Keith Bradnam Keith Bradnam

Thoughts on the unpredictability of which social media posts will be popular

I tweet a lot and I write a lot on my blogs, especially on my ACGT blog. Sometimes I write things where I think: This…this is the one that will go viral. And of course it never happens that way. The more I try to engineer a meme, the less likely the chance of success seems to be. This is why my concept of a #MexicanTweetOff never went anywhere, and that no-one seemed to get the joke in my recent #IamSpartacash tweet:

But then there are those tweets and blog posts which I think won't be of that much interest to anyone, but turn out to be the most popular things I've ever written. This week has been surprising in that two of my social media posts have taken on a life of their own.

Everyone loves a good gnome story

First, I spotted the opportunity to have a bit of fun with Genomics England. Last Thursday was a big news day for them with the project being featured in Nature. So after seeing the piece in Nature early on Thursday morning, I came up with this:

This tweet went on to have over 40 retweets and Genomics England ended up featuring me in a storify article on Friday about their news of the previous day. To date, that tweet has reached an audience of over 67,000 people on twitter!

Microsoft as a tool for bioinformatics

Then on Friday I was trying to find an image to use in a talk. I wanted to make a point about Excel often being an inappropriate tool for the management/querying of biological data, and just wanted a picture of Excel containing some sort of biological data. I was quite surprised by the image that I eventually found, and immediately shared it in a quick blog post:

Admittedly. the 'NFSW' part of the blog post title was a tactic designed to deliberately provoke curiosity. I tweeted about the blog post on Friday afternoon, a time which normally doesn't provoke a lot of interest (many of my European followers will have gone to bed by this point).

But it seems that this post hit a nerve and it has subsequently taken on a life of its own. Currently, there has been 64 retweets and 44 favorites, and now it is being spread on Facebook. By the end of Friday, it had become the most read item on my blog for the entire week (this never happens for posts I publish on Friday afternoons). I assumed that traffic would die down on Saturday but that didn't happen. By the end of Saturday, the post was my most read article of anything I have posted in the last 4 months.

At this point I assumed that things would surely quiet down on Sunday, but that didn't happen either. Traffic to my blog doubled compared to Saturday, and the post has now become the most viewed article of anything I have written in 2015, with almost 3x the page views compared to the next most-read article.

I guess the message here is that I should stop trying to predict the popularity of my social media posts!

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Keith Bradnam Keith Bradnam

Remixing Chris Breen's beautiful 'Space Theme' podcast music

Screen Shot 2015-08-24 at 8.38.38 PM.png

Liftoff is a new podcast on the Relay FM network that has a delightful theme tune written by Chris Breen. The subject matter of this podcast is 'space, the universe, and everthing'.

If you listen to episode 1 of the podcast, you will only hear about 20 seconds of the beautiful theme music, and only 8 seconds without any spoken interference. This is a great shame because Chris Breen recorded a full minute of music. It is delicate, quiet, and yet expansive and deep. It is therefore perfectly suited for its subject matter. Chris — who has written many podcast themes — provides some insight into how he wrote the theme on his blog and provides a link to where you can download the music (titled Space Theme).

I found myself listening to this piece over and over again. As Chris notes in his post, this is not your typical podcast theme. In my opinion, the most amazing thing about it is the level of restraint that Chris has wielded. It would be so easy to maybe overdub a ringing electric guitar solo, or add all manner of additional tracks to fill out some of the 'space' in the music.

After I had listened to the track for a day or two, I found myself wanting more. So I took it upon myself to make a remixed version of the theme. The main reason was just to give myself more of this lovely music. So using GarageBand, I made some edits to effectively double the length of the track. Because the track has a natural ending point, I had to duplicate material just before the end, and play around to find a natural cutting point.

At this point, I felt the new second half of the song needed something extra to help build the song just a little bit more. This gave me the opportunity to add a few bars of 'Breathy Vox' to partly mask the join I had made. I then added some simple strings and a few other effects. When I saw that GarageBand had a synth sound called 'Sea of Tranquility', I felt that this had to be added.

I tried various other additions, at one point adding a quite sweet clarinet track, but I kept on coming back to the restraint that Chris had shown and felt that I had to honor that as much as possible. The screenshot below shows my final set of additions and edits in GarageBand (click to enlarge):

You can hear my version here. Thank you Chris for making a truly beautiful piece of music. I hope that the Liftoff podcast can do it more justice in future episodes!

Space Theme (Remix)
Chris Breen
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Keith Bradnam Keith Bradnam

Writing a new book

Just a quick note to say that I am currently writing a new book with the help of Michelle Gill and Ian Korf. This will be a follow up our Unix and Perl to the Rescue! book. The name?

Unix and Python to the Rescue!

Snazzy eh? You can find out more details about why we are doing this on the newly revamped Rescued by code! website (it didn't make sense to keep on using the unixandperl.com website anymore).

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Keith Bradnam Keith Bradnam

Launch day statistics for the Take-Home Message

The Take-Home Message

The Take-Home Message

Today I helped launch the Take-Home Message, a new bi-weekly web comic that aims to entertain and inform its readers about various aspects of biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. The comic is drawn by the very talented Abby Yu, and you can read a little more about how and why it was launched on my ACGT blog.

At the time of writing, it's been just over 8 hours since we made the Take-Home Message official. How has the launch gone?

  • 748: the number of hits the new site has received (from 33 different countries)
  • 287: the number of hits to my ACGT blog post that introduced the Take-Home Message
  • 33: the number of new followers to the associated twitter account (@TakeHomeMessage)
  • 24: the score for my link to the site on the Bioinformatics subreddit (enough to keep it at #1 on the Hot list throughout most of the day)
  • 7: number of new Tumblr users who have followed the blog
  • 5: the number of subscribers who signed up to receive new comics via email

Overall, I'm extremely pleased by this. It will be interesting to see how well comic #2 does when it goes live in a couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone for their kind words about the comic and the website.

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Keith Bradnam Keith Bradnam

A flag for Davis, California

Yesterday was flag day in the United States. So it seems a fitting time to launch my idea for a flag for the city of Davis, California. Davis currently has a logo, which incorporates a Penny Farthing bicycle, but this is not a good choice for a flag as it breaks many rules of good flag design.

Here is my proposed design (you can also download a larger version without the border):

The video below explains what this design symbolizes. I shall contact the Davis City Council with my idea, but I would love it if they organized a proper flag designing competition, open to all residents of Davis.

Flags can be rallying symbols that a city can unite behind. Flags can also give people a sense of pride about where they live. So let's have a flag for Davis, California!

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