Tid Bits

It has been a while. Here goes:

'Do you want to catch up on your Darwin?
Here's a link to the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.

Want something to listen to while you are stuck in traffic? How about the audio version of The Origin of Species.

Also there is a great podcast from the Whitehead - I've been wanting to write about this for a while - go check it out.

And there is the Science Saturdays at Bloggerheads.tv that I've mentioned previously.

What else is there ...

Via Hsien at Eye on DNA I stumbled onto this clip produced by Genome British Columbia's Learning Centre:

... uhm ... I guess that is what you call public-reach-out?

Dan at Migrations has a great weekly summary of the webs best Cell Biology blogging called Cells Weekly.

In the "how to measure an academic" category, here is something from RPM at evolgen:

Paul Erdos was an extremely prolific and mobile mathematician who has left a legacy in academia in the form of the Erdos Number -- a count of your "academic distance" from Erdos. Anyone who published a paper with Erdos has an Erdos number of one (Erdos, himself, had a number of zero), people who published with anyone with an Erdos number of one have an Erdos number of two, and so on. It's a point of pride for a mathematician or other researcher to have a small Erdos number.

RPM proposes a Gibbs number for biologists. That is horrible. Maybe for genomics types, but for all biologists? How about a Watson/Crick number instead?

Now as for real Science blogging, here is something refreshing from suicyte:

I plan to do an experiment in science blogging. As my may have noticed, an earlier post on this blog addresses a series of recent papers identifying markers with strong association to both myocardial infarction risk and type 2 diabetes. Both markers map to a narrow region on 9p21.3. In an interview, Francis Collins compared this region to the 'soul of the genome', which many people thought was kind of funny.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that something interesting is going on in this part of the genome. Since I am a generally curious person, I am going to have a closer look at 9p21.3, and I am sure that many other people will do so. Unlike the others, I am going to describe my work, ideas and results in a series of blog posts, here on Suicyte Notes. If anybody else wants to contribute, be my guest.

I will be attending a conference during the next few days,, but when I am back in the office, I will start right away. Expect the first post on this subject early next week. So long.

Great! I can't wait to see what happens. That reminds me that a recent study by DeCode and others have found that mutations in two RNA binding proteins are associated with type II diabetes - I promise to blog about this in the near future.

Then Coturnix blogs (and links) to those going to the upcoming Science Foo Camp. I was also invited ... because of my paper and NERD club I've just been too busy to think about such things, but it now looks like I will attend.