Ben Bellenie

having been an undergrad project student in the Fleming group, probably Fleming-Tamao! But either sounds right to me. not like Suzuki-Miyaura where Miyaura often gets lost

Good news: meeting finished on time Friday
Bad news: booked the later train because I didn’t expect it to
not really good news but…: the earlier train I could have caught is cancelled anyway
Good news: time to get a pint of lovely pre journey beer

(later bad news: train toilets probably rank)

Rail Settlement Plan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Se... I think someone on here may have posted on it at some point too. @garius.bsky.social maybe?

If you google it (and I know because I did it once) you get pages and pages of people discussing it on railway forums…TLDR there’s a centralised computer model that works out which train companies you are most likely to have used for your journey and divides the money accordingly.

Usborne Book of Invention and Discovery

Loved this one. encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn...

Ah it’s tedious. There’s a run of about 5000 words in the middle that do nothing but describe how white the whale apparently is.

Great to be part of this event @chemicalprobes.org - nice to return to the complexities of GPCRs for a day!

Inactive batch 2 and dead cells, were you in our lab meeting this week?! Although we had “literature compound surprisingly working” instead…

I better check the patent updates and submit some more things for hERG just in case this list is fortune telling

When you work in drug discovery there are *so* many ways of hearing you're in for a very bad day.

Efficacy Results Came Back
[competitor] Patent Just Published
Batch Two Looks Inactive
Every Example Has hERG
Literature Compound Isn't Working
The Cells Died... Again
Hits Everything In Selectivity

Well, I am an scientist so the only way to find out is experiment

important scientific question: would a beer help me finish these overdue meeting slides faster?

Can confirm the letters turned to mush upon the ground would, in fact, re-assemble into the missing spots on the tree. Fantastic (even if they didn't)!

Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and ...

Interesting read on enshittification…
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"of course ChatGPT is full of errors when it comes to my specific area of professional or technical expertise, that's why I only use it for other stuff, where I can't tell if it's bullshit or not"

📰🗞💥

Wow. You sure about closing that London site, MSD?

'Morning 🌞☕

“Fixture schedule unfair to Man City - Silva”

Being owned and financed by a nation state unfair to other teams - Me

I love London so much. So much.

Did you know that London has the lowest level of ethnic violence of any city of comparable size in the world?

Multiculturalism has in fact worked here. They just don’t want it to be true because we happen to have a Muslim mayor.

Two very important graphs.
Net migration reached record levels in 2023 - and has since halved.
The vast majority of arrivals comprises students and workers.
Arrivals in small boats and asylum seekers - less than 5%.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

London’s Trans Pride March Just Shattered Its Turnout Record Organizers say it was the largest transgender rights march in the world.

Reminder that 100,000 people marched for Trans Pride in London earlier this year, but because they weren't violent fascists, there was minimal press coverage, unlike the Nazis today.

https://www.them.us/story/london-trans-pride-march-turnout-record-uk-transphobia

Breaking news consumer's handbook

awful news - thoughts to friends and ex colleagues at MSD. Had no inkling from the outside that this was likely, seemed like the job market was generally picking up slightly in the UK

Comic. Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure. [mockup of “2x4” piece of wood showing the dimensions as 1½“ by 3 ½“] Dimensional lumber sizes are tricky. A “2x4” is actually 1½“ by 3 ½“, and a “1x8” is ¾“ by 7⅛“. [two tape measures: one is labeled 12’, the other 12’*] If you know someone into carpentry or woodworking, get them our *dimensional lumber tape measure*. [A “normal tape measure” with even increments and a “dimensional lumber tape measure” with increments at different lengths for each inch] *Don’t tell them you got it*—just leave it in their toolbox. They’ll appreciate the surprise when all their measurements work out!

Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure

xkcd.com/3138/

Don’t leave it unguarded, those competitive intelligence folks will be unpicking the tape …!

Love this! great science, a great team of people with shared goal and yes, some stubbornness too are always needed!

The lab book write up is going to be fun. Like the old tissue paper extraction from the surface of the fume hood. “The biphasic mixture was distributed over a large flat surface and absorbed onto a cellulose matrix. Product was eluted from the cellulose with DCM and evaporated…”

Come and work with @andreascarpino.bsky.social and develop your in silico chemistry skills working on @icr.ac.uk cancer drug discovery projects. Learn stuff, discover new cancer medicines, what’s not to like :-)

This came up when we updated our risk assessments too - take note, TMS-diazomethane is less likely to kill you spectacularly but more likely to kill you in a boring way…

Tl;dr why can’t LLMs count?!?

Using copilot to reformat NMRs and check count the number of hydrogens. It’s like dealing with a lazy teenager. After the first few it starts cutting corners and not counting properly and I have to give it a telling off. Why has copilot been programmed to be like a shoddy coworker? #chemsky