Comments for Molecularist

Comment on Remixing the Internet? by Welcome, Bottlenose Intelligent Social Dashboard. What took ya? | Molecularist

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:02:10 +0000

[...] 2006, the poster child was NetVibes. But I though we could do better. Some started talking about personal aggregators, Digital [...]

Comment on Domestic-use in-vessel composters – really cool by charlie

charlie — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:50:17 +0000

Of course, vermiculture is also an in-vessel system that can be used in the home.

Comment on Domestic-use in-vessel composters – really cool by Recycling organic waste

Recycling organic waste — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:12:47 +0000

Nature mill is the automatic compost bin that compost the waste in a minute and i think now the nature mill is necessary thing to use in the house.

Comment on Viral infection: The gut microbiota: friend or foe? : Nature Reviews Microbiology by PGYx

PGYx — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:07:35 +0000

Agree that barriers to casual reading are far too high. Yet another reason I’m grateful to be a med resident — full access to most papers I care to read! Thanks for sharing.

Comment on Thoughts on completing NaNoWriMo by Pause for station identification | Molecularist

Pause for station identification | Molecularist — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:33:51 +0000

[...] thinking and we’ll have a blast. Until then, I’ll keep writing (I managed to complete NaNoWriMo last year) and fermenting [...]

Comment on Teach me: Does Hadoop signal the end of the database? by Janne

Janne — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:29:36 +0000

No.

What Hadoop and other NoSQL solutions, such as Cassandra, allow you to exchange certain properties of SQL databases to other properties, which are turning out to be very useful for a lot of cases.

Interestinly, there are even more structured databases such as Neo4J which are a part of the NoSQL movement, but is designed to provide very efficient graph representations.

However, data modeling isn’t the same thing as data searching; how you store the data is different on how the data is indexed, which is what searching typically consists of. E.g. Cassandra is very efficient in storing very large amounts of data and writing and reading it really fast; however, yet the query language used to search the contents is very similar to SQL.

Hadoop and Cassandra and Riak and MongoDB *are* databases. They just enforce different kinds of limits, and relax other kinds of limits when compared to Postgres or MySql. Mostly they remove the need to fix your data structure in advance on a database level, which is really useful for programmers who need to constantly adjust their schemas as the application grows. It allows for more agile development.

But whether this has anything to do with searchability or indexing? Nah. It’s all just a series of tradeoffs.

Comment on Teach me: Does Hadoop signal the end of the database? by rom

rom — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:38:37 +0000

Good post.
That unfortunately makes sense.
Processing power is a cheaper solution than a well structured model.
I suppose it depends how much data we’re talking about, and how each search is performed, but for a fast response there will always needs to be an index, and consequently a basic structure.
I too rely on spotlight, but I still keep things in folders since I often have to transfer specific sets of data.
As far as I’m aware, the human brain is erratically ‘structured’, and we seem to be doing alright.

Comment on Designing Biology at SXSW 2012? by A “shucks” followed by a “yay” and the some: SXSW 2012 panels announced | Molecularist

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:58:06 +0000

[...] Design was one of the ideas I thought would have legs, but I just didn’t have the chops, cred, or connections to have pulled it off, so I am glad [...]

Comment on An eye for success: Jobs tribute from thankful scientists by molAdmin

molAdmin — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:30:53 +0000

Wow! Thanks for sharing! And may your success on the Mac continue.

Comment on An eye for success: Jobs tribute from thankful scientists by Brad Larson

Brad Larson — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:43:01 +0000

To be honest, I was more of a Wozniak fan in the early days, due to his hacker / prankster style. I learned to program on the Apple II+, a skill that has served me well as a scientist and an engineer. I gave up on Apple’s products when the Macintosh superseded the Apple II line, which I thought at the time had a lot more potential than the Mac. I may have been wrong there.

However, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and brought the Unix core of the NeXT OS into Mac OS X, I started paying attention again. Several years ago, we decided we needed to focus on a single platform for development of our robotic control software and did an honest evaluation of Windows, Mac, and Linux. I was genuinely surprised to find how much more efficient Cocoa let you be as a developer, and how welcoming the community there was, so we switched all of our control computers to Macs and haven’t looked back. We now ship an iMac with each of our systems, which print microscale volumes of fluid for fabricating microcircuitry, biomolecules for microarrays, or even live cells for artificial tissue patterning.

On the side, I’ve spun the same Mac development skills I acquired into some hobby iOS development I do on the side. I wrote an open source molecular modeler for the iPhone and iPad called Molecules, which has been downloaded nearly 1.8 million times to date. The stories I hear about Apple’s mobile devices being used in the lab and the classroom have impressed upon me the huge impact that Apple’s current products are having in education and the sciences.

Moving our development to the Mac (and iOS) has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last several years, and it continues to pay dividends.