Damian Counsell

My name is Damian Counsell. This is my blog. I do bioinformatics and build Websites. I make and manipulate media.

I also sing and play music. When I do so live, I mostly do it with Birmingham-based disco band The Disco Disciples and studio-based duo Tincture.

I’m one of the original authors of the Euston Manifesto.

These days, I tweet more than I blog.

PooterGeek

I started blogging at PooterGeek in 2002, when I was working for the Medical Research Council at the Genome Campus just outside Cambridge, UK; but this blog was never intended to be about my day job. Anyway, in 2005, that day job ended, when the MRC closed down the Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre (later the “Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomic Research”—or something).

Because I wanted people who were searching for technical publications written by me to be able to find them easily, I blogged under a nickname invented for me by a student.

My contributions to proper science are negligible, but here are my contributions to crude generalization:

Counsell’s First Law

The Cool Kids are always wrong, even when they are right.

Counsell’s Second Law

The two most powerful forces known to contemporary humankind are peer pressure and the desire for a quiet life.

Counsell’s Third Law

The most dangerous political weakness is sentimentality. It’s not a coincidence that every form of fascism has had a deep and wide sentimental streak.

Counsell’s Fourth Law

Where there’s a subsidy, there’s a scam.

You Might Remember Me From…

I used to record podcasts with Judith Levy for US conservative new media start-up Ricochet, where I was their token Lefty.

Colophon

The “broken typewriter” lettering of the PooterGeek banner was made with the free GF Halda font from G:fonts. The photo of Damian Counsell that is the background to this blog was taken by Joanne Cooper.