Biocurious

/ a biophysics blog

Loading issues

Posted 20 March 2008 by PhilipJ under

Sorry for the recent general malaise felt around the site the past few days, it turns out that the anti-spam measures we use (relating to spamhaus.org) were causing some serious delay issues in page load times. Things should be all fixed now (Thanks Joyent!), but if there are any other issues, please let us know here in the comments.

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Joyent Shared Accelerated

Posted 21 October 2007 by PhilipJ under

We’ve moved, as of today, from an “old” TextDrive Shared FreeBSD box to a new Joyent Shared Accelerator running OpenSolaris. This should mean nothing to you, unless of course something has broken. I’m not noticing anything down so far, but if you come across something that doesn’t work, shoot me an email: philipj at biocurious dot com.

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Biocurious: year two in review

Posted 9 July 2007 by PhilipJ under &

I’ve been so busy these past few weeks that I missed our second anniversary Biocurious! We’re now coming up to the two year plus one month anniversary, but better late than never to review the past year.

Capitalisation — The most obvious change from last year’s post is the lower-case c. It’s just a little more classy this way.

Travel — I stayed in Canada this past year, but still managed to attend to excellent small conferences. The first was the Frontiers in Biophysics meeting put off by the two Vancouver-area universities, while the second was the Chemical Biophysics Symposium at the University of Toronto, where I’m also heading for my Ph.D.

André visited Hawaii, which, given those pictures, is where all conferences should take place!

Research — André published a paper! This paper described their AFM measurements of proteins involved with blood clotting, where unfolding of protein domains are implicated in the stretching mechanics. He’s also been working on combining AFM and TIRF.

Meanwhile, after discussing all about wormlike chains, I ran into problems that were insurmountable in the timeframe of a Master’s degree, but that’s part of the game, and ended up graduating all the same. I hope to talk about new work soon!

Scientific publishing — This remained as a common discussion point for us, with posts on the economics of open access publishing, giving elsevier a hard time because of their arms business, looking forward to drinking champagne, the tactics of for-profit publishers, and “debunking a physicist who didn’t care for open access“http://biocurious.com/open-access-unnecessary-for-physicists.

PLoS ONE launched, and I discussed some fears, while André asked that we hold off judging whether the journal model will be a success or not.

Fun — I wondered if any of us had windows in our offices, and tried to figure out what was contaminating one of my agar plates, while André discussed the physical aspects of fitness, and nearly-alive cornstarch.

This has only been a snapshot of some of the things we’ve talked about here over the past year, so hit the archive to see everything. Here’s to the rest of year three!

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Comment spam!

Posted 13 April 2007 by PhilipJ under

I’m proud to announce a few new deals for Biocurious readers: free v1agr4 and a m0rtg4ge! No, wait, that’s what the comment spammers have been offering.

We’ve been hit with abnormally high comment spam the past couple of days, so there has been tweaking on our end to try and get rid of it. If there are any problems with real people publishing real comments, please contact us directly and we’ll sort it out.

Since this is a bit of a throwaway post anyway, if there are any other requests, complaints, or suggestions, feel free to voice them in the comments.

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V for Veritas

Posted 8 November 2006 by Igor Kulic under &

Dear friends,

I’ve just moved to Harvard and got settled in my new office. The first impressions : I am surrounded by a bunch of inspired nerds with eyes shining (through thick nerdy glasses) and I enjoy the atmosphere of being among my kind…

It looks like its gonna be a big party time for me here in the next year. I will mostly work with Great Guru L. Maha (devan). He is a real artist among the scientists and quite exceptionally inspired guy even for this place.

I ll also be (hyper) diffusing on the campus, catching interesting people and learning from them.

The other thing I want to figure out is: what the hack is this V.E.R.I.T.A.S thing that I see adds for all over the place? It must be something like the local A.A. or A.A.A. or Y.M.C.A ….. Anyhow, I will keep you posted on that.

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Site Redesign

Posted 1 November 2006 by Andre under

Thanks for the new look Phil! I personally think it looks great. Perhaps his greatest innovation is the removal of our ugly faces from the main page and onto a separate about page. What a relief!

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