• Vi er alle lidt orangutaner

Featuring some of my greatest scientific idols, including Feynman and Sagan

So it is a bit strange when a press officer doesn’t want to talk to bloggers.

• Would you tell a blogger, “I think this is all you need for a blog?”
• In defence of science blogs (yet again)

I know that I would absolutely love to have my research mentioned by Ed Young — I’ve been reading his Not Exactly Rocket Science for years — so if a press officer at AU didn’t give him all the information he wanted, I’d be rather miffed.

Humans are crazy, it is time to give the bonobos a chance at the top of the food chain.

Completely beside the point, naming a website Virgen scan for virus gene scans is a bad idea. You won’t get the right kind of visitors. I know.

Loved this exchange in the episode of Supernatural:

Dean: So what can you tell me about dragons.

Bobby: They are not like the Loch Ness monster, dragons aren’t real!

Dean: Can you make a few calls?

Bobby: To where? Hogwarts?

We are suggesting that humans and orangutans are closer related than either to the chimpanzees in ~0.5% of the genome (and chimpanzees and orangutans are closer related than either to humans in another ~0.5%). That has to do with incomplete lineage sorting, and does not, in any way, imply that we as a species are closer related to orangutans than to chimpanzees.

Oh, and it doesn’t really mean that orangutan is our closest living relative in ~0.5% of the genome either. It is just closer than chimpanzee, but the gorilla could be closer related to us in those positions, so…

I am learning Objective-C and Cocoa these days, more for fun than anything else, but I figured that I could write a small unit conversion application to get some use out of it.  I mentioned this to Kasper, but he suggested that I write a dashboard widget instead.

I have never used Dashcode before, but I fired it up this morning before I headed for the office, to get a feeling for how it works, with the intention of writing a widget during the week.  It turns out it is extremely easy to work with, though, and within half an hour I had a complete conversion widget coded up.

The only thing I don’t quite like about it yet is that when I do the conversions it doesn’t present the results in the text field in scientific notation, so I get stuff like 1000000 instead of 1e6 or 0.0001 instead of 1e-4, which makes the conversions somewhat harder to read.

I’m sure there is a way to format the numbers, but my Javascript-fu is not up to it.  This widget is the first Javascript I have ever written.

Hat tip Amir.

This is a rowing competition where student groups from all over the university competes.  It isn’t quite like the traditional Oxford/Cambridge boat race.  For one thing, the race is across a lake that is only a few meters wide (but you have to cross it more than once). Another difference is that only inflatable boats are allowed in the race.

Well, with one exception.  The group that I belong to (although no longer a student I am still a proud member), TAAGEKAMMERET, can compete in any home made boat we want as long as we promise not to win.  So far we have kept that promise and I am sure we will keep up this proud tradition.

Another thing that differs a bit is that it is not just a rowing competition, but also a drinking competition.

Each time you reach the other shore, you have to drink a beer before you can get back in the boat for the next lap.

Beer sale starts at noon, the race is two to five, and after that it breaks into different parties at the various departments around the university.

Tomorrow is a holiday here, which is probably good since those parties tend to last all night.

Worth a read.