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Interesting post about the decline in the sciences.

Famous Cheese on Toast recipes

I wrote this ages ago, but it's been a very busy week.



Mrs Beeton: Bake 2 loaves bread. Slice thinly 4lb strong Cheese and toast over a hot fire.

Delia Smith: A lot of people are scared of cooking cheese on toast, but it really couldn’t be simpler. Firstly, you should buy some cheese and bread. Remember to bring both of them home from the supermarket. Then, carefully cut both the cheese and the bread into neat slices, although you will often find nowadays that the bread is already sliced! The slices of cheese should ideally be thinner than the slices of bread. Next, put the cheese, flat side down, on the bread, grill and serve.

Nigel Slater: Nothing more begs to be fallen upon and devoured than a jagged lump of Cortina or Spinbola seared onto really crisp grilled bread. Insist on the best. I buy my cheese from Jaqueline Singe of La Moisie in Hartlepool and my bread from Stantio’s of Oban. For pity’s sake don’t use any of the crap they sell where you live. Toast the bread in a cast-iron griddle, put the cheese on top, and then mix it with four pints of cream.

Nigella Lawson: The essential trick, that will make your toast ooze with chin-dripping salty cheddariness, is to give it a quick blast in a brick kiln. (Yes, yes, I hear you whingeing about the expense, but is it really too much trouble to have a small extension built, or convert a squash court?)
Tear open a packet of yielding bread with your fingernails – sliced white is fine if you’re a working mum like me – crumble a rough handful of any old cheese atop, bung it on a palette and shift it briefly into the hot kiln with your fork-lift truck. And that’s it, although I sometimes allot a sleet of diced pancetta to the dish prior to firing. And other times I can’t be bothered with the bread, and just lap the hot molten curd from the floorboards like a ravenous ocelot.

On University Architecture

Earth has not anything to show more square;
The concrete towers seven stories high,
Their ugly silhouettes a waste of sky
With spots of damp and blots of disrepair
And here and there a rusting metal stair
one wouldn't like to try escaping by.
A hardy weed, is Learning, to have grown
In such forbidding gardens as it's sown.

I ponder Beauty, Science, Art and Thought
Perhaps for rather longer than I ought,
And if my window faced the other way,
I might have done a bit more work today.

A History Lesson

The Comutin friars of mediaeval Lombardy situated their monastery twenty miles from the fields in which they worked, and travelled between the two locked in small boxes towed by three-legged donkeys in order to castigate themselves for sin.
Although the monks were notoriously sickly, irritable and unproductive, and the order was eventually quashed by the Inquisition (who deemed their practices inhumane), Comutin theology nevertheless had a lasting influence on Western society.

Systems Biology is the new Functional Genomics is the new black

Imagine you are studying the medium-sized British town of Thighmarcester, and have access to all the data collected there by supermarket loyalty card schemes: what everybody bought and when, with names and addresses.
Looking at the information, you of course detect lots of patterns, and they make a fair bit of sense to you. Customers who buy cornflakes always buy milk too. In one area of town, many families never buy pork or alcohol. People named Julian buy disproportionate quantities of extra-virgin olive oil.
And so on.

In fact, there are patterns everywhere you look. You might find Marmite-eaters' beef consumption is low (because they're often vegetarian), or high (because they're often traditionally-minded Brits who like a Sunday roast), but these effects won't cancel each other out exactly. With such a huge quantity of accurate information, everything's interconnected. You can work out almost anything about the town, whether it's estimating summer rainfall from sales of barbecue charcoal, calculating the number of students at the university by measuring the peak baked-bean purchasing rates in October, or determining where and when it'd be most profitable to open a gym from the sales of sports drinks and health magazines.

Now, instead, imagine the town is called Mådeuppsala and the dataset is in Swedish. You don't understand the product names and have only a vague idea of the culture, so your findings don't always make intuitive sense. You have lots of information, but translating it into understanding is nontrivial*, and although your results are almost always significant, it won't be clear what they signify.

That's systems biology, that is.
Well, at least until they change the buzzword again.


*nontrivial, adj. impossible, or very nearly so.

Back in business

Well, here I am at my new desk, and apart from a few annoyances things are sorted out. Home is, temporarily, a big house in a little village: cute, but a long bus journey from the uni. Cromagnon flew over last week with the cats, and as of yesterday we even have a real bed to sleep on instead of an inflatable mattress.
At work, most of the first week has been taken up with finding the coffee room/pigeonholes/toilets/photocopier, obtaining a library card, swipe card, keys, email account, payroll number etc, and having conversations that go So-you're-a-new-postdoc, No-I'm-on-one-of-those-new-fellowship-things, So-whose-lab-are-you-in, Well-mine-I-suppose, blank-look. But most of that's done now, so I can start to get some work done.
And maybe a spot of blogging too.