Mailund on the Internet

There’s an interview with Lars Bak and Kasper Verdich (Lund), two of the seniour developers of V8 at Financial Times. Also picked up at Slashdot.

I used to work Kasper back in the days when I was working with Coloured Petri Nets.  Lars was working at Sun at the time and had an office on the same floor as us at the Dept. of Computer Science, AU.

We’ve all moved on to more exciting things now, but in all honesty their work for Google might be just a tad sexier than my genetics work. In the eyes of a computer scientist, at least…

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…well, in Australia at least.

New work on lateral transfer shows that Darwin was wrong

A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much more like Empedocles‘ “random monster” theory over 2000 years ago had predicted.

An exciting result from researches at the University of Münchhausen.

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…the rest of us have to wait a few hours before our fun begins…

Another week, another list of favorite blog posts…

Fun

• The forensic astrophysics of Superman (Built on Facts)

Genetics

• Genetic signatures of recent human evolution (Genetic Future)
• Overstating the obvious (John Hawks)
• Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations…maybe (Gene Expression)
• African origins and phenotypic variance (John Hawks)

Genome analysis

• What if everything you thought you knew about the genome was wrong? (Discovering Biology in a Digital World)
• Challenges with data quality, sharing and versioning in next-generation sequencing (Byte Size Biology)

High performance computing

• Google searches for the holy grail of Python performance (Ars Technica)
• Solid state disks (Joel on Software)
• GPU Supercomputers (Statistical Modeling)

Programming

• Don’t like it? Code it yourself! (Coding Horror)

Reviewing

• Signing reviews and even publishing them? (Building Confidence)

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Great talk (and great slides, but unfortunately not particularly well synchronized):

Hat tip Byte Size Biology.

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I hate that I never have time to do all the things I want.

I just had a fun idea for a pop gen project (whether it is good or not, I don’t know and perhaps never will).

I have the data.  I have the software I need for the analysis (wrote it back in 2004-2005 but never managed to use it since the data set I was working on then was way too large).

What I don’t have is time to pursue this.

I’m completely swamped with projects well into autumn… I need some grad students to take some work off my hands, but I don’t have any funding I can use for it.  The grants I have are fixed to specific projects (projects, incidentally, that I don’t have much time for either because I’m busy with more interesting work that got started after I got the grants), and I have already hired as many as I can with the money I have.

Oh well, another piece of paper on the pile of potential, but never actualised, projects.

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