iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 31/08/2026

At ECCB this year as one of over 1500 attendees, let's chat if you're around! If you want to see what I'm up to, I'm giving a talk on Wednesday at 9 in the Transcriptomics track, room AD! ( #ECCB2026 )

A big stage with an ECCB welcome slide in the back, showing the big fountain in Geneva.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 18/08/2026

Looking it up in Utrecht's worldcat repo, it seems they should have it/that copy of Janus available? utrechtuniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/812856651 I'll be in Utrecht later this week, if they can't get it to you directly I can try to get a loan and scan it.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 08/08/2026

So some Dutch and Flemish newspapers have started to include translated NYT pieces. Most of the stuff from the foreign desk is fine, if a bit US-centric, but they've also decided we need to see Douthat etc. spew all kinds of stupid contrarian takes in Dutch. He won't be missed.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 28/07/2026

Zeker, de rest was een stuk beter, enorm van genoten! M'n tweede keus zou dit guesthouse van een Chinese universiteit zijn... Voelde soms wel echt als een gevangenis, en sommigen vonden allerlei beestjes. Na 1 nachtje konden we in het geplande hotel, dat was dan weer veel luxer dan verwacht.

A grey door in a dark corridor, slightly open to show a no-frills room. The window above the door has jailbars, and is covered with something semi-transparent to keep out some of the light.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 10/07/2026

Let's read about a statistical metric I've never heard of! ...aaaand it's related to phrenology. It's shocking how much of this field is based on unsavory fields.

The title and first paragraph from the wikipedia page on Mahalanobis distance.

Mahalanobis distance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mahalanobis distance is a measure of the distance between a point P and a probability distribution D, introduced by P. C. Mahalanobis in 1936. The mathematical details of Mahalanobis distance first appeared in the Journal of The Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1936. Mahalanobis's definition was prompted by the problem of identifying the similarities of skulls based on measurements (the earliest work related to similarities of skulls are from 1922 and another later work is from 1927). R.C. Bose later obtained the sampling distribution of Mahalanobis distance, under the assumption of equal dispersion.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 25/06/2026

Ik sta met een Groningse delegatie op Jera, en we zijn allemaal zeer jaloers momenteel

A temperature map of the Netherlands, with temperatures forming horizontal bands ranging from low 20s in Groningen and Friesland to 30s in south Noord-Brabant and Limburg. Highlighted is a location showing 32.3°C at the border of Brabant and Limburg, where Jera on Air is taking place.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 12/06/2026

Had an amazing time speaking at AI x BIO in Hinxton! Loved meeting everyone, so much cool work being done - incredible methods truly focused on understanding biology. I guess there's a hashtag? #AIxBIO2026

Me presenting a slide on 'one genome encodes many different cell identities' in a conference room.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 17/04/2026

Looking at the ECCB submissions, and I find this a bizarre policy - why not allow unpublished or at the very least preprinted stuff? Aren't you hoping to see novel results at conferences? Gatekeeping it behind already published manuscripts means you're only seeing work from years ago.

Section from the ECCB talks submission webpage:

Highlight talks

ECCB 2026 invites submissions of abstracts for highlight talks on recently published research articles (published in a scientific journal on 1 March 2025, or later, or accepted for publication by a journal and available online at least as a preprint). Highlight talks are expected to present significant and topical advances in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 25/02/2026

Surely it's not a good idea to train users to give their admin details to repeated unrequested vague popups that don't even show any indication in the listed program itself? I generally appreciate MacOS's smooth handling of updating OSes and applications, but these have always confused me.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 11/11/2025

wtf worm gene of the week: cox-6B, where there's apparently sometimes just an extra exon 80kb upstream, with like 15 genes in between

A genome browser screenshot, showing the cox-6B gene starting with a small exon, followed by a massive intron that spans 15 other genes, to then have a small set of exons at the end. There is a second transcript for cox-6B that only has the exons at the end, skipping the 80kb intron stretch.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 10/11/2025

truly, how do we get anything done as a field... I wonder how many datasets have accumulated many repeated 1-wide shifts because of accidental interpretation changes.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 16/09/2025

Taking my abstract book out for a walk at #SCG2025 Come chat if you're also around!

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 11/02/2025

y'know, uni, maybe this is not the time

Mail from the KU Leuven International Office with the subject "Success in the US | Information session", inviting me for an information session for study or research in the United States.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 26/11/2024

cleaning up old dirs and i've somehow run into schrödinger's directory

A screenshot of a command line, attempting to delete a path that looks like a directory. Running rm -r returns the error 'rm: cannot remove path: not a directory', while running rm without -r returns the error 'rm: cannot remove path: is a directory'.

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Cas Blaauw @casblaauw.eurosky.social · 10/10/2023

My fellow KNAW researchers over at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience appear to have some footer problems 🫣

A screenshot of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience website footer, showing the footer links (Privacy statement, Cookies, Disclaimer, Open government act, Login, Intranet) repeated thrice, with 'Titel van footer sidebar' and 'Tweede footer sidebar' separating the lines respectively.

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