Category Archives: Humour

In defence of chaos

I commend you on your skepticism, but even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidæ on our hands.

Douglas Adams

It’s not every day that someone recommends a new whizzbang note-taking software. It’s every second day, or third if you’re lucky. They all have their bells and whistles: Obsidian turns your notes into a funky graph that pulses with information, the web of complexity of your stored knowledge entrapping your attention as you dazzle in its splendour while also the little circles jostle and bounce in decadent harmony. Notion’s aesthetic simplicity belies its comprehensive capabilities, from writing your notes so you don’t need to, to exporting to the web so that the rest of us can read what you didn’t write because you didn’t need to. To pronounce Microsoft OneNote requires only five syllables, efficiently cramming in two extra words while only being one bit slower to say than the mysterious rock competitor. Apple notes can be shared with all the other Apple people who live their happy Apple lives in happy Apple land – and sometimes this even works!

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How to make ML your entire personality

In our silly little day-to-day lives in over in stats, we forget how accustomed we all are to AI being used in many of the things we do. Going home for the holidays, though, I was reminded that the majority of people (at least, the majority of my family members) don’t actually make most of their choices according to what a random, free AI tool suggests for them. Unfortunately, though, I do! Here are some of my favourite non-ChatGPT free tools I use to make sure everyone knows that working in ML is, in fact, my entire personality.

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OPIGmas, 2023

Our annual, end-of-Michaelmas OPIG celebrations took place this at the start of December in the MCR (Middle Common Room) at Lady Margaret Hall.

OPIGmas is a much-anticipated combination of pot luck, Secret Santa, and party games.

Perhaps Jay’s megaphone topped the list of gag gifts…

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How to replace bike ball bearings when your steering sounds crunchy

Over the last few months my bicycle steering axle started freezing up, to the point where the first thing I did before getting on my bike in the morning was jerk the handlebars from side to side aggressively to loosen it up. It made atrocious guttural sounds and bangs when I did and navigating Oxford by bike was becoming more treacherous by the day as I swerved from left to right trying to wrestle my front wheel’s fork in the right direction. It was time to undertake some DIY…

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OPIG Retreat 2023

With the new academic year approaching, OPIG flew off to the rural paradise of Wilderhope Manor in sunny Shropshire for their annual group getaway. The goal of this retreat was assumed to be a mixture of team building, ‘conference-esque’ academic immersion, a reconnection with nature in the British countryside, and of course, a bit of fun. It is fair to say OPIG Retreat ‘23 delivered on all accounts, leaving the OPIGlets refreshed and ready for what the next year may bring.

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AI Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter

Recently, I’ve been using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and other methods, to predict the binding affinity of antibodies from their sequence. However, nine months ago, I applied a CNN to a far more important task – distinguishing images of butter from margarine. Please check out the GitHub link below to learn moo-re.

https://github.com/lewis-chinery/AI_cant_believe_its_not_butter

The dangers of Conda-Pack and OpenMM

If you are running lots of little jobs in SLURM and want to make use of free nodes that suddenly become available, it is helpful to have a way of rapidly shipping your environments that does not rely on installing conda or rebuilding the environment from scratch every time. This is useful with complex rebuilds where exported .yml files do not always work as expected, even when specifying exact versions and source locations.

In these situations a tool such a conda-pack becomes incredibly useful. Once you have perfected the house of cards that is your conda environment, you can use conda-pack to save that exact state as a tar.gz file.

conda-pack -n my_precious_env -o my_precious_env.tar.gz

This can provide you with a backup to be used when you accidentally delete conda from your system, or if you irreparable corrupt the environment and cannot roll back to the point in time when everything worked. These tar.gz files can also be copied to distant locations by the use of rsync or scp, unpacked, sourced and used without installing conda…

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Cosmology via Structural Biology and Half-Lives of Teaspoons: Bizarre Papers from Around the Internet

I don’t know if anyone out there shares this peculiar hobby of mine (God, I hope not!), but I often find myself scouring the depths of the internet for some truly bizarre academic papers. Though there is an endless supply of such content to keep one entertained (read: distract yourself during those afternoons you planned to be productive but ended up succumbing to the lunch food coma), I’ve managed to compile a short list of the most fascinating ones for your enjoyment!

  • The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute (Lim et al, 2005, BMJ, doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1498)

This fantastic and robust study examines the enigmatic phenomenon of disappearing teaspoons in a shared kitchen—an issue of acute importance to all of us who rely on these tiny utensils. The authors reveal the shocking truth about teaspoons’ shockingly short half-life in research institutes. The question remains: does this phenomenon extend to other cutlery as well?

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Le Tour de Farce 2023

16:30 BST 27/06/2023 Oxford, UK. A large number of scientists were spotting riding bicycles across town, to the consternation of onlookers. The event was the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG) “tour de farce” 2023. A circular bike ride from the Department of Statistics, to The Up in Arms (Marston), The Trout Inn (Godstow), The Perch (Port Meadow) and The Holly Bush (Osney Island). This spurred great bystander-anxiety due to one of a multitude of factors: the impressive size of the jovial horde, the erraticism of the cycling, the deplorable maintenance of certain bikes, and the unchained bizarrerie of the overheard dialogue.

Dissociated Press.
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