Evolution 2010 talk schedule for iCal

In a moment of madness brought on by trying to make sense of 10 Mb of conference schedule for Evolution 2010, I extracted the text from the schedule and created a series of crude iCal files that I can add to my iCal calendar on my Mac (and hence sync to my iPhone). This way I can set reminders of specific talks I want to see.

I'm making these ical files available here, on the understanding that you can use them entirely at your own risk (some talks may be missing due to errors in parsing the file).

Mashing up NCBI and Wikipedia using treemaps

Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wanted to get quantum treemaps working (quantum treemaps ensure that the cells in the treemap are all the same size, see my 2006[!] blog post for further description and links). After some fussing I have some code that seems to do the trick. As an example, here is a quantum treemap for Laurasiatheria.


The diagram shows the NCBI taxonomy subtree rooted on Laurasiatheria, with images (where available) from Wikipedia for the children of the the children of that node. In other words, the images correspond to the tips of the tree below:



There's a lot to be done to tidy this up, but there is potential to create a nice, visual way to navigate through the NCBI taxonomy (it might work well on the iPhone or iPad, for example).