Nature podcast

Nature now has a podcast, and it's pretty good.
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html

Typefaces

Choosing typefaces can be stressful, and if you are not careful you could end up using Comic Sans, or Arial (this is Zach-style font snobbery, the most enjoyable kind). That's why I have made a list of fonts I can refer to. For those unaware, serif is better for long strings of text, particularly printed text; it's less tiring to follow.

Best serif fonts (from bamag.com): Garamond (a common font), Caslon (apparently best for books), Stone, Jaslon. I don't really like serif but sometimes there is no choice.

Best for the web: Verdana, it's common enough (unlike, say, Century Schoolbook, which I also like), and it looks nicer than Arial/Helvetica.

Best sans-serif: Apple knows a lot about nice fonts, so I figure I will copy them. They use Myriad for packaging/ads etc, and it's exceptionally nice. They also use Helvetica Neue sometimes. Finally, Lucida Grande is the "OS X font".

Bioinformatics blog

I stumbled upon this bioinformatics/genomics blog.
http://www.ghastlyfop.com/blog/

The 2005 zeitgeist is particularly interesting, it has a graph of hot topics (including machine learning methods) over the past year...
http://www.ghastlyfop.com/blog/2005/10/bioinformatics-zeitgeist-05.html

Web Tools

Two useful sets of tools for playing with websites...

www.dnsstuff.com

www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo

PhD laws

If you are doing a PhD, you should be aware of Hofstadter's law, and Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law comes from a very interesting book by Parkinson about the civil service.