Caution: this post is for nerds only. I watched this numberphile video last night and was fascinated by the point pattern that was created in it. I thought I would quickly program my own version to recreate it and then look at patterns made by more points. I didn’t realise until afterwards that there is actually […]
Author: Stephen Royle
Notes To The Future
Previously I wrote about our move to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). This post contains the technical details to understand how it works for us. You can even replicate our setup if you want to take the plunge. Why go electronic? Many reasons: I wanted to be able to quickly find information in our lab books. […]
The Soft Bulletin: Electronic Lab Notebooks
We finally took the plunge and adopted electronic lab notebook (ELNs) for the lab. This short post describes our choice of software. I will write another post about how it’s going, how I set it up and other technical details. tl;dr we are using WordPress as our ELN. First, so you can understand my wishlist of requirements […]
The Soft Bulletin: PDF organisation
I recently asked on Twitter for any recommendations for software to organise my PDFs. I got several replies, but nothing really fitted the bill. This is a brief summary. My situation I have quite a lot of books, textbooks, cheat sheets, manuals, protocols etc. in PDF format and I need a way to organise them. I […]
Bateman Writes: 1994
BBC 6Music recently went back in time to 1994. This made me wonder what albums released that year were my favourites. As previously described on this blog, I have this information readily available. So I quickly crunched the numbers. I focused on full-length albums and, using play density (sum of all plays divided by number of […]
Meeting in the Aisle
Lab meetings: love them or loathe them, they’re an important part of lab-life. There’s many different formats and ways to do a lab meeting. Sometimes it feels like we’ve tried them all! I’m going to describe our current format and then discuss some other things to try. Our current lab meeting format is: Weekly. For one hour […]
Adventures in Code IV: correcting filenames
A large amount of time doing data analysis is the process of cleaning, importing, reorganising and generally not actually analysing data but getting it ready to analyse. I’ve been trying to get over the idea to non-coders in the group that strict naming conventions (for example) are important and very helpful to the poor person who has […]
Tips from the blog XI: Overleaf
I was recently an external examiner for a PhD viva in Cambridge. As we were wrapping up, I asked “if you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?”. It’s one of my stock questions and normally the candidate says “oh I’d do it so much quicker!” or something similar. However, this time I […]
Elevation: accuracy of a Garmin Edge 800 GPS device
I use a Garmin 800 GPS device to log my cycling activity. including my commutes. Since I have now built up nearly 4 years of cycling the same route, I had a good dataset to look at how accurate the device is. I wrote some code to import all of the rides tagged with commute […]
Reaching Out
Outreach means trying to engage the public with what we are doing in our research group. For me, this mainly means talking to non-specialists about our work and showing them around the lab. These non-specialists are typically interested members of the public and mainly supporters of the charity that funds work in my lab (Cancer Research […]