Infinity's Sad RUD

Almost five years ago, I wrote of voluntarily leaving Infinity Pharmaceuticals.  Particularly due to the novelty (for me) of the voluntary part, at times I've wondered how long I would have stayed there.  Indeed, the offspring asked just that question just over a week ago. I do know now when I couldn't have stayed any longer, as to my great dismay Infinity announced last week it was discontinuing its Discovery operations due to a disappointing drug trial result.

Writing Big

For the past few decades, since the early stirrings that led to the Human Genome Project, technology for reading DNA has gotten immense investment and attention.  Particularly noted, perhaps ad naseum, is the rapid decline in sequencing costs which outpaces Moore's Law for microprocessors.  The converse activity of writing DNA has generally played second fiddle, but these past few weeks have seen a flurry of headlines on that topic.

London Calling 2016: Further Thoughts

London Calling was two weeks ago, and I still haven't written anything beyond the write-up of Clive Brown's talk (note that many of the talks are now view-able via Oxford Nanopore's website).  I did finally make some headway on Storifying the tweets.  After several self-inflicted wounds (starting with failing to read my write-up of the previous experience of trying to post to Storify from the command line, but also from failing to record the details of that final critical command), I did succeed.  This time I decided to group the tweets into several broad categories -- with tweets potentially showing up in multiple categories, though these are a bit rough-and-ready and probably most folks will want to check multiple or all of the stories.  One major value I derive from this exercise is having them to refer back to, so I'll probably feel the pain of erratic characterization the most (though I also have the tweet database, so I could reslice these in new ways).  Anyway, the categories are: de novo Assembly, Bioinformatics and R9, Real Time and Read-Until, PromethION, Microbiomes, Clinical/Human (except Infectious Diseases), Infectious Disease and Biowarfare, Field Uses plus finally Library and Sample Prep (another one that failed initial upload; includes Zumbador and VolTRAX tweets).

There's supposed to be a final one encompassing everything that was left over, particularly general tweets about the conference.  Unfortunately, Storify balked at that one -- have to look again and perhaps break the set into at least two pieces.  (nope: worked with one)