Friday, February 29, 2008

Laughing at lunch


The other day we had it over Futurama quotes and anecdotes. Today we continued to giggle over Black Adder and the Funniest Joke in The World (by Monty Python). I spiced up the conversation with some quotes from Danish radio comedy shows...

Have a laugh yourself, take for instance the Worlds funniest jokes from wikipedia.

Illustration courtesy: www.healthyeastleigh.org.uk

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

BMC good initiative


I would like to draw attention to this new electronic scientific journal by BioMedCentral:

"The aim of BMC Research Notes is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when results remain unpublished because they do not form a sufficiently complete story to justify the publication of a full research article. A key objective of the journal is to ensure that associated data sets are published in standard, reusable formats whenever possible. Data sets published in the journal will be made searchable and easy to harvest for reuse."

In my opinion it is an excellent initiative, both to encourage publishing incremental and 'negative' results, as well as the focus on open and easy access to data sets and results.

Read more about BMC Research Notes.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Open Source Licenses

Not until a few days ago, when I was about to submit source code to be hosted on bioinformatics.org, did I realise how many different open source licenses are out there. I thought that open source was open source, but the plethora of license texts actually imply very different obligations for the user. For example I did not know that if you distribute a program under the GPL (GNU General Public License) you have the choice to either distribute the complete source code with it or "Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code...". There are many more details that could make a difference, so I think it is well worth reading the full license texts along with the wiki comparison of free software licenses before deciding which license to choose for your program.

Read the full license text from the Open Source Initiative: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

Illustration courtesy: Neuton.net

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Friday, February 22, 2008

Congress: Women in Science

On March 6th there is a congress at Radboud University about women in science. Please see the website for more information: http://www.ru.nl/viw/congres_women_in/

Illustration courtesy: Women in Science, German embassy of New Delhi

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Sunday, February 17, 2008

Another issue

So, apparently the burning of tires, cars and schools in Copenhagen and the rest of Denmark is a different issue than the recently reheated discussion about the Mohammed cartoons. I found a distinction and explanation on a Danish blog, but I still miss a discussion in the newspaper Politiken.

Today they started some background story about angry teenagers behaving like we saw it in France.

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Friday, February 15, 2008

Copenhagen burning

I got a subscription to Politiken Weekly for christmas, which means that I since January have been a bit more updated on the Danish news, at least more than was by browsing randomly on Politiken.dk once in a while.

The front page of Politiken Weekly this week featured a picture of a bonfire on a street in Nørrebro. The text below the photo was a press release from Ritzau, saying 11 people were arrested for starting bonfires last Sunday. There was no mention of who or why.

Today I see that the front page of the Politiken online features an article about how the bonfires have spread to more cities: Århus, Nordsjælland, Ringsted, Slagelse. But still not a single reference to answer the first obvious questions of the alert reader: who did it? and why?

It is no secret that there has been a lot of attention to the Danish reprinting of the Mohammed cartoons which followed the Danish police intelligence discovery of a planned attack on one of the cartoonists. And without any further hints. I would automatically assume that these bonfires was started by angry mobs of muslims who feel their religion has again been set aside to advertise for the Danish freedom of speech.
But why does the newspaper not mention this? Are they afraid to blame someone by speculation? And can it really be that there has not been a questioning of the at least 11 people who were arrested for starting bonfires? I do not think so. But I am puzzled by the way the newspaper handles this.

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Saturday, February 09, 2008

Baking with dry yeast


I paused baking with my broodbakmachine for a while because I only had one dry yeast portion left. I already bought some loose weigth yeast, but I had no way to measure out 5.5 grams as the recipe prescribes for one bread. Yesterday I found a spoon with a size that corresponded exactly to the contents of the prepacked yeast, so now I can use this spoon to measure out the dry yeast from loose weight and start baking again - even cheaper than before.

Illustration courtesy: Fanatic Cook

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