Arrived in Chicago...

I arrived in Chicago yesterday afternoon. Much warmed than the cold Chicago the ACS promised me, so my winter coat was really not necessary. Is this global warming? Or was the ACS simply wrong? Anyway, very foggy indeed, just like the Chemistry World blog wrote:

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Chicago (Bulls), here I come!

I had some fun today with making prints of reservations etcetera for my trip to the ACS conference in Chicago. Went over to the website to make a print of the location of the hotel I am in. (Intercontinental Chicago: in case you want to leave me a message to meet up over breakfast or so.) Anyway, so at the ACS website I found a notice that the ACS Housing people closed down and that I should contact the hotel directly. Fine, no problem. Oh wait, my hotel is not in the list. No worries, I just enter my last name and acknowledgment number. Huh, they don’t know me?? Already worried about which bridge to use as backup alternative, I emailed the organization which now takes care of it, being answered some 15 minutes later that they no longer do the hotel administration for that ACS conference anymore. That indeed rang some bell; I went over back to the ACS webpage, and this time found the correct ACS housing webpage. I had been using one from a previous ACS conference. Yeah, one of my finest hours :) Things are sorted out now, as I had already email the hotel too. Things are fine, and so my nerviness activity is back to normal. (If you care to reproduce, just go to the page for International Visitors linked from the Chicago conference homepage, scroll down to “Preparing for Your ACS Meeting Experience” and click the Hotel Information link. Makes sense, because the international guests already know how things work :) And, yes, I could have seen it mention SA in the subtitle, I know.)

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Pipelining chemical information with Yahoo Pipes

Chemists are picking up Yahoo Pipes, or, as Noel calls them, Pipeline Pilot for RSS feeds. I tend to agree, as the source of the workflows are closed, that is, at least require registering to the Yahoo webpage.

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What is dapagliflozin?

QDIS blogged about Bristol-Myers and AstraZeneca teaming up for a new drug called dapagliflozin. Now, dapagliflozin is, this week, the most used search keyword in Google, leading to Chemical blogspace.

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Fast molecular similarity with a new 3D shape descriptor

Jim reported about SPECTRa being in the news and ./ about Toward a 3D Search Engine. These two items have in coming that they deal with the article Ultrafast shape recognition for similarity search in molecular databases by Ballester and Richards (DOI:10.1098/rspa.2007.1823). The NewScientist wrote up their angle on it, with a quote from Henry Rzepa.

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Nature Network v2: cannot create a new group

Nascent reported that Nature Network v2 has gone life. Never too anxious to try something new, I created an account and signed in. I even joined two groups: Bioinformatics and Semantic Web for the Life Sciences.

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Invisible InChI's

Some InChI’s are short, such as that for methane: InChI=1/CH4/h1H4. Others are long (think crambin), and you don’t want to show them inline. Or you just want to show them anyway, but still want the chemistry to be understood. Here come the invisible InChI’s.

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