Jasp’s Blog

On my (one of my) first day(s) at school I arrived to find a new delivery of BBC Micros. The slightly imposing size of the system sat on its trolley obviously impressed a young me, yet what surprised me even more was seeing the system in operation. I was fascinated, and immediately decided it was [...]

DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier, and in short is a permanent ‘address’ (like a URL) which will always point at a particular document. In particular DOI’s are used to make it easy to find academic papers, and saves one having to find the journal’s webpage, navigate to its archives, pick up the volume in [...]

I had intended to post this nearer to the date, but it skipped me by, so here it is now.
On August 1st 2007 I reached the tenth anniversary of my first forays onto the internet. Way back in 1997 my family first got on line with an ISP called Zetnet which still seems to be [...]

One of the problems with working in science is explaining what you do. For some people a quick, “I’m a Scientist,” is enough. Science either scares them slightly, or at least confuses them, or perhaps they are just not interested, either way they don’t push the matter any further. However sometimes I find someone whose [...]

More news from the lab and this time its me ranting about the behaviour of my cells.
When investigating the function of a particular gene one tactic geneticists have availible to them is to break the gene and see what happens. One way of achieving this is to ‘knock it out,’ to entirely remove the gene [...]

I had meant to remove the link to my website from the bottom of the E-mail, not because I have anything here that I want to hide, but that it just forms a bit of a strange introduction to myself. Of course it would be slightly silly to try and hide things if you are [...]

Oh dear. I like Wikipedia, its a lot of fun and usually reasonably accurate, but I just stumbled across an article which was almost entirely false. I can understand a few misconceptions sneaking in, but what possesses someone to write about a topic on which they clearly have no idea; especially when its something that [...]

In the past twelve hours I have recieved over two hundered E-mails, the vast majority of which are spam. Many of these were ‘bounced’ messages, that is they were returned to me because they couldn’t reach their destination. So why is this, do I have a virus?
Well no, especially as my computer is currently at [...]

Not long now and I will finally be able to use the thing, I’m actually excited. Its a bit strange actually, at 22 I thought my majorly exciting christmases (Or christma, but that lacks the necessary magic and ‘white christmas’ suggests that christmases is correct) had ended, at least until I had children myself (Something [...]

Its all been a bit hectic recently, as its been the transition from my Masters (Which I passed with distinction) to the PhD. However between this I though I’d take a bit of a break, so spent a few weeks at home, catching up with family and friends. Unlike the move to university there are [...]