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.

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.

I’ve previously written about analysing my iTunes library and about generating Smart Playlists in iTunes. This post takes things a bit further by generating a “perfect playlist” outside of iTunes… it is exclusively for nerds . How can you put together a perfect playlist? What are your favourite songs? How can you tell what they are?

I saw this great tweet (fairly) recently: I thought this was such a great explanation of when to submit your paper. It reminded me of a diagram that I sketched out when talking to a student in my lab about a paper we were writing. I was trying to explain why we don’t exaggerate our findings. And conversely why we don’t undersell our results either. I replotted it below:

I thought I’d compile a list of songs related to biomedical science. These were all found in my iTunes library. I’ve missed off multiple entries for the same kind of thing, as indicated.

Back of the envelope calculations for this post. An old press release for a paper on endocytosis by Tom Kirchhausen contained this fascinating factoid: If this is true it is absolutely staggering. Let’s check it out. A synaptic vesicle is ~40 nm in diameter.

I realised recently that I’ve maintained a consistent iTunes library for ~10 years. For most of that time I’ve been listening exclusively to iTunes, rather than to music in other formats.

A bit of navel gazing for this post. Since moving the blog to wordpress.com in the summer, it recently accrued 5000 views.

An IgorPro tip this week. The default font for plots is Geneva. Most of our figures are assembled using Helvetica for labelling. The default font can be changed in Igor Graph Preferences, but Preferences need to be switched on in order to be implemented. Anyway, I always seem to end up with a mix of Geneva plots and Helevetica plots.

What is your h-index on Twitter? This thought crossed my mind yesterday when I saw a tweet that was tagged #academicinsults It occurred to me that a Twitter account is a kind of micro-publishing platform. So what would “publication metrics” look like for Twitter? Twitter makes analytics available, so they can easily be crunched. The main metrics are impressions and engagements per tweet.