On Mon, 2004-12-20 at 14:54 -0500, Miguel wrote:

> > I'm surprised that you mention that Jmol is regarded as
> > something for novices and toy-like.
> 
> I don't recall anyone waying that it is 'toy-like'

I may have misphrased that - apologies. However my point is that as it
is, Jmol is a wonderful tool for educators and novices - that is,
newcomers to chemistry. However I also believe that with the addition of
various features (some of which are being discussed) Jmol can be useful
to other levels of people in this and associated fields.

> The professionals and researchers have software tools. Professionals pay
> serious money for a lot of them, so I assume that they must be happy and
> well-served. The corporations do no pay any money to support me or Jmol
> (despite my requests), so I assume that they are not interested.
> 
> It seems that the educators (and their students) get nothing more than a
> few table scraps.

Unfortunately true in academics - but also understandable. Given my goal
to enter academics the question of funding has been in my mind. Projects
such as Jmol/CDK deserve to be funded - but how to come about the money
is something that is not obvious to me :(

> But that should be *your* job, and the job of the professional chemists,
> not my job.
> 
> I am a computer scientist, not a chemist.

I fully appreciate your statement - and  I think it's really a
compromise. You as a CS person need to learn chemistry and chemists need
to write code :) From the various posts I can see that you are doing the
former and it would be great if Jmol had more chemist coders (of course
there may be more than I know)

> It is incredibly inefficient for me to learn about and try to understand
> chemical/biochemical/crystallographic concepts via email.

Very understandable. To be honest, I'm nearing the end of my PhD so
stuff like dissertations, post-doc searches are coming up :( In addition
I have been working on aspects of CDK. As a result I have been more of a
observer in the Jmol community. However as time permits I do want to
contribute - if not code (as it take some to become familiar with the
codebase), then ideas and discussions. 


PS. I came across a NIH funding proposal
(http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-05-012.html)
related to cheminformatics research. I was wondering if there are any
faculty members on this list (as well as the CDK lists) that might have
seen this. Clearly, coding of a visualization tool or cheminformatics
framework cannot the sole goal of such a funding opportunity - but they
could be useful components.


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