Bioinformatics and Norwegian pop bands

In the supplementary file to the recent paper on the Scratchpads project published in BMC Bioinformatics the Drupal module ahah_action apparently has the functionality required to provide 'a Norwegian pop band'.

Minor Flickr Fame

A photograph I took at the Pestival event this year and put on Flickr has been used by Schmap for a walking tour of Westminster. This is quite appropriate as Natalie and I did walk there from the Natural History Museum (stopping only for ice cream and traffic lights).

Urban Fox

Thanks to @radiokate: http://twitpic.com/sebvd

Mendeley

For a few years I have been struggling along with JabRef. It has been pretty painful, but it is free and pretty portable (runs off a USB stick). Until a couple of months ago when I started using Mendeley. Mendeley comes with an in-build PDF viewer, metadata editor and the ability to upload my PDFs to a central server, so they are accessible (to me at least) from anywhere that has the internet.

The last few months of reference-managing have been absolutely wonderful (read 'have been as as wonderful as reference-managing can be).

Recently I hit the 500MB PDF limit, a bit of a bugger. Mendeley are planning on providing bigger accounts as part of a subscription service in the future, but have kindly agreed to give me a total of 1GB for now.

The killer question is will I pay for the premium service? Ideally I'd want to keep the free tool and get it to synchronise my files to a server of my choosing (I have many GBs of storage space to play with). Failing that though, as long as it's priced about the same as Flickr (i.e. noticeably less than vimeo), then I probably will.

In despair...

Some person on Facebook decided I should get an invite to the Facebook group this is ENGLAND!!!! STAND UP N B COUNTED!!! As if the random capitalisation and use of 'N B' as 'and be' didn't suggest these people were a little on the dim side the quote below is the group's description.

"this is our country where we choose illegal immigrants over our soldiers we make sure they are well fed n equipted over our soldiers who are dyin fightin sum f**ker elses war we live in a country where half of the ppl dont even speak our language yet get more rights than us i say ditch political bullshit send them bk we only have had problems since they came if you werent born here then fuck off home our priorites should be with gettin our boys home safe CHARITY starts at fuckin HOME

WE ARE BRITISH !!!! ITS ABOUT TIME THE GOVERMENT STOPS TAKIN HOLIDAYS ON OUR FUCKIN MONEY AND EITHER STANDS DOWN OR DOES THERE FUCKIN JOB
i would love for one ov us 'common ppl' t go for prime minister we live in this shit hole that is now england its not england though its a load ov political correctness went wrong if u ask me! if u agree JOIN THIS GROUP
STAND UP AND BE COUNTED !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

There is a remote possibility they'd have a point, but only if Britain was a single cohesive culture that had been that way forever. But instead we Britons are a mongrel race with origins in Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Roman Empire, France and elsewhere (and we haven't even hit the days of empire yet).

That aside, who chose to go to war? Our government. How many people speak English in our country? Most. Who can't spell people? You. Who doesn't recognise 'ov' isn't even a contraction? You.

If you understand the history of Britain isn't as a cohesive race, that immigration (sometimes albeit through invasion) has for millennia been part of our culture, and that we ourselves have been known to emigrate (often using force) then feel free to be proud of being British, I am (despite not being at all proud of some of our behaviour over the years). If you use patriotism as a thin veil for racism then the rest of us would quite like it if you didn't do it in our name.

I am not Ed Baker...

...or at least the one you may think I am.

In the last week I have been confused with E. D. Baker a (female) author of books for children ( see here and here) and also Ed Baker - a hymenopterist from Cardiff.

I am currently basking in the glory of other people's fame!

Uncluttered Tube Map

Telling us what we always knew but never wanted to admit. People don't come to the Natural History Museum to look at insects, instead they want to see some statistical blips incapable of surviving beyond the K-T boundary. One day, they will learn.

Tourist Tube Map from The Londonist.