Some recent verdicts from the British public on YouGov polls
So much for Aristotle’s ‘wisdom of crowds’!
The results are in! 19 group members responded within 24 hours and rated 8 potential swag items on a scale from ⭐ to ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. Let’s see what they voted.
First, let’s take a look at the average rating per item. People gave many stars to the coffee mug, socks, notebook, and hat.
Brain teasers have a strange power. For many they evoke nothing more than a mild and transient sense of curiosity. But for a certain subset of people they create an irresistible intellectual temptation which even needs to actively be avoided at times as not to completely derail conversations and take over whole afternoons.
For better or worse, I am in the camp of people who are highly susceptible to brain teasers. I just love them too much. More than once in my lifetime I had to ask a friend not to tell me about a particular brain teaser they had heard about because I knew it would inevitably take over my mind and send me down an almost hypnotic spiral of thoughts whose only escape would be finding the solution.
While brain teasers can admittedly turn into ridiculously powerful distractions for some of us, they are not necessarily a waste of time. They have high recreational value and help the mind to enter a playful and creative state. They serve as mental gymnastics to directly train logical thinking skills, and logical thinking is arguably one of the most powerful transferable skills that exists. And last but not least, brain teasers are canonically used nowadays in job interviews at some of the worlds top employers (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, prestigious hedge funds, …).
In this post, I will present one of my favourite brain teasers to see if I can get you hooked. It is a slightly modified and self-contained version of the so-called pirate game. You can find the solution at the end of the page. Enjoy responsibly! Continue readingPicture this: You’re a zealous acolyte of the metric system, with a rare affliction that makes multiplying decimal numbers impossible. You’re on holiday in the UK, where road signs give distances in miles. Heathens! How can you efficiently estimate the number of kilometres without multiplying by approximately 1.60934?
Continue readingFor this Yuletide blog post, I sought long and hard a set of Christmas-related proteins. It is surprisingly difficult mostly because a google search for “Christmas protein” returns festive whey powders.
Continue readingCome rain or shine, every summer we leave our desks and journey across Oxford’s finer drinking establishments. This year’s Le Tour de Farce was held on 11 June [1]. The trip is traditionally done by bike; however, as long as you have a helmet and lights, anything goes. To emphasise this point, Charlotte jokingly suggested rollerblades were also welcome.
Continue readingWhen I recently tested out the voice activation features on my phone, I was extremely impressed with how well it understood not only the actual words I was saying, but also the context. The last time I used voice control features was years ago when the technology was still in its infancy. There was only a specific set of commands the voice recognition software understood and most of them were hard-coded. Given the impressive advances we have made utilizing machine learning for voice recognition and natural language processing to the point where I can tell my phone: “Hey Google, can you give me a list of the best BBQ restaurants near me?” and it will actually understand and do it, it is interesting that we still struggle with a language based technology that has been around for ages: chatbots.
Continue readingLast week, a sizeable flock of OPIGlets went to ISMB in Basel. Also last week, a storm and a radar tower problem over London Gatwick (LGW) and London Heathrow (LHR) led to four of those OPIGlets being stranded in Switzerland. This is a (somewhat accurate) timeline of their ordeal:
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Background:
Interdisciplinary projects are in fashion. Nowadays, most of the top universities in the world offer “interdisciplinary” doctorate programs. It seems that becoming a specialist in a particular field is not enough to progress in science. Now, students must prove their ability to understand and be proficient in different areas. Why study only Chemistry if you can combine it with Statistics, Programming and Biology? The more tools and concepts you can play with the better.
Continue readingFor my blog post this week, I thought I would share, as the title suggests, a small collection of tools and packages that I found to make my work a bit easier over the last few months (mainly python based). I might add to this list as I find new tools that I think deserve a shout-out.
Reading in .pdb files for processing and writing your own parser (while being a good exercise to familiarize yourself with the format) is a pain and clutters your code with boilerplate.
Luckily for us, Sebastian Raschka has written a neat package called biopandas [1] which enables quick I/O of .pdb files via the pandas DataFrame class.
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