What follows is a non-computer scientist’s and non-mathematician’s personal account of thoughts, ideas and discussions about using nature to compute.Years ago I was sitting on the shore watching the waves roll in, invariably and relentlessly crash into the rocks and bounce back towards the open sea in…
This morning I saw a tweet (a very unofficial one, more like a rumour) about Slack using ProseMirror for its new message box...... turns out that’s not the case, as it’s still Quill.js under the hood (Slack does use ProseMirror’s cousin, CodeMirror, for the code snippets)…
The best open source collaborative text editors and the tech behind them.…
There are awesome things happening and changing around how science is done and communicated, so I thought I'd put them in a list thingy. Let's go! Code Ocean 🌊When I first saw it used, linked from a Nature paper, I thought it was a demo and not a real, living…
Combining real-time discussion between researchers with collaborative writing and data analysis, and the ability to publish very granular findings, could result in a major leap in the scale of collaboration and velocity of research.…
First let’s take a step back and think about the definition of science: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Now, when we think about what kind of experimentation goes on in…
TL;DR: Over the previous hundred years, a lot of work has gone into standardizing the way scientific data is presented. All of this knowledge has been largely forgotten. I want us to bring it back to life. Before we talk about science, let’s take a short but scenic…
TL;DR: An open API for science helps researchers discover great software. Install the Scholar Ninja extension and you’ll get recommendations (based on software citations) on-the-fly while browsing GitHub. A while back I wrote about an open distributed search engine for science, Scholar Ninja, and about how great it…
TL;DR: I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. It uses WebRTC and magic, and is currently, like, right now, used by 0 people. It’s you who can be number…
Years ago (yes, it’s been years, don’t remind me), I wrote an application for modeling the laser ablation ICP-MS mapping process. This is a thing where you make microscopic explosions with a laser and then the little bits of the stuff get blown into a blazing torch, which…