The Futile Cycle

From Jacob and Wollman (1958), Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, 12, 75-92.

“One is thus led to dispose all known genetic characters on a circle….It seems unnecessary to emphasize that this diagrammatic representation, which is the simplest one that will account for the observed results at the present time, is not meant to imply that the bacterial chromosome is actually circular.”

(It is circular.)

There are some people around who say “nuke-ular” (as in, “NOOK-yoo-ler”) instead of the conventional (and correct) “nuclear” (”NOOK-lee-er”). I can accept that this is a relatively easy thing to fall into, since “nuke” is a fairly common slang word, and both words have something to do with nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and so on.

Today, a professor was giving an introductory lecture, and I was half-paying attention (I’d heard this part before). But wait, did she just say “nuke-ulotide”?? Yes, yes she did. Not “nucleotide” (NOOK-lee-oh-tide), but “nuke-ulotide” (NOOK-yoo-lo-tide). Since this was a bioinformatics course, I spent the rest of the lecture trying to stop the bleeding from my ears.

Via the Evilutionary Biologist, from the acknowledgements of this paper (PDF):

This manuscript has been improved substantially by the suggestions of C. Chang, B. D. Collier, C. F. Cooper…and two anonymous reviewers. Any errors that remain are their responsibility and theirs alone.

Wonderful!

I hadn’t heard this before, but comment 10 on this post was rather awesome.

The post is an interesting topic, too, about who’s the modern Asimov (in terms of science writing).

I found this figure in a review paper that I’m reading (MV Rockman and L. Krulgyak (2006), Nat Rev Genet, 7, 862-72), and I think it’s awesome. More papers need figures like this.

From the Loom, a scientist gets his wife’s initials (”EEE”) tatooed onto his body in the form of a genetic code (i.e. Glutamine-Glutamine-Glutamine). Very nerdy, but kind of sweet.

xkcd really hits the spot this time, with this brilliant strip:

I occasionally come across pages like “The Beauty of LaTeX” or other tutorial and article that evangelizes the semantic, archival, aesthetic, and typographical value of LaTeX. Whenever I do, I’m reminded of this reason I once heard from a graduate student:

My advisor really likes to crushingly edit my work; no phrase goes untouched. So when I wrote my thesis, I did it in LaTeX, and since there isn’t a “Track Changes” like in Microsoft Word, he has to edit it by hand, on paper. Suddenly, only really relevant suggestions and edits were given back to me.

(Of course, LaTeX does have a sort of “track changes” type package, but it’s not quite as easy to use as MS Word, and requires knowledge of LaTeX.)

From now until around May, I’ll be on the hunt for a Ph.D. advisor. Amusingly, I came across this Nature article on what makes good mentors at the same time that PhD comics had this strip: