Tag Archives: python
Python: shared birthdays
A few days ago I found myself having a vague recollection of a statistics problem presented at some unknown level in my education. All I could remember was that it had to do with having a room full of people … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, science
LabTeX
Lab notebooks are the linchpin of any scientific endeavor, since they serve as proof for everything that an investigator has done (and as a personal reference for long-forgotten protocols). The standard is to use a bound notebook with handwritten (in … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, HowTo, science
Python: Monty Hall modeling
You’ve all heard this classic statistics problem, based on an old game show: A contestant is shown 3 doors. Only one of those three doors hides something of value to the contestant (perhaps a new car), while the other two … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, science
average gene length in prokaryotes (part 1)
One of my side research projects involves processing large numbers of genomes (specifically, all fully-sequenced prokaryotic genomes). Since I’m playing with the data anyway, sometimes I end up with random questions that can be answered with what I already have on … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, science
Python: GEB and Wondrousness
While perusing a bookstore a couple years ago, I stumbled upon a fascinating book by Douglas Hofstadter called Godel, Escher, Bach. If you like math, biology, music, art, computer science, and philosophy, this is really an amazing read (though, admittedly, … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, science
Python: Clean up and translate nucleotide sequences
Some simple, hopefully useful, and totally non-optimized functions for working with nucleotide sequence data (note that there are many more tools as part of the biopython distribution, if you’re interested in learning the library) : First, for cleaning up a … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, science
Connecting Python to the Web at UT Southwestern
While working on a little Python script to do some datamining for lab, I stumbled upon a serious problem: When connecting to the Internet via the school’s network, whether hard-wired, wifi, or through VPN, I could not get Python to … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, HowTo
Python: ad infinitum
In Seth’s post on dice rolling, he briefly mentioned something called a “while loop”. It has the basic structure while (this is true): (do this) Note: Courier font or italics show code. WordPress is douchey about font-changing, so it’s easier … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software, HowTo
Python: Getting Started
Awww… isn’t she the cutest little thing? Python is both a cuddly pet (when in ball form) and an awesome programming language. I’m well aware that most people don’t equate “awesome” and “computer programming”, but that’s simply because most people … Continue reading
Filed under computers/software
