Well, there were a large number of specific outcomes from Neuroinformatics 2008, most of which I won't bore you with. The best idea, though, came out as piece of humour. I was ranting (yes, I know, it's hard to believe) about public understanding of science. I'm a bit fan of this because I think that as scientists we should be able to write about what we do clearly and at a level suitable for an intelligent but uninformed individual. Of course, I believe this because in Neuroinformatics, this covers me; I don't know much about brains, just computers and biology.

The suggestion was that, to every scientific paper we publish, scientists would be forced to add an explanatory paragraph; now, as I say, this was meant as a joke, but I think it's a great idea. It is the beginning of term, so it's going to take a while, but I intend to do exactly this; I shall add explanations to my publications page for each of my papers. I'm slightly worried about this, of course; it's a well-known secret but, like many scientists, I don't actually know what all of my papers are about; some of them were written by other people, some of them were written by me so long ago that I was "other people". So, I might even learn something in the process.

I shall announce releases here; the world will, no doubt, hold it's breath till it turns up.

Today, we have neuroinformatics meets bioinformatics. I've been looking forward to this; unfortunately, I'm feeling a bit washed out having slept badly. I went to be at 10ish (I was tired!) and went to sleep at 2ish. The room was too hot and, by bad design, I left my melatonin at home so I lack even chemical solutions.

We've started off with a talk by Ed Lein from the Allen Brain Atlas. Lots and lots of gene expression analysis!

So far, we've had two talks, one from David Essen, one from Mary Kennedy. A nice bit of organisation because they have jumped scales — the first was mostly about brain gross anatomy and the second about molecular modelling.

A bit like it's forerunner — databasing the brain — there is not that much informatics here. The keynotes have been very much about the neuroscience; this makes it both novel and interesting for me, although fairly heavy going at times.

It confirms my feeling that neurosinformatics is much less mature than bioinformatics; it's not really a separate discipline yet. Not that this is a bad thing; I've been at bioinformatics conferences where the "bio" seems barely relevant. If I am honest about it, I think more about computers these days and sometimes forget the point — understanding life — although I guess this is inevitable working in a computer science department. Less mature is another phrase for new, young and fresh. It feels good to be in this environment.

Ah, off to a conference again. Depressingly on saturday, so the airport is heaving. I'm going to Neuroscience 2008 which is a new one to me, in Stockholm which is also new. I'm taking a poster which seems distressingly old. Been a long time since I've done this. It's already been a struggle — some of my colleagues didn't like it; I think because neuroscientists tend toward lots of text, while I do a light-weight, advert-style, if-you-want-more-details-read-the-paper form of poster. And I hate travelling with a poster; it's hard to replace your belt while carrying a bag and an A0 poster tube. My subconscious tried to leave it at a Starbucks in Schipol, but my better judgement forced me to go back for it.

I'm not in the best of moods: my toe, which I appear to have broken is nothing but a a dull ache and I was frozen on the flight having got a bath between the terminal at Newcastle and the plane. Still the conference should be fun.