from the desk of stinkpot

Our paper on ancient genome evolution was published online yesterday.  It’s been remarkable watching news stories about the work spread online; as a scientist and geek, it’s thrilling to see my work on sites like Wired or Slashdot.  There’s also been some press coverage from less techie sources, like MSNBC and US News. To which […]

it’s been a long past week,  as i’ve been gearing up for handing in my thesis in T-14 days. part of the headache has been due to catching a bug in some old code and having to rerun 3 years of work over the weekend. i told our computer cluster sysadmin my sob story,  who […]

heard larry wall, creator and benevolent dictator for life of the perl programming language, speak today. glad i went.  the first 15 minutes or so was a bizarre stream-of-consciousness race through about 100 1-word slides.  it was both profound and absurd, both celebration and diatribe.  equally fun was seeing MIT in its finest geek culture […]

i’ve discovered a new program for my mac this weekend that should make for a lot of fun w/ our summer backpacking pictures: autopano pro.   checkout what it did with 9 hand-held photos from bohol, philippines:

i’ve only recently discovered: a) text messaging on my phone; b) t9 word completion.  i’m going to argue that i was born about 5 years too early for texting to be second-nature to me, the way using google comes so instinctively to my generation. in any case, a texting feature i discovered on my phone […]

i got a little distracted lately and began designing our lab website. i ended up getting a lot distracted; iweb is incredibly easy to use and making extremely visually appealing websites with very little effort is addictive. if you’re interested in getting to see what happens when abercrombie & fitch meets a microbiology lab, check […]

ugh, it cost me two hours of sleep, but i finally got lightbox and gallery doing something that doesn’t suck. check it out! [click on one of the images] update: in another colossal  waste of several hours, i’ve finally wrestled the lightbox script into working with images linked from blog posts.  clicking on images in […]

i don’t know why, and i don’t know how, but i’ve just come across a website that streams the french open for free (and even shows matches earlier in the day!) http://video.tennischannel.com/schedule.jsp this makes christina and my vow of no-cable-tv so much more bearable.

insane how eloquent americans were 50 years ago.  although perhaps, back then, we only put people who we didn’t want to embarrass on tv.

… at reproducing low-end frequencies?  (and assuming they’re good enough, how good your low frequency hearing is?) i’ve uploaded some files here to give you an idea. although, i guess if you’ve got lousy low-frequency hearing, it’ll be interesting to see if you can still tell how deep your speakers’ bass is.  perhaps you can […]