This is what passes for swag in the bioinformatics world:
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| 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.
That's ok, my spellchecker still swears that "reinforcer" is not a word, even though it's perhaps the most commonly used word in the field of ABA.
ReplyDeleteThe first question that springs to my mind is: is the problem of having specific items use different units of measurement unique to bioinformatics? or is it more widespread than that? The next question that follows from this is: do all bioinformatricians (no idea of that word actually exists or not) use these units of measurement for each of the specific items or is it country specific on top of the item specificity issue? Because if all bioinformatricians use the same terms for specific items worldwide than perhaps it is not as large a problem as it appears, especially if there is an agreed upon way of translating metric to imperial to cubits etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm poking a little fun at the fact that we can't decide on a single universal naming convention for the proteins we're studying, thus making any collaboration a tedious nightmare of translating between different protein/gene nomenclatures:
ReplyDeletehttp://parsedammit.blogspot.com/2012/01/rituals-of-cult-of-cthulhu-as-practiced.html
It's not country specific, it's lab specific (there was talk of an in-house naming convention for our own data, so yeah, that happens too).
It's not a problem unique to bioinformatics. If it were, I wouldn't have three different sets of hex keys (imperial, metric and torx) sitting in my small tool drawer. It's just worse in this field.