in science

Neil — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 03:39:25 -0500

I've always thought that the lives of working scientists could make great material for a novel or film. Not in the sci-fi tradition, but with the focus on the people - their lives, feelings, problems. Yes, scientists have personal lives too! This is often forgotten, I think.

Anyone recommend a novel or movie that they feel comes close to an accurate portrayal of the "tortured complex scientist"? Curiously, one of my favourites is a cult B-movie titled "Darkman", about a guy who invents artificial skin.

The slow pace of our own work

PedroBeltrao — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:39:44 -0500

Probably most of us have talked about this with friends and colleagues. One of the most frustrating things about working in science is how slow our own work moves. Specially when compared to the pace of science as seen in the journals every week. This is for me one of the big challenges, to keep interested with the work that I am doing even if moves along so slowly. It is so much easier to just start something new after getting all excited with something we just saw somewhere recently. This is specially true for me when trying to finish a project, to continue working after the initial effort to establish if the idea has potential or not.

Excellent list. You might

Greg — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 05:24:42 -0400

Excellent list. You might consider adding this list as a page on the nodalpoint wiki. Just reference the new page, for example Bioinformatics Journals, login with your nodalpoint user name and password, then create the page...

prove your point

Neil — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:54:53 -0400

We are a tough audience here at Nodal. On the one hand, geeky enthusiasm is what we live for. On the other - if you storm in full of big promises, you'd sure better live up to them. Because we have a zero tolerance policy for bullshit.

Do not make the fatal mistake of assuming that bioinformatics is merely a branch of computer science. Because when I read claims like "analysis of almost every type of file", then I see a bunch of clustering algorithms which construct trees with nodes, I wonder how that applies to everyday bioinformatic tasks like annotating genomes or batch-processing PDB files.

Richness of data is the hallmark of biological information. I've no doubt that this software is interesting and important, but before telling me that it can do everything, take some time to understand biological problems.

complearn

cilibrar — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 05:42:38 -0400

Sure, there are many reasons details in my research papers on my homepage: http://www.cwi.nl/~cilibrar/

In summary the main reasons are
a) it's easier, usually
b) it's more robust, usually

I would like to fix the Mac OSX compile/link problems. Can anybody let me have an account for a day or two on their Mac to fix this problem? Please email me at cilibrar@gmail.com if you are up for helping.

Best regards,

Rudi

Exciting new site ?

Greg — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:36:36 -0400

Nodalpoint will be celebrating it's 5th anniversary in a few months. I think "exciting" rather than "exciting new" site might be a better way to put it.

So can you offer us any reason why a compression based approach is better than [insert favorite machine learning technique applied to biology here] ?

Compiling on OS X

alf — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 11:22:24 -0400

I had no luck compiling this on OS X. Things like malloc.h and -export-dynamic throw up easily fixable errors, but I wasn't able to find a way round an undefined symbol error later on.