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Category Archives: Bioinformatics

Programming, simplicity and art

Programming, the writing of computer code in order to solve a specific problem, is a new intellectual discipline. It has a history going back to logic and mathematics, but it is relatively new as a human endeavour. It is constrained by hardware, by mathematics, by programming languages, and what we might call technical culture: APIs, […]

Posted 19 January 2024 † Johan § Computer science § Life § Philosophy § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Covid-19 and time

I can now conclusively answer the question raised at the end of my blog post from December 2019: the 2020s are not a decade of orderly peace. What a strange year. But weren’t years always strange? Time passes not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. A year spent with Covid-19 seems to have passed differently from […]

Posted 12 May 2021 † Johan § Computer science § Life § Philosophy § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

The year and decade in review. 2020s: orderly peace?

2019 comes to a close, and with it the 2010s. Below are a few thoughts on these periods of time. The most significant book I’ve read in 2019 is probably Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The German title, literally “Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Rule” more closely reflects the contents of this monograph. Arendt […]

Posted 30 December 2019 † Johan § Computer science § Life § Philosophy ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Nietzschean toxicology

Although one of my main projects is software for toxicology and toxicogenomics, my background in toxicology is not as strong as in, for example, computer science, and I’m lucky to be able to rely on experienced collaborators. With that said, I’d still like to try to speculate about the field through a mildly Nietzschean lens. Toxicology […]

Posted 25 January 2018 † Johan § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) °

Interactive toxicogenomics

If you work in toxicology or drug discovery, you might be familiar with the database Open TG-GATEs, a large transcriptomics database that catalogues gene expression response to well-known drugs and toxins. This database was developed by Japan’s Toxicogenomics Project during many years, as a private-public sector partnership, and remains a very valuable resource. As with […]

Posted 04 May 2017 † Johan § ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,