Blogs are good?

Artificial organs validates the blog.

RNAi

To me, RNAi was always a confusing mess of different biochemical processes. This animation brings it all into sharp relief. I can't stress how sweet it is.

Journals

What are the most awesome journals? My favourites are Nature [Reviews] Genetics, Trends in Genetics, and Genome Research. Genome Biology also seems to have good data-set papers. I don't know many people that read Trends X, but those journals have a lot of great reviews on cutting edge science. Diane mentioned Bioessays to as being a good one, and I quite like it, though I have to go through Lane library's eJournals to get it for some reason.

Serafim's blog

Serafim's group also has a blog.

Text files and Unix

I often have large text files to deal with. There are three essential Unix utilities for doing this (without resorting to awk).

1. Less: is just like more, except better. You can go backwards, and use '/' to search (like vi). And it doesn't load the whole file into memory.
2. Sort: can sort a file according to one of its fields. For instance, "sort -k 10 -n file" sorts "file" by the 10th field, and does so numerically (as opposed to alphabetically). Sort -k 10,11,12 also works as you would expect.
3. Cut: allows you to look at the first n columns of a file. For instance, "cut -c0-100 file" shows the first 100 characters of each line in "file". If you have a big DNA sequence, all on one line, then you can cut out your area of interest easily.

"sort -k 10 file |cut -c0-100 |less" = sweeeet....

A good chinese restaurant in Palo Alto

Try Windy's if you are looking for good reasonably-priced chinese food in a pleasant environment. Jing Jing's seems to be the usual destination of choice for chinese around Stanford. I am not really sure why, except maybe because people don't know about Windy's, which to my mind is far superior. Here is a review from a few years ago.

Drosophila resources

Anyone interested in Drosophila as a model organism might enjoy this article from Nature Reviews Genetics. It covers the (many, many) available data sources you could use for your integromics.