I am the God of Hellfire, and I give you...

Fire.
I'm led to believe this was period costume in 1968.

So it took some time, but I got my five comments, and the Gods of Rock have been appeased. So without further ado here's the location of the Map of Rock:

It's behind the freaky heads.

What I'm linking to is Many Eyes, which is an interesting visualization experiment put together by the people at IBM. Christophe Viau was kind enough to point me in its direction. The concept behind Many Eyes is simple: you upload data, and then everyone can have a go at visualizing it. If you've kept a log of the weight you've squatted for every workout in the past ten years (and who hasn't?), you can upload it, and the whole wide internet can turn it into a multitude of charts and diagrams. Here is the data behind my graph. Graphs, sadly, seem to have only one visualization, so you're pretty much stuck with the visualization I linked to above. I'm not going to complain too much though: until I can build a better engine for online visualizations, my readers (all five of them) can have a poke around my graph and see who's been playing with who.

If anyone has any submissions to add to the Map of Rock, or explanations as to how Deep Purple could have turned into the awful Whitesnake, please leave them in the comments. 

Rocket Science

This is what passes for swag in the bioinformatics world:

Confused?

My co-worker arrived from a product showcase wearing the above. I appreciate the sentiment only because no-one I've talked to knows what bioinformatics is. My spellchecker still thinks it's not a word. 

I disagree with the shirt, because if a bioinformatician designed a rocket, the bolts would all be in metric, the nuts in imperial, everything else in cubits, and the whole mess would probably turn into a pinwheel of flaming death if it ever got off the ground. We're working on that.

The Rumors of my Demise have been Greatly Exaggerated

I haven't abandoned my loyal readers (all three of you); there are more exciting things in the pipeline!

The Map of Rock is going to change format and illustrate some quirks of protein-protein interaction networks. By the way, if you haven't pitched in your two cents towards getting the Map of Rock released into the wild, you can still do so here. Get on that, by the way. It's expanded to Iced Earth, thanks to input from a knowledgeable coworker, a development I feel ill at ease with.

I'm counting on my readership to be either too lazy or too well informed
to go listen to Iced Earth.

Also, there's going to be some rumbling at Annex Fitness, the strength and conditioning group I help coach. It will include lots of grainy black and white photographs of the strongmen of yore, and a chunk of relatively obscure Toronto history.

In the meanwhile, I read things:

Why You Need Domain Knowledge

More Ricky Bruch

And something that fell into my lap a month late from the minds at Starting Strength.