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March 2010 - Posts

Notes for Today

posted Sunday, March 07, 2010 7:14 PM by hussain

The Collatz Conjecture is a mathematical problem which states that given any number, and following a simple formula, converges to 1.

Take any number and do this:

  • If odd, multiply by 3 and add 1
  • If even, divide by 2
Repeat. You'll get to 1. Every time.

A comment about the latest xkcd comic's reference to the Collatz Conjecture, which I had never heard of before, lead me to create Hailstone sequence; my first Google AppEngine web app.

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Notes for Today, March 6th

posted Saturday, March 06, 2010 8:17 PM by hussain
Notes for Today: March 6, 2010

Back when I started my blog, I would have entries that were simply lists of links that I'd come across and thought worth sharing or brief events during the day.  Never mind "sharing with whom."  The impetus to share, presuming some sort of tenuous permanence seems like a decent rationale for blogging.

Today, one of the tabs open was a Wolfram|Alpha preview search for Academy Award nominations for the recent Star Trek movie (makeup, sound editing, sound mixing, and visual effects).  That lead me to the Star Trek wikipedia page where I read about some of the backstories on casting, etc.  I spent a few hours rewatching that awesome movie.

Saturday's my day to work myself into a little frenzy about savings etc, so I listened to Marketplace Money and called TiVo to follow up on cancelling my subscription from a long while back and that an acceptable refund was issued.  I still sort of want one of the new super cool HD TiVo Premiers because Comcast's DVR is just awful.

Later, I watch the latest episode of Caprica and lamented (privately) that the Facebook fan page for Caprica showed the closing climactic scene of Friday's episode as a preview last week, pretty much making episode 6 literally anticlimactic. I also looked up the word apotheosis that Sister Clarisse likes to say.

I read a recent first hand report of someone who attended Singularity U's executive conference and got to thinking about small-cap biotech ETFs as the next investment bubble.  A bit of Googling came to a decent seekingalpha article that mentioned XBI, BBH, and FBT.  Apparently, the Chinese government's bought $96m worth of Illumina genetic sequencing machines (@ $750k a pop) - the same machines used by personal genomics companies 23andme, decodeme, and counsyl. Will the new phrase be "cheap chinese genomes"?

Back to Singularity U, I watched Dr. Daniel Reda's talk on Biotechnology Fundamentals and wondered if I could memorize the RNA codes for all the amino acids. May be.  It's got to be like learning hex or anything else computational.

Optimization efficacy of evolutionary techniques

Natural selection
  • Slow!
  • Optimized for selecting the best replicators
  • Builds on previous adaptations (doesn't optimize best adaptations)
  • Optimization principle: Just good enough - ie selected for whatever's just good enough to pass on genes, not for any longer (healthy life, etc.)
Human Intelligence
  • Recombinant DNA technology - cut & paste via enzyme restriction endonuclease + ligase
  • DNA printer - writes DNA
  • http://www.bio-era.net/
Recursive AI


 If you haven't seen Harvard's BioVisions animation of the cell, you should.




Protein folding
    Game: http://fold.it/portal/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124207326903607931.html

"Killer Apps"
  • Drug metabolism
  • High-risk drugs

Edit, 04/25/2010 (DNA Day)

The new machine, the HiSeq2000, will begin shipping next month with a cost of $690,000 vs. $500,000 for Illumina's current model. It is being unveiled today at J.P. Morgan's investment conference in San Francisco. The Beijing Genomics Institute will be the first customer, purchasing 128 of the new machines.
Illumina's Cheap New Gene Machine Matthew Herper, 01.12.10, 03:00 PM EST
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