An Exercise in Irrelevance

Today is the kick-off meeting for ONDEX. This is a new project which is doing something that I’ve wanted to do for ages; in a nutshell, it’s a large, graph-based datawarehouse. It’s rather similar to a proposal that I wrote with Mark Wilkinson from BioMOBY a few years back, with one important difference — the system actually exists, produced at Rothamstead over the last few years.

The new project involves integrating some other bits of technology — taverna, text mining and so on, and a couple of specific biological examples. I think it’s going to be a pretty cool project, and we should get some useful biology out of it.

Two things that I have learnt today: firstly, what "Ondex" actually stands for is not actually sure and, secondly, some varieties of willow are dodecaploid. Why would any plant need that many genomes?

Originally published on my old blog site.

I had to take my car to KwikFit yesterday as my exhaut was hanging off by a thread; I was irritated to be phoned up by them the same day. How was the service, they asked? Could we have done anything better? Well, the exhaust hasn’t falled off in the half mile from the garage to my house, and can you reduce the cost to 20 quid, please. Free would be better. Turns out they didn’t care, they just wanted to try and flog me car insurance. No, you can’t give me a quote, and no you can’t call me back next year.

I’ve been reading "Medicine balls" by Phil Hammond; fine stuff. He repeats the old ear, nose and throat gag: never put anything in your ear small than your elbow. This makes me wonder, how to explain the stethoscope?

I’ve also added a new Silly idea. Only 6 months since the last; what a flood of ideas I am having?

Originally published on my old blog site.