ToeJam & Earl Full Map Print

When I found that a chap named 'darkwolf' had stitched together full images of a couple of maps from one of my favourite Sega Megadrive games, ToeJam & Earl, I couldn't resist the temptation of filling it out with a reasonably comprehensive set of sprites, and sending it off to the printers.  My only dilemma?  The size.

The full res image is available in my Flickr account.

Live Performance: I am Harlequin - Wild One

Here's a live performance of Wild One by I am Harlequin, available in glorious full HD would you believe!  We had lots of fun doing this, and the results really reflect the professionalism of all the crew.

Of course there's nothing like an unexpected close-up to show you what kind of faces you pull when playing an instrument.  I realise I have a 'bass-face' of sorts that comes and goes during a performance (likely linked to the complexity of what I'm playing at the time), but I don't think I've ever seen video of myself playing violin before.  Luckily, I don't generally have to look at myself during performances of any kind!  On this occasion I blame the pressure and intensity of a very revealing live recording.

BBC Radio 4 session

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Broadcasting House to play a live track (the new single from I am Harlequin: Onesome) on the BBC Radio 4 show Loose Ends, hosted by Clive Anderson.  The lovely ladies doing sound made everything very easy for us setting up, and I was surprised to be in what was quite a large studio, furnished with a Steinway grand (of which Jonny made full use).

The guests (sat at the table across from us) were Sean Bean, Jason Donovan, John Sergeant and Claire Foy, and it was a privilege to see the The Civil Wars performing Barton Hollow for the show as well!  I mean, I am Harlequin have around two thousand Facebook 'likes', but The Civil Wars have around two hundred thousand!  Needless to say, they were superb (as well as being really down to earth).

There are some more photos taken during our setup and sound check available on my Flickr account, but here are just a couple:

Finally, I have to give a special mention for the BBC bacon sandwiches, which were amazing.

Animated cell motility simulation.

It took a bit more work to get a fully animated simulation video, but here's the first to be produced:

3D simulated cells visualisation.

As part of my ongoing PhD in computational biology I've needed to look at methods of visualising simulated multi-cellular structures (tissue) in 3D.  CompuCell3D (the modelling environment on which I develop) has the facility to render opaque surfaces of clusters of cells of the same type, which can allow you to see broad structural detail, but generally not the behaviour of individual cells.  I developed a visualisation that shows individual cell surfaces, each coloured according to a chosen cell variable (for me, the level of protrusive activity), as seen in this rotation of a model 'engineered epithelial tubule':

Of course you might be interested in a certain region or cell, so I use the VTK cursor widget to allow selection of a point or cell around which cells are displayed, opacity decreasing with distance.  I'm also interested in cell paths, so I incorporated these as well.  This image is of the same tubule showing the region around one cell of interest, along with some other cell paths:

The Hallmarks of Computational Cancer or: The Art of Chicanery and the Machine

I recently wrote an article with this title, shamelessly exploiting the popularity of a certain famous Cell paper, and it's available to read or download on Scribd. It's a light-hearted discussion of the merits of computational modelling in biology, some of it serious, some of it less so, but all very pertinent.

Who I am not.

Apparently there are lots of people called Dan Lea using the internet, but of course most of them aren't me.

People like Dr Daniel Lea, who is also a British physicist, and whose field of research is not dissimilar to that in which I undertook my MSci project.  I do enjoy photography, but I'm not a professional like the man running danleaphotography.com, and although I played bass for redbluegreen I'm not offering bass guitar tuition in Halifax, like danlea.net.  I may have done some science outreach events for children in London, but I'm not an award-winning teacher.  Don't think that just because I'm a musician that I write music for film, or that I lecture in comtemporary literature at Oxford Brookes University just because I'm typing away here.  To keep the list to a palatable length, I'll finish with a link that's unlikely to cause confusion: living in Ealing, I don't have a farm on which I breed the finest in AKC Registered Show or Pet Great Danes and Irish Wolfhounds.