I was happy to notice just a minute ago that the first blog items covering the ACS meeting are popping up: C&EN has set up a dedicated blog about the meeting, Nature’s Sceptical Caterine wrote she has reached the meeting too, Richard wrote about the scent of bugs in wine (or so), and Kyle won’t make it other than tomorrow. Additionally, Nature is running a coverage of the ACS meeting.

I arrived in Chicago yesterday afternoon. Much warmed than the cold Chicago the ACS promised me, so my winter coat was really not necessary. Is this global warming? Or was the ACS simply wrong?

I had some fun today with making prints of reservations etcetera for my trip to the ACS conference in Chicago. Went over to the website to make a print of the location of the hotel I am in. (Intercontinental Chicago: in case you want to leave me a message to meet up over breakfast or so.) Anyway, so at the ACS website I found a notice that the ACS Housing people closed down and that I should contact the hotel directly. Fine, no problem.

Chemists are picking up Yahoo Pipes, or, as Noel calls them, Pipeline Pilot for RSS feeds. I tend to agree, as the source of the workflows are closed, that is, at least require registering to the Yahoo webpage.

QDIS blogged about Bristol-Myers and AstraZeneca teaming up for a new drug called dapagliflozin. Now, dapagliflozin is, this week, the most used search keyword in Google, leading to Chemical blogspace.

Jim reported about SPECTRa being in the news and ./ about Toward a 3D Search Engine. These two items have in coming that they deal with the article Ultrafast shape recognition for similarity search in molecular databases by Ballester and Richards (DOI:10.1098/rspa.2007.1823). The NewScientist wrote up their angle on it, with a quote from Henry Rzepa.

Nascent reported that Nature Network v2 has gone life. Never too anxious to try something new, I created an account and signed in. I even joined two groups: Bioinformatics and Semantic Web for the Life Sciences.

Some InChI’s are short, such as that for methane: InChI=1/CH4/h1H4. Others are long (think crambin ), and you don’t want to show them inline. Or you just want to show them anyway, but still want the chemistry to be understood. Here come the invisible InChI’s.

Jörg’s PhD book Data Mining und Graph Mining auf molekularen Graphen - Chemoinformatik und molekulare Kodierungen für ADME/Tox-QSAR-Analysen has a dump of the JavaDoc of the GroupContributionPredictor in JOELib (Figure 3.2, page 43). There are two nice things to the shown JavaDoc: 1. it has links to Wikipedia; 2. it has a Further Reading section.

Slashdot reported on D-Wave’s recent demo of their 16-qubit quantum computing system. Video’s of the demo can be watched on Google Video.

The last twelve months or so, I have been doing two jobs (excluding hobbies of mine, such as Chemical blogspace): my postdoc in the group of Christoph Steinbeck on computer aided structure elucidation, and finishing my PhD.