RIP Gary Gygax

I played D&D endlessly in my youth. XKCD gets it right, as usual:

Eat less cake...

The BBC News website's front page story all day has been "Obesity 'not individuals' fault'". It has been accompanied by a number of pictures of people stuffing their faces with burgers and cakes. Like the juxtaposition.

Kudos to Ben Goldacre. I don't know how he finds this stuff sometimes.

“Down subjects and Oriental population share several specific attitudes and characteristics”
Federica Mafrica and Vincenzo Fodale.
Medical Hypotheses (2007) 69, 438–440
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2006.12.043

It is frankly terrifying that such an article can even exist, especially in this day and age.
My personal favourite line:

Down subjects adore having several dishes displayed on the table and have a propensity for food which is rich in monosodium glutamate (a salt of glutamate), such as parmigiano, beef broth, tinned food, etc. The Chinese food abounds in monosodium glutamate that seems to be responsible for the fifth taste or “umami taste”[...]

It seems so obvious, why did no one realise this before </sarcasm>.

HHMI requires Open Access

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has become the first major US funding body to require investigators make their papers openly accessible (by deposit in PubMed Central archive within 6 months of publication). This is something which pretty much all UK funding bodies already require (see http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/funderpolicies/).

BH

Gosh, I've not blogged much this year have I? Well, I have been rather busy.
Anyway, on to other matters, I have started downloading the Broadcasting House podcast, from Radio 4. My reason for getting it was to replace the Fighting Talk podcast, which is on its annual summer hiatus. BH used to be presented by Fi Glover, a writer and broadcaster I much admire, but it seems that Paddy O'Connell is the primary presenter these days. It seems like the programme provides an excellent, slightly sideways, glance at the week's news, which is what Fi Glover's much missed Radio 5 show always used to do. (Though I do recommend the show which eventually filled Fi's old home, presented by Anita Anand).
It is refreshing for me to get a rather more highbrow take on the news than I get from my usual outlets of choice (Radio 5, and BBC Breakfast, chief among them). I learnt much from this weeks edition. My word, this reads like a slightly extended advert for the BBC, doesn't it? But then they are responsible for pretty much all the quality broadcast output in this country.

EDIT - An extended and badly written advert. Rather than edit it I am going to leave this to remind me how not to write.

Another blog...

Its the only time I'll ever mention it here. My wife is 12 weeks pregnant, and I have started a separate blog as a sort-of pregnancy diary. I will aim to write there more than I do here, since I want it as a good record of the next 6 months (and beyond).

Darwin's Letters

Darwin's correspondence is now available online for the first time. The database of over 5,000 letters to and from the naturalist have been made available by the Darwin Correspondence Project.
A brief search reveals such mundanity as a letter from Darwin to the 'Gardener's Chronicle', on the value of saltpetre in manure, and highlights such as a letter to Charles Lyell (famous geologist and populariser of uniformitarianism), suggesting that Law of Gravity is not seen as requiring design. A resource worth further perusal I think.

Java Properties

More of a aide memoir, than a blog post really. Save me having to go digging for this info again.
java.util.Properties, very useful System info that can be obtained from a Java application with the System.getProperties() method. The following properties can be recovered:

"file.separator"	Character that separates components of a file path. This is "/" on UNIX and "\" on Windows.
"java.class.path"	Path used to find directories and JAR archives containing class files. Elements of the class path are separated by a platform-specific character specified in the path.separator property.
"java.home"	Installation directory for Java Runtime Environment (JRE)
"java.vendor"	JRE vendor name
"java.vendor.url"	JRE vendor URL
"java.version"	JRE version number
"line.separator"	Sequence used by operating system to separate lines in text files
"os.arch"	Operating system architecture
"os.name"	Operating system name
"os.version"	Operating system version
"path.separator"	Path separator character used in java.class.path
"user.dir"	User working directory
"user.home"	User home directory
"user.name"	User account name

Statisticians are bigger geeks than I am

Sitting in the second morning of a 2 day Baysian Statistics for Systems Biology workshop, it begins to dawn on me that it is probably aimed at statisticians, and if it isn't, they've really missed their market with the talks.
I am aware of Baysian Statistics in a 'wouldn't it be nice to know more about that?' kind of way. The jargon, and names of funky distributions I'd never heard of until yesterday, turns out to be a real barrier to entry, and statisticians talking like all this stuff is ridiculously simple really doesn't help. I think I'm learning stuff by brute force and repetition, but not nearly as much as I would have if I came to the workshop with anything like a basic understanding of what these people are banging on about.
Kudos, therefore, to the last speaker yesterday (Leanna House) who was the only speaker so far to be even slightly inclusive, and it was during her talk that I thought I might actually start to get this stuff, with a lot of work. It's all gone backwards again this morning though.

Catholic Gay Rights

It may be B3ta, and therefore slightly crass and unsubtle, but the nail was hit right on the head with this post about this story.