Notes from the Biomass

Notes from the biomass will continue at nftb.net.

My thanks to twoday.net, their service is recommended for everyone who is just starting to blog and doesn't want to be bogged down by administration of their own blog. However, at this point I need to move on and make use of more advanced software, most notably structured blogging.

Things to do when you're not blogging: Taking care of comment spam. After I revisited this site recently, I had questionable fun with several comments in German. They were just statements of admiration by Gotfrid and Hans and other namesakes of baddies from Die Harder Than You Can Possibly Imagine Reloaded, written within ten minutes. Still, there was a little lag time before I realized that they truly were spam and at first, I felt hurt. I do write in my second language, but mistaking it for German was a little much, even for a spammer - but there were no links to anything, so I suspected a funnyish prank. However, the earliest of six spam entries had the links that I was expecting. I am not sure whether others have had similar experiences, so it appears that the spammer enters several blunt, nice comments into the blog manually to obscure earlier link spam. There is an increase in this type of spam here. I was expecting that comments would not be indexed but I also realized that some of the spam on this blog that I had deleted was still accessible via Google.

Anyway, twoday.net was a good choice so far and at least I had never problems with automated spam as other blogs. I wonder when manual spam and silly comments will converge.

Why don't you turn to a book, read a comic or scientific paper? Some all time favourites that crossed my path recently.

A 120 page novel

Stanislaw Lem, one of my favorite authors died recently. As his best story (Experimenta Felicitologica) is not available in English - well read the Futurological Congress. Still excellent after the 5th time.

Evolutionists are the better demagogues

"Reading the entrails of chickens: molecular timescales of evolution and the illusion of precision." by Dan Graur and William Martin.

Here's a motivating yet misleading excerpt:

In fact, we might ultimately be able to tell whether the human–chimpanzee divergence occurred on a Monday or not.

Promise to read the rebuttal too, will you?

The best graphic novel on the cheapest paper

The best story line to start reading Cerebus is Church and State.


"Cerebus will bless your baby and tell you a valuable story. You can get what you want and still not be happy about it."

365 days ago I started to blog about life sciences and bioinformatics in this spot - for one year. The experiment is over and I might review what has happened in the next couple of days in more details. However, I have decided to discontinue Notes from the Biomass in its current form.

A blog break hopefully gives me the opportunity to reconsider many things. Blogging takes time. It depends on your perception of the day whether it takes too much of it. I became pretty blog weary over the last couple of months and while there might have been one or two interesting posts, I was not overly happy with the quality and form for too long. In particular, the opportunity for serious scientific communication seemed less of an option than I had initially hoped for.

There will be a couple of posts coming here still but I will rather use other forms to use online communication. I'd rather comment on other sites and write longer articles and essays. Later, I might move finally run the Wordpress blog that I was aiming for for too long and resume but before that there will be some downtime.

So thanks for all the feedback so far.

The keywords Biology or Science in Technorati are dominated by popular science blogs, many of them discussing other topics ranging from politics to Harry Potter side by side. My preferences for this blog are different: I concentrate on sciene - bioinformatics and genomics - and mainly want to communicate with fellow scientists on special interest themes. There are a few blogs around that follow a similar setup, several in my blogroll.

Every once in a while, I was inclined to follow the trend to write a little manifesto for this style of blogging. I decided to focus on my content first and post the meta-content at a time when I think I have arrived at some stable point - which is yet to come.



It turns out that the hard bloggin' scienstist, a group of mostly German bloggers already came up with a manifesto, which includes several pieces that I had in mind. I am rather close to put the badge on this website. Just that "science is free speech" - it's a little more than that - feels a little too simplistic for the first paragraph.

The background of most of the founding scientists seems to be humanities and rather than life sciences or computer science. Many of the blogs are not very focussed on science yet but the manifesto comes closest to my approach to blogging as a scientist and is worth studying if you reflect on how to use your blog as a scientist.

Today, the Daily Transcript (a recent scienceblogs addition) lists the worst parts of scientific life. Somehow I cannot tune in the crying tonight - being a scientist of the best jobs I can think of on this planet. However, if your gel was empty, you can't find the bug in your own 3 lines of code and your arch-nemesis just published your good idea with sloppy and inconclusive data turn there to ensure that you're not alone in your misery. I'll join you tomorrow. Or some other day.