One of the people I enjoyed seeing at Science Foo Camp this year was Joshua Bloch. Josh is a Java Junkie [1,2,3] and software engineer at Google. When he wasn’t playing harmonica around the foo camp fire (see picture right), he was giving interesting talks about optical illusions, some of which can be found in his book Java Puzzlers. So I bought the book, and have been doing a puzzle a day to keep the doctor away.

Today, the 20th July 2009, is the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing. There has been plenty of global coverage, stargazing, astronautical analysis and heavenly commentary recently. But for me personally, the Apollo 11 anniversary brings back fond memories of rocket science lessons [1] – specifically, the things I learned in Chemistry at school.

The fourth International Science Foo Camp (scifoo) 2009 has just concluded. Here are some very brief and incomplete notes and links from some of the sessions on the second day (Saturday), see the scholarly kitchen for a report on the first day.

So, I’m going to San Francisco and on to the Googleplex in the heart of Silly Valley, California for Science Foo Camp (scifoo) 2009. As I put the Flowers In My Hair (what’s left of it) and confirm my booking at the Hotel California I’m not just California Dreamin’ but California Googlin’. Just how many American and Californian musical clichés it is possible to cram into one blog post and accompanying iPod playlist?

Graffiti artist or blogger? So I was passing through Bristol the other day, a fine city that has given the world many things. Perhaps one of the best known (apart from the trip-hop and slavery) is the renegade graffiti artist called Banksy who during July and August has an exhibition of work on at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. This show is well worth a visit – take a look at banksy.co.uk and the links below for a taster.

Fabio Rinaldi is currently visiting Manchester from the University of Zurich, he will be doing a seminar on Monday 6th July, the details of which are below. References Rinaldi, F., Kappeler, T., Kaljurand, K., Schneider, G., Klenner, M., Clematide, S., Hess, M., von Allmen, J., Parisot, P., Romacker, M., &

[This post is part of an ongoing series about impact factors] The latest results from the annual impact factor boxing world championship contest are out. This is a combat sport where scientific journals are scored according to their supposed influence and impact in Science.

A brief report (well just some scribbled notes, bullet points and links really) on the third and final day of Network Applications and Tools in Biology (NETTAB) 2009 in Catania, Sicily.

It is great to see the eminent french football philosopher and scientist Eric Cantona back in his adopted hometown of Manchester.

This is a  brief report and some links from the second day of Network Applications and Tools in Biology (NETTAB 2009) in Catania, Sicily. There were two keynotes on the RNA WikiProject [1] by Alex Bateman and myExperiment [2] (by me) as as well as presentations by (I think but I wasn’t concentrating enough) Dietlind Gerloff, Guiliano Armano, Frédéric Cadier and Leandro Ciuffo.

Well I was going to blog about last weeks Open Biomedical Ontologies workshop, but Susanna-Assunta Sansone at the EBI has already done it via some very detailed minutes.