Quaternions are essentially magic. With just four numbers, they can describe the position and orientation of an object in space. For example, the rotation of an object about one axis. Consecutive rotations can also be described by a quaternion.

A while ago, I set up a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero cameras to make long-term time lapse movies. To recap: the idea was to take pictures every ten minutes and turn them into a movie. The process is totally automated so that every day, the photos from each Pi get saved to a server, and then processed into a movie that gradually gets longer and longer. At the end of the week, if the back up went OK, the photos get deleted from the Pi’s SD card.

This post follows on from the last post on BBSRC Responsive Mode funding. Another frequent question from applicants is: “How much can I ask for?” One answer is: the same amount as successful grants. This information is freely available and can be downloaded from the UKRI website. All awarded grants can be searched (even those that have completed) using their database.

This month I spent a lot of time evaluating proposals for BBSRC Committee D. At the same time a number of my colleagues were also preparing BBSRC applications for the next round. A question came up: Is it best to put Track Record before Case For Support or vice versa? If you have no idea what I mean, a brief explanation. The “Case for Support” is a document up to 8 pages which is the meat of a BBSRC Response Mode application.

This is a quick set of tips to improve your Twitter experience. YMMV on these tips. Plus I can see Twitter changing things so that they no longer work, but this advice is correct as of today.

I have been running a pi-hole to block ads on my home network for a while. It’s great! Not only are ads blocked, but it speeds up internet browsing because… the ads do not load. I wondered if it would be possible to use a pi-hole to make a child-safe internet experience to protect the little people in the house. Sure, there are ways to do this in most routers but they are not ideal.

Long-time readers might remember the short-lived series on quantixed called The Digital Cell. There is a reason why I stopped these posts, which I can now reveal… The Digital Cell will soon be a book! Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, The Digital Cell is a handbook to help cell and developmental biologists get to grips with programming, image analysis, statistics and much more.

There is an entertaining rumour going around about the journal Nature Communications . When I heard it for the fourth or fifth time, I decided to check out whether there is any truth in it. Sometimes it is put another way: cell biology papers drag down the impact factor of Nature Communications , or that they don’t deserve the high JIF tag of the journal because they are cited at lower rates. Could this be true?

Time for an update to a previous post. For the past few years, I have been using an automated process to track citations to my lab’s work on Google Scholar (details of how to set this up are at the end of this post). Due to the nature of how Google Scholar tracks citations, it means that citations get added (hooray!) but might be removed (booo!). Using a daily scrape of the data it is possible to watch this happening.

A while back I visited Artistes & Robots in Paris. Part of the exhibition was on the origins of computer-based art. Nowadays this is referred to as generative art , where computers generate artwork according to rules specified by the programmer.