Protein folding contest

Since this is my baby, I can’t possibly not link to it: We’re running another online MATLAB programming contest this week. It started last Wednesday and will end this Wednesday. There are a zillion programming contests out there, but this one is special because your answer is evaluated and posted in real time. It’s sort of like competitive open-source coding on steroids. I wrote a paper about it for a conference a while back, but we’ve also got a few short pieces out about this contest even while it’s running: a mid-contest analysis, and a short contest story by Matt that shows in a nutshell the dynamic that makes the contest so interesting.

The Show Me state sets us straight

Mikey O., denizen of Missouri and molecular biologist extraordinaire took issue with our most recent post. He writes:

Dearest Paracelsus,

I was reading through your weblog today with my wife and our au pair, and
was upset to see an erroneous message regarding the Isle of Capri in
Kansas. I would direct you to the Missouri Gaming Commissions regulations
on Riverboat Gambling:

http://www.sos.state.mo.us/adrules/csr/current/11csr/11c45-6.pdf

That’s right, you read it correctly: Riverboat Gambling. The Isle of
Capri is a “Riverboat” insofar as it is built in a basin of water and
functions as a “permanently moored platform” according to the U.S. Coast
Guard. We Missouri people call them “boats in moats.”

Even before the Commission imposed the exchange limit, the “player’s
passes” were required as “tickets” for the “excursion”, and some of the
casinos actually had to move players through in timed shifts to give the
appearance of leaving the dock.

So the Isle of Capri is a boat after all, despite Nabeel’s statement to the contrary. I have heard of this faux-riverboat phenomenon, and I understand there are places in Louisiana where a puddle of greasy water around a shed will make a passable riverboat for gambling purposes. It’s charming to think that what I used to consider my house is actually an exotic (though navigationally-impaired) permanently moored platform… so long as the dew is on the grass.

Guest Rambles from Kansas City

My friend Nabeel works with money professionally, making software for financial types. So it’s no surprise that when he went to Kansas City on a business trip that he ended up in a casino. Casinos in Kansas City? you may ask. But keep in mind that, although gambling used to be considered a vice, we like it now. Plus, Kansas City is no stranger to gambling. It was a wild place back in the Depression, when Tom Pendergast single-handedly ran the whole debauch. Despite the Prohibition, there was no shortage of booze or gambling. Pendergast’s power was such that he was able to name his man for the Senate in 1934: a former Kansas City haberdasher named Harry Truman.

Anyway, I asked Nabeel to fill me in on the dang deal in Kansas City, and this is what he said.

There’s a lot to do in Kansas City. Well, not really. But now you can gamble. There are probably lots of stories about riverboat gambling, but that’s all long gone now. The casinos I saw were built on solid ground, no need to be on the water to gamble. There may be riverboat casinos left, but the Isle of Capri (where I went) was on dry land.

What makes them interesting, however, is one of their rules (I believe it’s a legal requirement for casinos in Kansas and Missouri). To enter the casino floor, you must get a player’s card for the casino. Why? Whenever you exchange real money for chips, they take your player’s card and swipe it through their machine, recording the amount you’re trying to get. You are limited to exchanging no more than $500 in 3 hours; they won’t let you exchange more than that. Essentially, this caps your losses.

This gives casinos in Kansas a totally different feel than anywhere else. There are no “high-rollers” areas — if you can’t get more than $500 cash in 3 hours, you really can’t bet too big. Most tables I saw were $5 tables. This simple policy really changes the feel of being in the casino; it’s a lot less stressful.

Of course, they still end up with your money :)

Melvyn and Manson

On the night of Mr. Melvyn’s murder is a hypertext murder mystery, the sort of thing people got very excited about at the dawn of the HTML age. I remember very clearly there was a strong current of belief that hypertext fictional webs had the potential to be as rich and widespread a medium as the novel. Instead they became a novelty, and Mr. Melvyn’s murder illustrates why. The “story” is a complicated thread that winds through perhaps a few dozen character pages, including fictional creeps like Moe and Mr. Earl as well as cameos by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and
Elton John. Each page has a portrait of one character and their part of the story. The story is convoluted, but the artwork is very good, so I clicked and clicked in an absent-minded sort of way, watching the pictures go by until I found Mr. Melvyn at the end of the maze. That by itself didn’t reveal the mystery, but I wasn’t motivated enough to go back and unravel it.

Serendipity brought me, in less than two week’s time, to a different web of pages in much the same format: the Manson Girl Info Center. The gruesome backstory of creeps linked together by murder is nonfiction this time, but the shape of the site is very similar to Mr. Melvyn’s. Despite this similarity, I was extremely compelled to read my way through the Manson Girl site. Why was Susan Atkins called Sadie? Did Squeaky Fromme really intend to kill President Ford? Why were these women so infamously dedicated to Charles Manson?

The hypertext format works well with facts, because the world is endless and complicated. But when it comes to stories, you long for a single burning fuse. The point here is not so much the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The point is that I know the basic story of the Manson murders and am curious to learn about the context, whereas I don’t know why I should care that Mr. Melvyn was murdered, and so the labyrinth of background information is merely wearying.

Come fly with me

More joys of the Astronomy Picture of the Day, a.k.a. APOD. I think this must be one of the best (and most cost effective) public relations efforts ever managed by NASA. I used to work at NASA Ames Research Center, and I remember how important PR was, given their steady diet of taxpayer’s cash. It’s a good arrangement… I want to see cool space pictures, and NASA wants to show them to me for free. Last week APOD featured this: Liftoff With the Space Shuttle, which led me to a bonanza of online video here: STS – 112 Video Index (which is to say, videos from space shuttle mission 112, the most recent one). I really must insist that you take the time to download the movie that shows the view looking down from the external fuel tank as the shuttle takes off. You get an unbroken visual record as the shuttle moves steadily from one world to the next. First there is the familiar view as from an airplane of grasslands, beach, and ocean. Then after only 90 seconds (17 miles high! 2800 miles per hour!) the scene has become a view from space, with tiny clotted splotches of cloud painted flat against a dim Florida coastline. The last frame seen from this camera shows the soft curvature of the earth clearly highlighted against the black void beyond.

Before I leave the topic of APOD, I have to mention another title that caught my eye: October 24 – Gullies on Mars. Since my last name is Gulley, you can imagine I looked long and hard for a peek at my Martian cousins, but to no avail. Still, if their house is somewhere in the picture, they must have a marvelous view from their back yard.

Guest Rambles from Maryland

My good friend Jay is, in addition to his many other diverse interests from military history to birdwatching, an amateur genealogist. He recently sent me a hot tip that the 1880 U.S. census is now online courtesy of the Mormon Church. It took 17 years for church volunteers to transcribe all the handwritten documents and put them online at FamilySearch, but you can now read about your obscure relatives or famous people like Frederick Douglass.

My friend Jay, in addition to his interest in genealogy, also happens to live in Maryland near the erstwhile sniper’s hunting grounds. I asked him what it was like these days, and this is what he wrote.

My wife woke me at 6:30 AM Thursday morning, crying. She had been watching CNN. I was expecting to hear her tell me about the next victim of the D.C. area sniper. Is this one closer to our home, I thought. Instead, she said “They caught them.” It was over.

I work in Rockville, but live near Baltimore, so the everyday impact of the three week reign of the sniper had not been as acute as it was for those who lived in Montgomery County and Bowie in MD, and Virginia along I-95. But it had certainly seeped into our mundane everyday activities. A low fuel gauge in my car would propel me into unfamiliar decision-making terrain. Where do I gas up? The characteristics that made my usual station preferable – easy access to the major highway – was now a disqualifier. I brought a brown bag lunch to work to avoid going out at mid-day. Intellectually, you know that statistically the odds are extremely low that you will be a target. And, normally, people take a measure of re-assurance at some subconscious level by rationalizing, often a touch judgmentally — oh, that bad thing will not happen to me because I don’t associate with those types of people, or I don’t go into that bad neighborhood, or I don’t engage in that risky behavior. But these rationalizations clearly didn’t apply here, and that is why your intellectual side fought a slow losing battle against your growing anxiety. The slow losing battle turned into an outright rout when the young schoolboy was shot and when the sniper put us on notice that he was coming after our children.

More generally, during the three week period, I caught myself taking grim stock of each day’s top stories. Killer on the loose. Terrorists re-grouping. Steadily increasing drumbeats of war in Iraq. Economy is down the tubes. Boy, remember the late 90’s? Clearly, the naive optimism (and, I daresay, smugness) of those heady days when the Cold War was a memory and we were ‘safe’ within our protective and speculative bubble was not warranted and a correction was due. And, excepting the tragedies that refocused us, that change in perspective is not unhealthy. It’s just that it seems the pendulum has swung way too far. Now every day we have to worry about threats to us from ‘failed states’ on the other side of the world and ‘failed individuals’ on the other side of Main Street who lash out at people going about their lives. I can’t express the relief that the culprits in the sniper shootings were caught. But that same day, the government announced now-familiar vague warnings based on intelligence concerning terrorist actions against American railways. One danger is removed, another takes its place.

Science made stupid

I always enjoyed the book Science Made Stupid, a parody science book. The writing is hit-and-miss, mostly relying on goofy sound-alike puns (the three kinds of rock are ignominious, sedentary, and metaphoric). Enough of the writing hits the target to make you believe the author, Tom Weller, is truly (or was trained as) a scientist. I liked the throwaway reference to the Devil’s Grant Proposal National Wasteland in Wyoming. But the artwork is superb and lifts it far above lamer low-end parodies. Here’s a typical explanation, reminiscent of the explanations of Calvin’s dad in Calvin and Hobbes.

We sometimes speak of the tides causing the oceans to rise or fall. Of course, this is a fallacy. Actually, it is the land that rises and falls.
As the Earth rotates, the moon’s gravitational attraction is greatest first on one side, then the other. Land masses, being rigid, are pulled up or down accordingly. Oceans, being liquid, are free to flow back to their normal level. (see diagram).

This site is based in Austria; I have no idea if the author approves of the material appearing online like this. If Amazon is any indication, the book is out of print, so enjoy the website.

Watching the clock

My old pal Rob the Coffee Czar sent me a good link this morning: check out the animated timepiece at Industrious Clock at yugop.com, which appears to be related to the Japanese design firm MONO*crafts. I haven’t even had time to check out all the mesmerizing Flash demos they have up, but the ones I’ve looked at so far are really impressive. The Industrious Clock reminds me of another handwritten clock called the Human Clock. The Human Clock is much slower, but really seems to have succeeded as a social phenomenon. When I first saw it some time ago, every minute seemed to show someone from Portland, Oregon. But they seem to have succeeded to the extent that you’re as likely to find someone from New South Wales as from Oregon.