nellaby's comments

nellaby | 7 years ago | on: Bypass Paywalls – A Firefox extension to bypass paywalls of many news sites

I agree completely in that high quality journalism requires the appropriate wage, and I detest advertising. However, playing devil's advocate, the flip side of pay walls is that you essentially remove/hide quality journalism from being used in the the argument against the poor quality, free to publish 'news' that is often referred to as 'fake news'. Just a thought.

nellaby | 7 years ago | on: Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature (2016) [pdf]

The amount of time I have wasted dealing with this in the past, and no doubt in the future, is much greater than I would like to admit. It highlighted the importance of plain text csv/tsv files and regular file backup/duplications. In my opinion Excel should be avoided at all costs when doing the majority of analyses, however for ease of use and data linkage sometimes it can't be avoided.

However, I don't understand why Excel wont allow the user to set a standard format for blank cells (i.e. plain text) and maintain that format until the end of time, unless the user specifically resets it.

Select all, format cell before pasting data into a sheet should work as expected. However, formatting is ignored as soon as anything is pasted into the spreadsheet.

I can't help but find this ridiculous. Is that too much to ask for? Is this behaviour more convoluted to implement or are there unforeseen consequences that are beyond me?

nellaby | 7 years ago | on: Ryanair strike hits 55,000 customers across Europe

Added to this you don't have to pay to get your tickets in seats next to each other. Ryan Air clealy makes an active effort so your seats are far away from each other. I was on a flight where my partner was next to an empty seat (one among many) but for some reason I was placed on the other side of the plane. Oh, and they make sure to mention you can't move seats before taking off. Don't listen to that dross

nellaby | 7 years ago | on: Tardigrade protein helps human DNA withstand radiation (2016)

Bare in mind that tardigrades are known for being found everywhere, including extreme environments, and therefore there would be a selective advantage in being resilient to many forms of damage such as heat, cold and radiation. Most species stick to a particular niche and therefore mitigate the need to select for such resistance genes.

nellaby | 7 years ago | on: Kola Superdeep Borehole

Really interesting experiment. Since the temperature was greater than expected would that have any bearing on being able to use bore holes for geothermal power?

I believe they are trialling this in a few places but I can't help but think that a hole that small (circumference wise!) could be easily implemented and potentially used as an energy source