Scribl is Neat!

Speaking of Twitter, one thing I've found it highly valuable for is discovering new tools and ideas in the bioinformatics space.  It's not a replacement for all my other methods, but I've discovered things I otherwise would have missed.  A great case in point is Scribl, which I discovered over the holiday period and vowed to try out this morning.  WOW!

BTW, I'm on Twitter

For a long while, my only interaction with Twitter was to monitor key hashtags during AGBT and ASHG.  However, I've gotten myself sucked in and am now actually contributing.  As suggested by the username OmicsOmicsBlog (archives at this link), I'm treating this primarily as an extension of this space.  So if you look you'll mostly find genomics, bioinformatics and other geeky stuff. I post more often, given that it's actually possible to author tweets on my smartphone (I once had delusions of writing blog posts there; it's really not workable). To date, I've retweeted more than I've originated.  It's certainly a challenge to compress thoughts into 140 characters.

I'm sure this has been covered elsewhere, but the 140 character limit is a weird holdover from text messaging, which itself was a weird technological cram job on the cellular voice standards.  What would Twitter be like if that limit had been higher or lower?

Why Next Gen Now?

A confession: I've considered writing this piece for a lot of years now; not quite as many as this space has existed, but many years.  Some ideas get stuck in my head, but I never force them out through my fingers.  Finally,with this one, I will pose the question: Why did "next-generation" sequencing happen when it did?