by Bill Hanage
As the PI of the lab, it falls to me to write the first post. Lucky me.

Seriously, blogging and writing about science for a wide audience is an increasingly important part of outreach, and just being a good publicly spirited scientific citizen. It helps communicate with our peers, potential students or postdocs and the public. Sure, the public might not be interested in a new method of likelihood free inference or the distributions of a mysterious gene in some population. But we should attempt to explain why it is important or interesting.

So, to let you know the sort of thing you are likely to find here. We are hoping to have updates from members of the lab on our work, including brief summaries of our published papers and occasional commentaries on the work of others. There’s also (this being github) a link to code that we use. Karel (blogmaster) in particular is a Git evangelist. Sometimes we will write a short piece considering how best to use the latest set of bioinformatics tools, and how we are doing so. If you are reading any of those posts, and you think we’re doing it wrong, please get in touch!

Speaking for myself, there’s also that thing when you realize 140 characters is not enough. I find myself having conversations on twitter* from time to time when I realize that the medium is fundamentally unsuited to whatever I am trying to convey. Brevity is good, but not when it wipes out nuance. In future when this happens, I will likely point people here to where I will try and explain it better. Note that these will often be a first draft of whatever I am thinking and should not be considered definitive. I hope this makes conversations more useful.

So, for now, I have to go science. See you round here, I hope.

Bill

*yes you can have conversations, instead of (or as well as) shouting matches followed by blocking people with whom you disagree