The Sign on the Door

One by one the names on the sign by the door have dropped off. Former lab members gone to postdocs or real jobs, slowly trickling out of the lab.

My name got added somewhere around a year ago, though I've been working in the lab much longer (typical of the maintenance delay).

So as I read the names of people who are gone, and think about how nonessential maintenance works, I take it as a sign that I should get my butt the heck outta here!


.....I swear I haven't been here that long. Right?

...right?

Sources for math tutorial info: MathOverFlow

I wished I paid more attention to math in high school and college. Math without context is hard for me though, and I never realized how important it is for biology. Granted, I can still do all my research and get a doctorate without it (except for using statistics programs), but all the really interesting science today requires at least a familiarity with numbers (statistics in particular). Systems biology and large data sets are quickly making the handling and manipulation of science data and information more important than benchwork. Ok, I love benchwork; is it is a crucial part of biology: all I mean is that it's relatively easy to extract RNA for transcriptome analysis, but much harder to understand it after RNAseq.



Anyway, the point of this post is that I was looking for some math resources and discovered MathOverFlow.net. This site is mainly for mathematicians as a forum to ask and answer questions, but it also provides links to education resources as well. So, if you need a place to start looking (look under the "education" category), try here.



Incidentally, I also spent my time looking at the "Math Urban Legends" post :) (that's what I'm linking you to first)



www.mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-legends

Passing on a link: pwned experiments

If you're a geek who likes to laugh, check out this website. It looks abandoned now, but there are some funny things on it. ...Or have I just spending too much time in lab too?


www.pwnedexperiments.blogspot.com

Bringing the Blog Back

I never know if I'll keep writing this blog, but I always want to. It's funny how life always gets in the way of life. So I'll give this the ole' college try again, trying to post at least once a month (I'm ambitious).

When I started the blog I wrote some reasons why I was doing it. For the most part, they still apply. I'm interested in the synthesis of knowledge, from an interdisciplinary perspective or even from one's own field. I think that as human beings we're crap for 'putting it all together'. We're good at estimating, simplifying, and stereotyping and that all applies to the science that we do as well. Not that each of us doesn't contribute to the building blocks on the stairs of scientific knowledge (it's a pyramid you know, E being equal to M*Csquared), but we could be building some ramps too.

Fields are becoming more interdisciplinary anyway. Biology and computer science are merging at an accelerating rate(bioinformatics, microarrays, sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies). These both need some math and statistics to survive and produce data, at least more than the current stock of biologists like myself usually have. You can add in the physics of microfluidics as well to get another discipline involved (for example, microfluidic devices are being developed that collect various cell types for later analysis, in applications such as vaccination and cancer diagnostics).

Anyway, I hope to get some discussion going about these things eventually. Well, that's my post for the month. (joking-- at least, I hope so)