Category: Uncategorized

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 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.

Don’t miss seeing Jupiter and Venus sliding within spitting distance of each other: Two Brightest Planets Converge in Evening Sky.

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 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 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 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.

Protein folding is in the news, and it’s just going to get more so. You’re going to get sick of hearing about protein folding. Here’s a good NY Times article that lays out what’s at stake when proteins don’t fold properly: In Folding Proteins, Clues to Many Diseases. The analogy

fast folding

Read about the Quarter Shrinker at Bert Hickman’s experiments page. The pictures alone are worth the trip. “The quarter shrinker uses a high voltage capacitor bank and a triggered spark gap to apply up to 125,000 amps through a small work-coil of #10 AWG magnet wire which surrounds the coin. Once the spark gap is triggered, a current of over 1 million amperes in induced into the coin, and the interaction of the induced magnetic field and the field from the coil cause the coin to shrink radially-inward. At the same time, the work coil explodes into copper shrapnel, and then into a 8″ ball of plasma. This all occurs in about 20 millionths of a second.”

This MATLAB Programming contest has been so successful that it’s practically swamping our ability to process the entries. One person, Yi Cao, entered the contest more than 200 times during the week in which it ran. Even now, despite the fact that the contest officially ended at 5 this afternoon, we still have around 180 more entries to process. If all goes smoothly we should have a winner within 12 hours. Currently Sriram from Georgia Tech is in the lead. But if overall effort has anything to do with, Yi should win, hands down.