Author: gulley

Go look. It’s a Welsh

Go look. It’s a Welsh blog. You won’t understand it, but it looks so cool: MorfaBlog. Or as the host, Nic Dafis says, “Yn ôl y geiriadur, rhywbeth A chanddo weflau mawr, cyriog, gwefldew. Neu, cyfieithiad diog o’r gair Saesneg ‘weblog’.” (pause for laughter) But seriously, folks…

I went to my college

I went to my college reunion last week and there discovered that a classmate of mine was actually in World Trade One on the 83rd floor when the first plane hit. I knew that no one in our class died in the attack, but I hadn’t considered the people I might know who had close escapes. People have different reactions when asked to recount a story they’ve told many times, but he was willing to tell his one more time. A few tidbits from his story that I hadn’t heard anywhere else: the flexure of the building due to the impact did all kinds of damage throughout the structure, breaking water lines, knocking marble tiling off the walls, and bending door frames. This last apparently trapped some people in their offices by jamming the door shut. Burning fuel pouring down the stairs diverted them from the first stairwell they came to and sent them running to the second, by which time the smoke in the hallways was already very thick. He also said the stairway wasn’t even crowded until he got down into the 40s. Which he knew at the time was a bad sign.


On the way back from the reunion, I stopped in New York to look at the site. It’s just a big construction zone now, the last remnants of debris having been cleared from the site itself. The scene surrounding the big void is more telling. There’s still plenty of damage visible to the nearby buildings, and a few spray-painted signs (“TRIAGE”) remain on the walls. Lots of tourists. Lots of security. The city hasn’t removed any of the tourist signs that tell you fun facts about the towers. I wonder if they ever will.

Can this be real? Snoop

Can this be real? Snoop Dogg has a blog? Check out the Snoop Doggy Blog. It looks real. It smells real. It’s not real. On the internet, no one can tell if you’re kidding. Fortunately it has a tag line at the bottom of the page: It’s a parody. Get over it. Somebody has a lot of time to devote to this. My favorite line: “If I married Winnie The Pooh, my name would be … Snoop Doggy Dogg Pooh.”

Here’s a good example of

Here’s a good example of new information disturbing the sleepy status quo. A web site at Williams college (called Factrak) lets students anonymously rate their professors. The faculty doesn’t like it. Of course they don’t like it; having people anonymously rate you in a publicly availaible forum is hard for anybody. But what can you do? There’s absolutely no way to stop it. The profs will have to accomodate themselves to this new state of affairs. There are some juicy catty remarks in the article, such as this one by an auditor of university president Morton Schapiro’s popular economy class: “By the end of the course, I think I’ll know more about his Nobel Prize-winning ‘friends’ than microeconomics.” Those uppity students don’t know what’s good for them. Here’s the article (from the Boston Globe): Student Web site for rating faculty riles Williams College. [This link will be defunct soon, since the Globe reaper pulls its content from view after a while. Read it while you can]

One of the fears mentioned by the disapproving faculty members was the specter of grade inflation. If you know you’re being rated every day, will you pander to the crowd? Will you become an affable but ineffective buffoon, or will you risk cyber-humiliation to hold back the tide of rising grades? This
column on grade inflation in the New York Times supports the view that students who expect high grades get them and further that students who get bad grades give bad reviews.

Now this is something I’ve

Now this is something I’ve been wanting for some time: my very own three-dimensional copy of a transfer RNA molecule. David Goodsell was so kind as to point me to the Center for BioMolecular Modeling at the Milwaukee School of Engineering as a place where I might be able to buy a made-to-order protein model. Sure enough, the friendly people at 3-D Molecular Designs quoted me a reasonable price for yeast initiator methionine tRNA (PDB entry 1yfg). I’m getting me some.

Why transfer RNA? Because there is nothing more central to the mystery of life and language than the point where the arbitrary code (like DNA) gets turned into active agents that move the world (like proteins), and transfer RNA is the hardware that makes it possible. Check out Goodsell’s images and explanation of transfer RNA and its good friend and partner aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase. You know, at a certain level, the meaning of life is just messy, gluey arts-and-crafts project.

What has six legs, room

What has six legs, room for a man on its back and an insatiable appetite for trees? No, it’s not a mutant beaver, it’s a Timberjack Walking Forest Machine. Designed and built by a Finnish subsidiary of John Deere, this baby will walk where wheels won’t go, then size up, cut down, and strip to lumber a tree while maintaining a dialogue with the lumberyard’s database about exactly what dimensions are required by the current customer. Low impact forest management sure seems like a good idea, although the image of an army of giant insect-like walking sawmills is a little creepy. Let’s just make sure they can’t reproduce.

More than a year

More than a year ago I picked up a copy of American Scientist magazine, partly because it had a cool article about nanotechnology with these beautiful images of biomolecules. Then, without reading it, I put the magazine aside for a long long time. Happily, it reappeared from under a crumbling pile of unread material and I did read it this time (serendipity like this reinforces my worst pack rat instincts). The article, Biomolecules and Nanotechnology, is really first rate. The author, David Goodsell of the Scripps Institute, takes a Steven Vogel style approach to thinking about the natural world, just at a much smaller scale: how do we apply engineering thinking to biological systems? The result, along with the illustrations created by the author, offers many aha! insights about why biological systems behave the way they do.

I was inspired, so I went to Goodsell’s web site where I became more inspired, and now I’m ordering a copy of his book (used, because sadly it is out of print) The Machinery of Life. There should be a lot more writing like this, but I am grateful that there is any at all.
From his web site I discovered this article about his illustrations published in the San Diego Union Tribune providing a little background on the artist and his work. The inset picture I display here is an illustration of the cell membrane and flagellar motor of an E. coli bacterium.

Steven Levy writes a good

Steven Levy writes a good piece, straightforward and reasonable, on blogs at Newsweek: Will the Blogs Kill Old Media? Answer: no. But will they be a big deal? Yes.

Here’s an example of what I can do in the age of blogs that I never could before: Alex Beam wrote an obnoxious piece on blogging for the Boston Globe a month or so ago. I’d give you a link to it, but the Globe doesn’t make archived articles freely available. Take my word for it, it was short-sighted and annoying. I read columns like this all the time, and usually I just think to myself, “what a jerk” and move on with my life. But in this case I knew about the weblogs of the people he was ridiculing, people like the prolific Minnesota writer James Lileks and uber-bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Virginia Postrel. I knew as I was reading the piece that I could go to their sites and learn the other side of the story. Sure enough, within a day or so I was able to see how Alex Beam put together his story by reading what his interviewees had to say. They posted his email messages and their own version of things. I was able to verify that yes, other intelligent people out there agree with me: Beam’s column was short-sighted and annoying. Someone once said you shouldn’t make enemies with people who buy their ink by the gallon. These days, anybody who wants to write can get all the Internet ink they need in God’s great plenty.

Get the whole story here: Glenn Reynolds. James Lileks. Virginia Postrel.