Peer reviewing and atavisms

Summary: let's make manuscripts for review reviewer-friendly instead of atavist-editor-friendly. There are many things we carry on because of ... let us call it "tradition" to avoid calling it by its proper name: "atavism." Today I am finishing reviewing a manuscript, and I feel irritated again that the article has the figures last, by themselves, …

Changing teaching ways

You gotta change your evil ways, baby, before I stop loving you! --Santana I have been pondering lately about education. Reason being that I have been asked to teach a second year course in the undergrad biology program (genetics). This means teaching a large group of students. Now, I am not afraid at all of …

Arguing and science

Yesterday we had a colleague visiting the University across the street from mine. I know her from a couple of conferences before the visit. Still, I asked to have a time slot to chat with her. We had a nice exchange abut projects and results, and were able to find knowledge that we could share …

The Color of my Parachute

Well, before I start I should say that I have not read the book whose title I paraphrased. So, to the purists out there: no need to point this out. But I do know it is about career choices and changes, and that is enough for me to play the metaphor. Just yesterday I was …

The Dog Pause

I have presumed often that a great advantage of working with computers is that you can do your work from anywhere. As a computational biologist, this has given me the opportunity for working from home and still be programming the solution to one or another problem. Downloading databases, and such, while, for instance, putting my …

Entropy

A little history of my chaotic encounters with the concept of entropy visiting physics, chemistry, structural biology, literature, pseudoscience, and Murphy's Law.