Some journals sound like they should be bands. Whereas some journal titles ARE in fact the same as band names. I wondered… how many journal titles are also band names. Let’s find out! The journals cited in PubMed could be downloaded as a text file from here. This list includes every MEDLINE journal – even defunct ones – as well as non-MEDLINE journals where content is is in PMC. This will do for now, but is obviously limited.

The coronavirus crisis has meant that scientific meetings and seminars have moved online. This change has led to me wondering: why don’t scientists give talks the way that musicians do gigs? The idea is: after posting a preprint or publishing a paper, a scientist advertises that they will livestream a seminar to explain the work. Attendance is free.

I’m a long-term fan of Weezer. Such was the brilliance of their first two albums that I have stuck with them through thick and thin. And dear me, there has been some very thin music. Nonetheless I own every album – thirteen of them. Among them are six albums entitled “Weezer”. These records are colloquially referred to by the colour of the album. In chronological order: blue, green, red, white, teal and black.

As a scientist and a music lover, I see parallels in the process of doing science and in making music. They’re both creative endeavours after all. The lab’s latest paper is like an album release. The authors of the paper are like the players in the band. See, the analogy works quite well.

Over the holidays, I had an idea about looping an animation between two images. I wrote some code to do this in Igor Pro (sorry, no R this time…). This post describes how the code works and how you can make a similar animation. There was a reason to do this animation, but as a proof of principle I used two band logos.

I was recently reminded of the wonders of paulstretch by a 8-fold slowed down version of Pyramid Song by Radiohead. Paulstretch is an audio manipulation widget that can stretch or compress the time of an audio recording. Note that it doesn’t “slow down” or “speed up” a recording, it resamples the audio and recasts it over a different time scale while maintaining the pitch.

I’ve been following the tweets from an account called Albums You Must Hear @Albums2Hear. Each tweet is an album recommended by the account owner. I’m a sucker for lists of Albums That I Must Hear Before I Die since I’m always interested in new (or not so new) music recommendations.

BBC 6Music recently went back in time to 1994. This made me wonder what albums released that year were my favourites. As previously described on this blog, I have this information readily available. So I quickly crunched the numbers.

I’ve returned from the American Society for Cell Biology 2016 meeting in San Francisco. Despite being a cell biologist and people from my lab attending this meeting numerous times, this was my first ASCB meeting.

I don’t often write about music at quantixed but I recently caught Survivor’s “Eye of The Tiger” on the radio and thought it deserved a quick post. Surely everyone knows this song: a kind of catchall motivational tune.