In the spirit of “if it took you a while to find out how to do something, write about it”, I will detail a method to approximate the surface area of a 3D shape. Our application here was finding the surface area of a cell but it can be used on any shape. We start with a 3D point set, specified by points of interest in a single cell imaged by 3D confocal microscopy.

Reading about someone else’s recovery-after-injury story can be a bit dull. At least that was my conclusion after pressing delete on my story a moment ago. Having spared you the details, the summary is: I got injured. It hurt. It took me a year to recover because I didn’t tackle the recovery properly.

To validate our analyses, I’ve been using randomisation to show that the results we see would not arise due to chance. For example, the location of pixels in an image can be randomised and the analysis rerun to see if – for example – there is still colocalisation. A recent task meant randomising live cell movies in the time dimension , where two channels were being correlated with one another.

Well, the 2015/2016 season was one to forget for Crewe Alexandra. Relegation to League Two (English football’s 4th tier) was confirmed on 9th April with a 3-0 defeat to local rivals Port Vale. Painful. Maybe Repeat Failure is a bit strong. Under Dario Gradi, the Railwaymen eventually broke into League One/Championship (the 2nd Tier) where they punched above their weight for 8 seasons.

Fans of probability love random processes. And lotteries are a great example of random number generation. The UK National Lottery ran in one format from 19/11/1994 until 7/10/2015. I was talking to somebody who had played the same set of numbers in all of these lottery draws and I wondered what the net gain or loss has been for them over this period.

I read this article on the BBC recently about alcohol consumption in the UK. In passing it mentions how many people in the UK are teetotal. I found the number reported – 21% – unbelievable so I checked out the source for the numbers. Sure enough, ~20% of the UK population are indeed teetotal (see plots). The breakdown by gender and age is perhaps to be expected. There are fewer teetotal men than women.

It’s been a while since I did some navel-gazing about who reads this blog and where they come from. This week, quantixed is close to 25K views and there was a burst of people viewing an old post, which made me look again at the visitor statistics. Where do the readers of quantixed come from? Well, geographically they come from all around the world.

I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart . I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science. Statistics is a topic that many people find difficult to grasp. I think there are a couple of reasons for this that I’ll go into below.

I put a recent code snippet put up on the IgorExchange. It’s a simple procedure for averaging a set of 1D waves and putting the results in a new wave. The difference between this code and Average Waves.ipf (which ships with Igor) is that this function takes the average of all points in the wave and places this single value in a new wave. You can specify whether the mean or median is used for the average.

I have been doing paper of the day (#potd) again in 2014. See my previous post about this. My “rules” for paper of the day are: Read one paper each working day. If I am away, or reviewing a paper for a journal or colleague, then I get a pass. Read it sufficiently to be able to explain it to somebody else, i.e. don’t just scan the abstract and look at the figures.