Say you’re interested in computational biology. You’ve had a hard day debugging scripts, transposing columns to rows in Excel files and persuading people to write their next paper in LaTeX.
computational biologist, in a bath
You get home. You run a bath, light some scented candles. Put on some relaxing new age music. You step gently into the soothing bubbles then let the warm water envelop you. Mmmm, soothing bubbles. The sweet smell of frangipani fills your nostrils.
Still, something is missing. What you really need now, you think as you sip from your wine glass, is something to read. Something to stimulate you intellectually. Something covering the topics that you’re passionate about. Something like a freely available compilation of the best bioinformatics blogging from the past month in easy to print PDF format.
Fantastically enough such a thing exists in the form of Bio::Blogs, which gets published on the first day of every month. Bio::Blogs pulls together posts from all over the bioinformatics blogosphere and has a different guest editor each issue (the schedule is coordinated by Pedro Beltrao at EMBL). It’s a good read and a gentle introduction to scientific blogging in general. The PDF is a relatively recent development but a welcome one – it means that you can print out all of the posts at once to read at your leisure.
After downloading B::B you should check out Nodalpoint, the ‘by the people for the people’ bioinformatics group blog founded by Greg Tyrelle which has recently seen a resurgence of activity. Some of that activity has been focused on updating a list of blogs about computational biology which is worth going through to find good reads.
yeah, but you can’t read all this stuff in the bath, especially if you are already holding a wine glass. Roll on the waterproof, eye-blink-activated e-reader?
Bio::Blogs, now read aloud in one of three user-selectable voices (Stephen Fry, Brian Blessed, or Trevor MacDonald).
I suppose you could attach them to your wine glass with bulldog clips. (The PDFs, not Stephen Fry and co.)
“Something covering the topics that you’re passionate about. Something like a freely available compilation of the best bioinformatics blogging from the past month in easy to print PDF format.”
That probably limits it down to two or three people right there ;)
Henry – I think more like… roll on the floating, non-tipping wine glass for the bath :D
James—Great idea. I’ll buy one. No, scrub that, I’ll buy two. My wife will want one.