Computational biology and genomics
misc
It has been 14 years since I’ve started this blog and as per tradition, I write a blog post reflecting on stuff. It’s a loose tradition since some years I didn’t write anything. When I do write, it’s usually about something new I’ve learned and/or started practising since the last anniversary post. Recently, I’ve been…
There’s this nice tip from a book I had read a long time ago. Some of the tips/lessons from the aforementioned book weren’t useful to me but the following tip is something that I have found quite effective in getting stuff done. Say you have some task to do and you’re finding it hard to…
I was recently contacted by the Stanford Deep Data Research Center at Stanford School of Medicine where they are working on "pioneering a transformative approach to precision medicine research and education." The center is led by Amir Bahmani who has made it his mission to make it possible for anyone to learn about bioinformatics and…
I recently learned of the WTFPL licence and was reading the FAQ (link no longer works) to learn a bit more about it. I came to the "But profanity is offensive!" section and while reading it it made me reflect about the things that really matter to me in life. The last few years have…
A lot of the well known bioinformatics blogs are no longer maintained. I recently came across a blog post that talked about blogging and how it was possible to actively maintain a blog for over 10 years. I discovered the blog when I learned of the book Building reproducible analytical pipelines with R, which also…
I read a news article recently about someone suing ChatGPT for defamation. Prior to finding out this news, I never considered asking a Large Language Model (LLM) about myself. This reminded me of egosurfing, which is the act of using your own name as a keyword on a search engine or search engines to see…
Last updated: 2023/03/07 I’m not really a fan of PowerPoint but it’s ubiquitous in research, so I have to work with them. Sometimes I need to find a slide amongst a pile of PowerPoint files and waste a lot of time opening and closing files. I wondered whether I could grep PowerPoint files and sure…
When I was an honours student (in Australia an honours degree is a one year [in practice, it’s about ten months] undergraduate research program you can take after your Bachelor’s and has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of the word "honours"), I literally jumped into the deep end of bioinformatics. I recall joining…
Sometime in the past this blog was called “Musings from a PhD candidate”, despite hardly writing any blog posts that were of the contemplative sort. It later evolved to “Musings from an unlikely candidate” because I had received my PhD, which I thought was quite an unlikely event given my background. However, this carried a…
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology provides historical weather data, some of which can be freely downloaded. In this blog post, I will plot the weather data collected at two weather stations in Brisbane: the Brisbane Regional Office weather station (latitude 27.466 degrees south, longitude 153.0270 degrees east, and elevation of 38 metres) with data available…