Cubbi
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| Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | | 12:50 pm |
science in review: november 2009
It's been four years since my last scientific publication, and while C++ is all good and profitable, I feel like I'm missing the fun stuff. So I randomly decided to check the news to keep myself informed.. Let's see what we've learned in November 2009, other than that the Moon is slightly damp and that LHC finally works. In chemistry, everyone who was crazy about fullerenes and nanotubes is now crazy about graphene (monolayer of graphite, first literally peeled off a chunk of graphite with Scotch tape by some Russians in 2004). In just last month people kept coming up with new ways to create it, new ways to modify it (and some more), new ways to calculate it, and new physical properties to measure. That whole nanoscience thing is a good source of funding! Adult neurogenesis (did you even know new brain cells are constantly born in adult brains?) is still a hot topic in neuroscience: these Japanese guys say the new brain cells not only form new memories (as a bunch of 2008 works has shown) but also clear out memories from hippocampus after they've been permanently stored in neocortex. Speaking of memory, this girl just showed that motor skills are stored by permanent rewiring of neurons, which is a neat explanation for why once you know how to ride a bicycle, you'll never forget. Also, speaking of brains, there was this cool review by the leading bee brain specialist (who once was a postdoc in Stony Brook, like me) saying that brain size does not change cognitive capacity. Continuing the search of minimal set of molecules required for life, a crowd of biochemists from all over Europe finally published their detailed analysis of one of the smallest bacteria, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, in three articles in Science: 1, 2, 3. They found it "more subtle and intricate than was previously considered possible". Well duh, it's a pathogen, it has to be able to change quickly, and under evolutionary pressure to be small it just had to reuse the same molecules in multiple ways. One thing evolution is good at is reuse. It's a good reminder of how dismally far is biochemistry from understanding the function of nearly all proteins. Decent advance, nevertheless. What else.. Astronomers, besides everybody's favorite slightly damp Moon bombing, found out that heliosphere is not smooth but has a weird ribbon going around it: Science 326:959 and four more papers in the same issue (how do they get so much space there with nothing but guesses??). Anthropologists, who had a bit of a debate about the 3'6" tall hobbit named Flo ( Homo floresiensis, fossil human-like specimen found in 2003) have a new article, from Stony Brook of all places, again saying it's a real specimen and not a sick H. erectus. Botanists discovered some altriustic plants (they change their morphology to cooperate with relatives and to compete with strangers growing nearby), and some plants that use camouflage to hide from herbivore animals. Who knew botany could be interesting? In kick-ass geological news, African continent is being torn asunder, with the gigantic Ethiopian Rift which suddenly appeared in 2005 in the middle of a desert, becoming 35 miles long and 20 feet wide in just a few days. A new article came out, which now says that it is no joke, this crack will one day become the middle of a new ocean. And just for fun, someone bothered to find out why a dash of flour tossed on the surface of water scatters out so very fast (hey, it's nanoscience!), and these girls say they got a good idea how to make the infertility pill for men. Current Mood:  geeky | | Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | | 10:40 pm |
So I heard you like Ray Bradbury?
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And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day -- the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue.
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.
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Current Mood:  giddy | | Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | | 6:43 pm |
Fruit bats and their tongues.
Image (c) PLoS ONE |
I know it's two weeks old, but it's still amusing. To quote the article, "Our observations are the first to show regular fellatio in adult animals other than humans."
What I find really funny though is how unrealistically precise they were with their timing. Duration of copulation measured to one hundredth of a second? Really? With precision of give or take half a minute?
"The average duration of penis licking was 19.14±3.45 s, representing about 8.7% of the average duration of copulation (220.29±26.19 s (N = 14)). [...] The pairs spent more time copulating if the female licked her mate's penis [...] than on occasions when females did not show licking behavior (121.83±20.56 s, N = 6)"
Well, I guess that's PLoS ONE for you. |
Current Mood:  amused | | Friday, October 30th, 2009 | | 11:47 pm |
Halloween 2009
Hey, tomorrow is Halloween (longislanders, btw, party at our house!) and it will be 7 years since I walked out of JFK airport with a giant suitcase full of clothes, books, and hard drives. It's amazing how much stuff happened to me since then. Now let's see how much candy can I eat today before the trick-o-treaters come tomorrow. Current Mood:  bouncy | | Friday, September 4th, 2009 | | 2:07 pm |
ocaml got really lazy now
Redesigning and managing the team of rewriting by myself the C++ core of all software we make at work, from scratch, stirred up my interest in programming to the point that I started randomly writing programs during free time commute to work. Guess what, ocaml, the one functional language practical enough to be used in real world. from science to file sharing, and good enough to have been stolen by Microsoft, finally learned how to do infinite lazy lists while I wasn't looking. What used to take half a page of hand-crafted code fiddling with explicit lazy constructors and forced calls, is now done like this: list of all integer numbers above zero: value naturals = let rec n a = fstream [: `a; n (a+1) :] in n 1;list of all fibonacci numbers: value fibs = let rec f a b = fstream [: `a; f b (a + b) :] in f 0 1;And yes, in case anyone reading this is into programming like me, I know Haskell had infinite lists for 19 years, but Haskell is not for real world, plus these little "fstream" constructs from ocaml allow much crazier stuff done to them, by means of functional and backtracking parsers. Current Mood: geeky | | Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | | 12:19 am |
Li Wei
 I totally forgot on whose lj (if it was lj) I saw a link to Li Wei's photography, these days I'm so busy at work I cannot remember what I had for breakfast. But hey, he's pretty crazy with his imagination and the ability to take a picture like that with no photoshopping. Even though he has a bizarre habit of falling into things head first - he makes one lousy superhero. Current Mood: amused | | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | | 1:48 pm |
Microscopes show C-H bonds now O.o
  As BBC reports on this article in Science published by a bunch of crazy IBM researchers from Zurich, atomic force microscopes can be tuned so insanely well now that even C-H bonds become (kinda) visible! (the molecule on the picture is pentacene) (The first picture is from IBM press release, the second picture is taken (and greatly reduced in size) from Science 325, 1110 (2009), without permission) Current Mood: geeky | | Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 | | 11:00 pm |
thought of the weekend
More laser tag arenas should have mirrors, it adds a whole new dimension to the game. Current Mood:  thirsty | | Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | | 3:29 am |
| | Friday, July 24th, 2009 | | 7:30 pm |
Fried chicken and champagne!
I had to go to Austin for a quick business trip, and out of the patchwork of places I went to eat, I liked best the brand new eating establishment there on San Jacinto and 3rd, called Max's Wine Dive, which was still open at midnight and served some rather nice food. And I could watch them cook it. And their slogan sums them best: "Fried chicken and Champagne? Why the hell not!?" Also, I have now participated in Space Balls Quote-a-thon at the Alamo. Austin is Wierd. | | Friday, July 10th, 2009 | | 1:37 pm |
A C++ epiphany
boost::asio::async_read_until is the best invention since std::vector! Current Mood:  think async | | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 5:53 pm |
I know who the real father of science fiction is!
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Jules Verne got brought up in an IRC conversation, and I started remembering his novels. Honestly, I never cared for his quaint science fiction, as awesome as it was from historical point of view (air conditioning, TV, and the Internet in the 19th century!), but his adventure novels completely swept my imagination. Captain Hatteras, Fifteen-year-old captain, Captain Nemo, Children of Captain Grant, various explorers, pirates, scientists, and tribesmen.
In fact, his Mysterious Island is what made me a chemist: the true hero of the story was a engineer, who made everything, from steel to dynamite, out of raw materials. Odd how few people around me have even heard of that novel, although they all know about Captain Nemo (who meets his end in the Island) |
and now, anthrocon. Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 12:26 pm |
| | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 10:25 pm |
What would I do without eBay?
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Guess what I got this time? A 1918 printing of the first edition of both Jungle Books! In solid red leather binding with gold designs. And, the weirdest thing, which I didn't know until I've opened them, the books are inscribed to someone who had their birthday on February 18th, 1919. Which is also my birthday, just a bit before my time. Weird, huh?
I've read the russian translation of the Mowgli Stories when I was about six, before seeing any sort of cartoons, and was completely taken by the idea of living wild. Grown-up, I've been finding influences of that book in my psyche all over the place. So I decided to feed this little old fancy with a nifty 90 year old treat, even though I have all the Mowgli stories (including In The Rukh, not found in the JBs) already.
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Current Mood: bouncy | | Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | | 4:04 pm |
Even when the media is pro-science, it does it disservice.
This image is Fig. 1A of the PLoS ONE article |
What the news say:
Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution ... Researchers say proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.
What the researchers actually say:
Morphological characteristics preserved in Darwinius masillae enable a rigorous comparison with the two principal subdivisions of living primates: Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini. Defining characters of Darwinius ally it with early haplorhines rather than strepsirrhines. We do not interpret Darwinius as anthropoid, but the adapoid primates it represents deserve more careful comparison with higher primates than they have received in the past. |
upd: I beat PZ Myers by one minute in posting this! His post is much longer, though. upd: looks like the researchers may have hyped it up themselves, off-paper. Way to lose face. Current Mood: busy | | Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | | 6:17 pm |
| | Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | | 12:17 pm |
Umhir deln Fshofth, du saq mishallfen
I've insanely busy at work lately, and to counter the stress I've been entertaining myself by replaying the computer games of the early 90s using dosbox. Star Control 2, Ultima series, Civilization, Eye of the Beholder... I've got over a thousand of them. I think I am going to try and seriously play Wizardry 7 (1992) this time, having rolled some good chars and having finished the beginner dungeon for the first time. But I started replaying The Summoning, the old sequel to the even older DarkSpyre, and remembered something awesome about that game. The way the spells were cast!
You see, in most games magic spells are choices in a pull-down menu, especially in AD&D inspired ones. In some old games, however, the player has to actually cast them, by remembering/writing down how to do each spell. In the Ultima series, spells were sequences of Futhark-inspired runes (for example, to cast Armageddon, the Avatar had to say "Vas Corp Bet Mani"). In Loom (Lucasarts, 1990), spells were composed of musical notes (different in different replays, and at expert level, they had to be heard and identified by ear).
In The Summoning (Event Horizon, 1992), spells are sequences of hand gestures. Flame Arrow is a half-closed fist, then tight fist. Liquefy is open palm at 45 degrees, then straight.
Do any modern games have spellcasting that's not just choose-from-a-menu? |
Current Mood:  cheerful | | Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | | 6:59 pm |
Writer's Block: Taxmen and Poetry
This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet Current Mood: busy | | Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | | 12:17 pm |
Hail Eástre!
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It is the time to celebrate old goddess of spring light and fertility Eástre, whose month Eostur-mónaþ has now begun! Feast on hare pies in her honor and do what hares do! And I hope you didn't forget to paint your eggs red for the Zoroastrian celebration of No Ruz, which was a couple weeks ago! Isn't it interesting how rituals from across the world mix and mingle? |
Current Mood: mellow | | Saturday, March 14th, 2009 | | 1:08 am |
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