This week the blog and I are officially on holiday, which allows me to enjoy a few of my hobbies such as following the cricket via the splendid Cricinfo and the evening highlights programme (it is nice finally to see the England cricket team number one in the world, just like the UK’s biologists). I have also been catching up on my reading (including via my new ownership of a tablet computer that runs the free Kindle app).

I have much enjoyed reading a popular book on the history of Bayes’ rule; it is extremely well written, and makes the story thoroughly gripping, as indeed it is. I am an increasing fan of the Bayesian approach, and I am writing something about it over the summer. I also read a handy little book on Matrix Management, and (with computer simulation occupying a philosophically uncertain position between ‘theory’ and ‘experiment’) one on the epistemology of computer simulations.

I also enjoyed a very nice animation on Synthetic Biology, as well as a number of others from the same stable.

Papers I enjoyed reading include a comparatively old one on the relationship between biology and maths and one on metabolites as global regulators.

One of my own papers came out in final form, on pharmaceutical drug transporters, while two more were accepted for publication.

Among the list of bon mots, I much enjoyed ‘skillionaire’, for someone who earns a significant sum of money despite a comparative lack of higher education. Presumably those who do so in pharmaceuticals are ‘pillionaires’…

• Bertsch McGrayne S (2011) The theory that would not die: how Bayes’ rule crack the enigma code, hunted down Russian submarines, and emerged triumphant from two centuries of controversy. London: Yale University Press
• Cohen JE (2004) Mathematics is biology’s next microscope, only better; biology is mathematics’ next physics, only better. PLoS Biol 2, e439. Full, free text
• Gunn RA (2007) Matrix management success: method not magic. Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing
• Jayawardhana B, Kell DB & Rattray M (2008). Bayesian inference of the sites of perturbations in metabolic pathways via Markov Chain Monte Carlo. Bioinformatics 24, 1191-1197
• Kell DB, Dobson PD, Oliver SG (2011) Pharmaceutical drug transport: the issues and the implications that it is essentially carrier-mediated only. Drug Disc Today 16,704-714
• Li X, Snyder M (2011) Metabolites as global regulators: a new view of protein regulation: systematic investigation of metabolite-protein interactions may help bridge the gap between genome-wide association studies and small molecule screening studies. Bioessays 33, 485-489
• Winsberg E. (2010) Science in the Age of Computer Simulation. London: University of Chicago Press

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