101–110 of 518 posts
the paper announcing the new guidelines of renaming genes, a work of fundamental importance to all scientists in the world, cannot be read without an expensive subscription to the journal.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-020-0669-3
Thanks science (sarcasm!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " To people calling, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?"" I respectfully disagree with this. Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data. It's often the default program affiliated with a .csv filetype on people's computers, but trying to get an entire field of scientific research to rewrite itself based on its glorified bugs is...wrong, in my opinion. If…
>based on its glorified bugs If someone types MARCH1, DEC1, OCT4, SEPT1 into a column, why should Excel not treat these as dates? Probably 99.999% of users would prefer this auto-understanding. To make users have to then select cell formatting and select date is a terrible UI decision. It's odd to call such a useful feature a bug. >Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data But it's excellent for a ma…
It is super hard to figure out a way to import data into excel without triggering auto-conversions. I knew a way a few years ago when I was dealing with lots more biologists, but I have forgotten now. If I had to do it now, I would write XLSX directly then manually check the file in Excel, because Excel is fundamentally untrustworthy.
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I don't disagree completely with this, but just want to point out that it's kind of a bad smell to have computational biologists who are - as someone in the article puts it - computationally illiterate. I have met lots of these types over the years, and usually their methods are kind of a gong show. If you can't properly sanitize your data inputs on your column headers, why should I trust that you've treated the rest…
I have a strong feeling that, if people really put an effort into reading and replicating more papers, we would find that a lot of what's being published is simply meaningless. In grad school I had a subletting roommate for a while who was writing code to match some experimental data with a model. He showed me his model. It was quite literally making random combinations of various trigonometric functions, absolute va…
Seriously, I hardly trust the program anymore. I always need to get the truth from Python and Pandas.
Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.
My mind is blown that Excel's usability is so bad that the representation of the human genome itself has to adapt around it's undesired behaviour. As in, the history of genetics research is now irreversibly linked with the shortcomings of this one software product, which just happens to be incapable of describing the genetics of the organisms that created it.
It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)
Just type '01/02 or ="01/02" and get on with your life
Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.
Also, the main problem is that excel changes your input instead of just misinterpreting it. The difference being, the original will be gone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " To people calling, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?"" I respectfully disagree with this. Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data. It's often the default program affiliated with a .csv filetype on people's computers, but trying to get an entire field of scientific research to rewrite itself based on its glorified bugs is...wrong, in my opinion. If…
Having Excel be the default for .csv files has caused me problems in the past as well with Excel automatically changing data when you open it. The unfortunate thing I have come across multiple times is a csv file that has some values with a lot of significant figures, i.e. 123456789876, 987654321234 After opening in Excel it will convert these to: 1.23E+11, 9.87E+11 Then resaving the file (as a csv) will store the va…