From the famous play Ham-let's Be More Productive

OneDrive is a ducking house of cards

Comic this week is my office door IRL! Two notes: - CDP is our annual performance review - flood fill is a real PITA IRL

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Hey! Did you know I have a substack? Well, I do. And you can subscribe and get this same kind of premium content (and sometimes more detailed discussions) for FREE! (or, you know, become a paying subscriber - that's good too) open.substack.com/pub/redpenbl...

It's Thursday: How's everyone's ToDo list going? Well I hope?

"AI will make you forget how to code." HONEY I've forgotten how to code so many times in my career - AI got nothing over on me.

I debated whether to post this since it's a little off-brand for me, but once an idea like this starts it's hard to stop it coming out. But be relieved this wasn't a flow chart.

The RPBP first law of organization: *any* organizational system is the best for as long as you only have little to organize

Conrad Hal Waddington was born OTD in 1905. His “epigenetic landscape” is a diagrammatic representation of the constraints influencing embryonic development. On his 50th birthday, his colleagues gave him a pinball machine on the model of the epigenetic landscape. 🧪 🦫🦋 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #evobio

This is a subjectively scary comic for #halloween2025

shocked. shocked i tell u

BTW: I know that often times talking on via Zoom/Teams/Phone is a waaay more effective mode of communication than text/emails but I still don't have to love it.

A short poem about using the phone: Please don't call me when I'm in another meeting Please don't call me without pinging me first Please don't call me when I don't have my headphones handy Please don't call me when I do have my headphones handy Please don't call me Please

AI be like

What's in yer basement?

As coding gets more plug and play, it becomes IMPERATIVE for us as educators to teach fundamentals about what the statistical tests are comparing and assumptions. Students might not need to understand how to code things up, but they should understand what the snippets are doing and why

5 seconds of the current news seems to do the trick

It turns out that the infinite monkeys that may be put out of work from our new (and I, for one welcome them) AI overlords are actually us scientists

MMseqs2-GPU sets new standards in single query search speed, allows near instant search of big databases, scales to multiple GPUs and is fast beyond VRAM. It enables ColabFold MSA generation in seconds and sub-second Foldseek search against AFDB50. 1/n 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💿 mmseqs.com

I’m sitting here enjoying the NATURAL FLAVOR when all of the sudden the NATURAL FLAVOR kicks in

Gosh how helpful

I may be willing to give them the Gary Busey one...

One out of 3 ain't bad Google News. . . . Ok. It really is bad.

Knock, knock. Who is it? Spi-door dash

The new XKCD has to be a reference to the ant paper where ants just casually lay eggs of a different species, yes? Maybe? There are so many weird bugs its hard to know.

You can't give a monkey a hammer and call them a carpenter [me: about myself, with respect to AI expertise]

I won't say this is *every* paper, but I have trouble remembering any that weren't like this

Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

I got coal in my stocking

Today was the day BlueSky finally became Twitter

I am delighted to announce that the UW Department of Biochemistry has opened searches for TWO tenure-track positions. Descriptions and links in the following two posts.

Harsh? But true?

Biosketches, the connection cable specifications of the grant world (I'm looking at you Apple)

The feeling of seeing the alight of science in someone's eyes not because of what you taught them, but because of what you learned together? Pretty awesome.

I feel like someone MUST be making money off of biosketch formats. It's the only reason I can see that every funding agency changes their format requirements on a monthly basis.

Super-satisfying wrap up meeting with a summer intern: she identified a new dataset, that had a specific design that led to new analyses, and then we just talked through the data and came up with some really interesting hypotheses about what's going on, changing our approach to this project.

Oh nothing, just me in my microbiology office, preparing to do microbiology stuff, in my new microbiology fit

science funding rn

Update: I've made a modest $150 from Redbubble, plus a few bucks from other sources this year so far. I've just made my first donation to Planned Parenthood. My December donation will go the ACLU. Buy some stuff! Or better yet - directly donate to these causes.

An accurate description of the whole idea. (new - though admittedly, not very novel - comic)

@biodataganache.bsky.social is now up. VaLPAS: Leveraging variation in experimental multi-omics data to elucidate protein function. #ismbeccb2025 #ProteinFunction #bioinformatics

Well this is weird mashup of Forged in Fire and STTNG

‘Ok- I just got Coldplayed’ QRT with what you mean

Inaugural member right here!

Now here's an old comic that hasn't faded one bit in the years since I drew it. True now more than ever!

I'm not sure if this has gotten more true or less true in the years since I originally drew it up. What do you think? I mean - emotionally - does it get harder or easier for you to deal with rejection and critique?

Feeling punchy on a Friday evening writing a little science . fiction

The first rule of extrovert club is that you never stop talking about the extrovert club.