Beautiful weather Mr. Feynman!

I was worried that the thunderstrom would miss my part of the city, and disappear in the heatwae.

I am glad to see that I was wrong. Right now the horizon is shining in muted red colors of the sunset, while thunder and lightning rage across the sky above me. The rain is beating down hard. I feel refreshed already. The world is in display of brilliant play of light and wind, spreading out all across the spectrum from red to violet.

I love it here.

MoMA

Currently at MoMA. I'm writing this using my trusty eeepc and the generous (though not-so generous when we think of the admission fee into this place, although entry after four pm on every friday is free) free wifi connection provided for museum patrons.

It is really great that museums have gotten around to allowing free and rather unlimited access to the net for the museum patrons. Now I can look up the information about the museum schedule, the art work history, and even the menu of the museum restaurant/cafe just by sitting on a sofa overlooking the garden and typing a few thing inside. Combined with the 'ipod' craze these days, this is a wonderful step in the right direction I think.

I was initially frustrated that I could not hold onto my backpack within the museum, and I could not check in my laptop at the check-in corner either. Those with heavier (i.e. normal) laptops will experience some frustration here, as you will be forced to carry it by hand while walking through the museum. Yet the policy is somewhat understandable, in that the increase in the number of people with backpacks running around galleries like they do now would drastically increase the chance of injury for th sensitive art pieces displayed in the museum (in not always conventional sense, I might add). However, the policy regarding laptops are beginning to sound very obscure and behind the times. Is it because laptops might end up being financial liability? Or is it because the laptops might explode? Frankly, I can name quite a few thing that can/might explode that are allowed to be checked in at the entrance of all the major art museums in NYC, so I don't really see any obvious use for such a regulation against laptops, especially considering that most major museums have begun offering free wifi access to their patrons. I certainly hope this matter sees some kind of clea resolution someday.

I actually came today because I wanted to catch a particular exhibition named Design and the Elastic Mind, though I'm sad to say that I'm a few months late. I guess I have to get my fix through the web exhibition, though it will not be the same without seeing the real thing in front of me, I think.

I guess I'll stick with it of Mark Rothko's work for today.

music

My brain was hazy, and I was flipping through books and websites with glassy-eyed glare of a dead fish.

And then, a familiar tune flowed into my ears.

I don't know how to describe the experience. Catharsis doesn't begin to capture the purifying mystique of the moment.

At the single moment, all my thoughts were focused into a single whole, moments of my life flashed in front of my eyes, and I was reminded again of the reason why I am going through this. I was reminded of the promise I made to myself so long ago, with so much dream and determination.

The night is getting darker, and I should fall asleep soon, to prepare for tomorrow. Yet I will not forget this moment, of the things I was reminded of.

The effect of music is breathtaking. What part of this chemical system allows such miraculous phenomenon to manifest in this universe? The trembling strand of information propagating throughout the brainstem is one thing, the effect it has on the directionality of the human will is another.

I do not believe in any mysterious forces or divine substances behind this marvelous feat of human origin. Yet experiences like this leads me to believe that things that would be described as mysterious and divine might one day be built by the human hands.

Calm day.

The weather this afternoon is amazing. Not too cold, not to hot, and the sunlight is so clear without burning me. The wind is just right too. Enough to be felt, but not enough to bother anyone.

Right now I'm perusing the free wifi service being offered at the Lincoln Center, in a little park right by the Opera theater. My ipod is playing a charming piano piece from a long time ago. It certainly isn't Glenn Gould, but it fits the world around me nicely. The effect is almost magical.

It's so nice to be able to rest a bit and think like a human being after a long day's work. Woe onto the fools who think bread and shelter are the only things necessary for human survival! I find that decent rest and peace of mind is just as fundamental to the human condition as any other physical, more conspicuous requirement of life.

Maybe I'll call a friend and dine out tonight. The weather is just too wonderful to go home and eat dinner in solitude. Or maybe I should cook something? I think I'm getting the hang of the zen of roasting chicken (and other things).

Tomorrow

According to the weather forecasting services on the net, tomorrow will be cloudy with high chance of thunderstorms. Tonight's humid and warm weather seem to agree with the forecast.

There's something in my heart that welcomes the harsher weather for some reason. I really need to see a decent storm one of these days or I'd go nuts. I guess people can't live without turmoil of some kind.

Speaking of turmoil, the xandros OS on my eeepc crapped out on me today, so I had to spend better part of the afternoon remodding the whole thing again. I've got hold of 4G sdhc card and changed the desktop to fluxbox just for kicks. I really like the simplicity of the fluxbox. It seems even more elegant than the original xandros cover the computer came with. I guess minimalism is the way to go for a small and relatively weak laptop like this.

The sheer customizability of the linux system is quite amazing. And all this is available for free, unlike some other major operating systems. I'm setting up my current system to better suit my report-writing/web surfing/scientific calculation needs. I think I might as well go the extra mile and give the biopython a try, since I'm going full blast into the synthetic biology realm.

Shakespeare in central park

Shakespeare's Hamlet will be playing in Central Park public theater beginning this coming tuesday (May 27th). The tickets will be given out beginning at 1 pm of each day of performance, and the performance will be at 8 pm in the night. I've never gone out to one of these things before (not the one in the central park), so I don't know whether they will be crowded or not.

It's not every day I get to see free stage performance of Shakespearean plays though, so I plan on attending on the first day of performance, see how it is and etc. I'm looking forward to this one.

Anyone interested should go and see it.

Searching for bacterial life on Mars

I just found out that the NASA Phoenix mission will be landing at Mars at May 25th of our Earth date. The mission is designed to search for traces of life forms native to arctic Martian environment, most likely to be around Bacterial regime or below. How long had it been since the Viking mission? Perhaps this rather conspicuous shift in direction reflects the humanity's growing understanding and concern for the true scientific nature of life. Who knows, a week from now the papers might be blazing with the discovery of traces of bacterial life forms in the deeper crusts of the Martian arctic landscape.

Forgetfulness.

I had a bit of unexpected freetime today, so I visited the Met and had a little lunch with a colleague from my school. The Met opened a new gallery that was closed for renovation for as long as I can remember right by the Middle Ages art gallery. I took a look around, and one painting caught my eyes. It's titled 'the Aegean Sea', painted by Frederic Edwin Church, a noted American painter of landscapes. The painting itself is quite gorgeous, and the pictures on the net doesn't do it justice. The subtle shades of light and imaginative rendition of old Greek ruins are executed with master's brush work, the sheer size of the painting and its details engulfing the viewer on the spot. Yet it is not the painting itself that I want to talk about.

When I saw the painting, I instantly felt some reaction in my brain, instigated from the electromagnetic waves that went into my eyes, propagated by the network of nerves leading to my cerebral cortex. The established notion of the 'environment' formed by the information oriented, energetically transferred sensation in terms of human language would be 'beauty.' Simply put, I found the painting to be beautiful. What am I in this situation? I am a relatively huge and complex system of interlocking chemical networks, able to sustain myself through interacting with the environment using chemicals and chemically transferred yet fundamentally informational impulses. Yet I felt the undeniable sensation of beauty from certain signal from the world. What is beauty? What is art? What drives us to create again and again and wonder and despair throughout the course of our lives, like some strange metamorphic longing, an obsession with kind of immaterial condensation which we sometimes steal glances at through the medium of art and beauty of the world? If I am in this world, and if I am part of the causal system of the world, then this strange thing we call 'beauty', or 'soul', or 'will' must be a physical manifestation of some kind, fully replicable, explainable, and surmountable. The sciences and art in such a world we live in, belong together. The very fact that human beings are capable of feeling things and have certain peculiar predilections toward the acts of creation of things that doesn't effect the immediate survival of the individual is an indisputable evidence of the physical nature of the psyche, and the beauty and the will that powers a human being. And in that regard, again, I find this world to be beautiful.


As I was walking out of the museum I thought of a very elegant mathematical system for describing beauty of an art work without getting caught up in actual composition of the art work itself. Like all good sounding ideas, however, I promptly forgot what it was as I arrived home. I can only remember the incredibly satisfying fulfillment I had when I first thought of that piece of math. It was something to do with networks... And entropy, but the entropy wasn't important... It was in fact something to get rid of... Maybe if I catch some sleep I might remember it tomorrow.

The penny-arcade game

The penny arcade game,  On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness had been released, either last night or this morning!

I'm definitely downloading the demo, and I must say I'm very much likely to buy the game. The price of a pizza pie (now that I think about it pizza pies are getting ridiculously expensive these days) for a game with the whacked-out brand of humor usually seen in their comics? Sign me up.

Considering that my SB preparation, graduate studies preparation, and P3 FES playing is all happening simultaneously at the moment, I might not have the time to actually play the game for a while though. Once I get around to it, though, expect a thorough review.

Plan for october

A little early to worry about considering we are in middle of May, I nevertheless have a news to share with you.

I think I might end up going to the Synthetic Biology 4.0 conference/mission in Hong Kong this coming October. I have five months to prepare for it, but I'm nonetheless very excited. If I'm lucky I might take about a week off and visit my relatives in Korea and Japan after SB 4.0.

I won't be presenting anything at the conference though. My understanding of the ethos of synthetic biology is nowhere deep enough for me to actually present something in front of professionals and industry insiders who'll be clouding the joint. I'm going to the conference as a student, someone who wishes to get some first hand learning directly from people at the forefront of the science of synthetic biology and do something people can't do with telecasting. Meet the people and ask questions to them.

Again, I'm very excited. I've toured around China before (during vacation), but this will be my first time in Hong Kong. Not to mention the kind of people I'll be able to see there. Maybe Craig Venter will be there too. I know he attended the SB 2.0 at UC Berkeley before... Hmm. Maybe I should pack in his autobiography and get it signed.

As for the travel expenses, I think I might be able to coax some foundation to finance part of the ticket price. I think I can afford the discounted SB 4.0 hotels out of my own pocket... The cheapest ones at least. And I won't be needing much money in Korea and Japan since I'll be mooching off my relatives. The whole thing (surprisingly) comes out as being quite affordable to me. I'm looking at ~$1900 for around two week trip across three countries, so that's a real killer bargain.


Speaking of trips, I think I might take one this summer too, if I can take time off from my college work and brushing up on synthetic biology studies. The PAX 2008 in Seattle sounds like good fun. I've always wanted to visit Seattle anyway (I've only been to L.A and S.F.).

Without borders

I happened to stumble upon this article about a program called scientists without borders. It's basically a web 2.0 project much like jove, but with focus on interactivity and network building for scientist around the world with goal of negating some of the more significant effects of brain drain across the globe rather than sharing physical data or research protocols. Wonderful stuff, somewhat of expected and perhaps even redundant with all the 'community' sites aimed at various strata of the world popping up all over the place, but still it's nice to see that someone in this world noticed the negative effects of professional brain drain and is attempting to do something about it (I'm looking at you, United Nations). Perhaps this program can also work in favor of certain people of professional learning scraping dishes in remoter corners of the globe simply due to the problems of accessibility, rather than lack of talent or diligence. Such waste of men/womenpower always bothered me.

The problem of brain drain is a serious issue. It had been as long as anyone can remember. However, just like the field of synthetic biology which, despite being of opensource nature (reflecting the roots of the movement based on informations technology), can't establish itself without significant industrial presence of genome synthesizing and computerization facilities, science utilizing web 2.0 concept itself won't work well without some sort of physical international distribution network that would make it possible for remoter corners of the globe to have access to the more sophisticated laboratories and equipments available in richer nations.

Application of the web 2.0 and related human network philosophy (...engineering?) ethos is only beginning, of course. What we see right now will not even remotely be close to what we will see in the future, and all I can say at the moment regarding the matter are mere speculations. However, am I too far gone in predicting that in the future the science community might be able to reap the benefits of an international laboratory that does the labwork 'contracted' from scientists around the globe regardless of nationality and location?

Rain slick precipice

The game by the creators of penny arcade webcomic is due out in five days. Am I excited? Yes. Of course I am.

I've always been fond of their peculiar brand of humor. Some would find many of them to be a bit crude, but I like them nonetheless. It's like junk food. There will be problem if I ate only junk food all the time, but if I started skipping out on all forms of less than nutritious delicacies I would go mad faster than you can say hatter!

The problem with the game is, at this stage, I don't think I'll have time to play it through. Sure, I have enough time to play it, but enough time to pull it through multiple hours and reach the end of an episode? And remember, this is only a single 'episode', implying that there will be more than one. And I know that once I get hooked on the stuff, I'll probably end up getting every last one of them, for the sake of peculiar humor and lovely lovecraftian knock-off settings.


On the other note, the 'greenhouse' service being promoted by penny arcade (through the release of their game on that very channel) sounds promising. Industrial focus to amateur game developing has a lot of rewards to offer. Think iPods. Soon after the iPods became the 'thing' of the times, almost a symbolic icon of the era, people started getting iPods simply because it was readily available through variety of commercial channels. The ads were everywhere, the people everywhere were leaking some sort of white rubber strand out of their ears like the proverbial brain leaking out of ears, to the point that iPod became synonymous with mp3 player. The problem with quite a number of indie games aren't really the problem of quality. It's the problem of distribution and availability, the idea of availability being applicable in both physical and cultural senses. Maybe greenhouse might be able to become a 'thing' of indie gaming.

There are a lot of hurdles to cover, however. Like the eponymous service called 'Steam' which already has an independent game distribution branch of sorts, meager at the moment, but certainly with some potential simply due to the accessibility of the service itself. How would greenhouse be able to pull it off?

I read a poem from a blog of my acquaintance, titled 'On time' written by John Milton.

On time

FLY envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace;
And glut thy self with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more then what is false and vain,	5
And meerly mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb'd,
And last of all, thy greedy self consum'd,	10
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood,
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,	15
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine
About the supreme Throne
Of him, t'whose happy-making sight alone,
When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall clime,
Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,	20
Attir'd with Stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.

Beautiful poem. I just wanted to share it with you all.

I’m a physicist (to be). Everything in the world is within the realms of cause and effect, even the imagination of the human beings, even the ‘bits’ of information that can ever be represented by the universe itself. If my belief is true, just what mechanic of this universe allows impressions to surpass their expressions? Musics transcendent over instruments, and memory over life? Integrated together into a beautifully knit whole, yet one’s emergence feels entirely different from the substance it originated from.

Again, I am a physicist and a scientist (again, in training). And I refuse to leave such profound movements of my heart to simple metaphysical jumblings as if they weren’t part of this universe to begin with. I can perceive them, and I can feel its intent spreading throughout my heart. The indescribable sensation of being alive and empathetic to things made by the living, they are definitely integral parts of this physical universe.

The beauty should not be relegated to some pathetic social conventions that grew from physical impediments of last few centuries should humanity ever hope to go beyond a few more centuries into the future. If something in this universe is so capable of grasping at our hearts, then we must be able to explain it in the language of this universe. We must be able to recreate it. And active study and understanding of us, the life, might as well be the first step into the breach.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why I am obsessed with artificial life.

Writer's Block: Three dishes I could live on

Hmm. Let's see.

Sushi, definitely. Not one of those wimpy rolls, I want the real deal, preferrably high quality maguro. Have you ever seen one of those fishes? They have increadibly large variety of edible parts with different textures and tastes. The flesh isn't the only edible part. There are wines from their spines and other bones, and eyeballs and general head parts in particular are considered delicacies... A beginner might feel a little squirmish at first at the prospect of eating 'everything' a gigantic fish has to offer, but think of hot dogs. Hot dogs are infinitely more disgusting than a carefully prepared delicacy prepared by a master's hand.

Pizza comes in the second. I love Italian food. Not as much as I love the Japanese cuisine, but decent Japanese food in the NYC are so ridiculously overpriced for their quality. Italian food, however, are cheap, usually well made, extremely tasty and goes well with variety of wines. Among all the Italian foods on the palette, pizza stands out as one of the finest culinary creation ever made! So versatile, so rich, and yet there is certain depth that draws the line between amateur crafters of pizza and masters of the art. If only I didn't have such a predilection for sushi (and variety of sashimi) pizza would certainly take the top spot as one food I'm willing to spend my life with.

The third place... I say wine. I'm cheating here, of course, since wines aren't foods in conventional sense of the term. But seriously, I can't think of my life without wine. Not that I'm wasted 24/7, of course. Getting drunk out of mind is a hallmark of immature mind (in most cases). Wines are more of alcoholic tea rather than, say, beer (yuk). Glasses of good wines are referred to as having their unmistakable bouquet, and it is a very suitable term... The problem would be that I'd probably starve to death if forced through the diet of wines alone...

A bit of an old news.

Charlie Rose is one of my favorite journalists of the day. His talk shows have certain depth and intensity rarely seen in crapfests passing for shows on the television today, and I try my best not to miss any of them (though due to time restraints I usually watch them on the net these days). Broad topic coverage ranging from top of the lines sciences to cultural phenomenon, and he isn't afraid to dig deeper into those topics and is enough of a man to admit to things he doesn't know in professional context. Meticulous research of topics seem to be his friend (unlike most talk show hosts these days, who seem to throw anything off the top of their head hoping to sound smart).

I've recently found out (this morning, about thirty minutes ago actually) that Charlie Rose is also a sort of gadget geek. In fact, he loves his gadgets so much that he would jump to their defense at the risk of physical harm to his own body. Seriously, how cool is that? A world class journalist who also knows to appreciate the finer (techie) things in life! The world needs more of those I think.

Funny

I found bunch of funny spoofs of the Persona 3 game on youtube. This is even more entertaining to me since I've actually started playing Persona 3 FES version amidst my busy schedule. Well, I can always sleep less and eat while doing something.

This is the first time I've turned on my PS2 since... About two or so years ago, and even then it was to watch a DVD of 'the Waking Life', rather than to play a game... I should play this thing a little more, but then synthetic biology should be the one I focus my leisure time on... Not to mention that PS3 had been out forever so PS2 is quite obsolete... Choices choices.

Anyway, this game (persona 3 FES) is quite interesting. I've always been fond of shin megami tensei series and their spinoffs, but this particular game seem to stand out among the other games of the franchise in terms of style and accessibility... They should have a PSP version of this game. I just see portable gaming written all over this one (not that I own a PSP...).

A plethora of Jungian psychoanalytic terms are thrown around the game, and unlike some other superficial jab at pseudo psychology present in many videogames, the ideas in the Persona 3 seem to be rather well thought out, and doesn't take itself too seriously (the developers doesn't stop the game to give pseudo-psychology lectures at players). Aside from the superpower bit, the nature of different persona-archetypes and their utility in real world human interactions actually does make a bit of sense even in contexts of reality.

The style in the game is very clean cut and aesthetically appealing without being gaudy or shallow. The music is alright aside from a bit of problem with Engrish lyrics (as is frequently the case with some Japanese games). Very hip, very easy-listening. The menu interfaces and general design of the game is well done and helps players to immerse themselves into gaming and the game world, instead of dwelling on menus and buttons.

Further reports/comments as I play along.

Lebanese situation

Just made a little post on the Lebanese situation on my wordpress blog, the place I usually reserve for semi-serious rants that shouldn't be placed in Livejournal-like casual environment.

Seriously, the military in Lebanon wasn't as pronounced as they are now, and I'm beginning to suspect that certain chain of circumstances stemming from the widely publicized (and criticized) Israeli invasion of Lebanon led them to gaining certain political and cultural momentum they were prevented from attaining in pre-war Lebanon. Of course, I'm no expert on the matters of international politics and their subterfuge which tend to be rather too subtle for public consumption, but still, the logical reasons to suspect so are clearly in place, I think.

All the more reason to lament the lack of backbone present in contemporary United Nations. Have I ever mentioned that I am a great supporter of the concept of United Nations and such related ideals of internationalization? Some would cry foul at such sentiments, but I view the problem of internationalization as the problems of implement rather than idea, so there it is.

In this world, where the powers of individual states fluctuate and condense into arms-based absolute levels (am I the only one finding it ridiculous that the only permanent members of the security council happen to the the biggest arms manufacturers and sellers in the world?), the only sure way for peace would be to place some sort of international laws, enforcements for such laws, and forums to discuss such laws beyond the narrow aspirations of any single nation. Unlike what some amazingly complacent people seem to believe, population in misery have a habit of wanting to be rid of the source of their misery, and within the cycle of the world economy, which is a physics applied with human emotion, the source tend to be (justifiably?) those who are more advantaged than themselves due to environment/stroke of luck, slant of the system itself and etc. Such a world system is innately unstable in that the very moment it is implemented upon real people, it begins to manufacture dissidents with significant energetic potential and logical reason to overturn the whole system. Such a system maintained by human beings able to perceive the threat to their relatively priviliged way of life, then must spend significant amount of energy and resources to manufacture the 'antibodies' against such dissidents, the very dissidents who are in fact also the result of the materials and resources that might have been spent to further the causes of general human philanthropy.

In such a world, composed of such examples of humanity, the only efficient way (physically and economically, in long term) would be to provide a forum in which disadvantaged nations and individuals might be able to speak out on equal footing as the ones with the most nuclear weapons on subjects that affect them. And economical and diplomatic fairness guaranteed by the international organization (United Nations) would provide the incentive for the groups of weaker nations and middle-of-the-way bourgeoisie nations (like many nations in the Europe region) to seek diplomatic methods to their conflicts that would in the end be significantly less violent and damaging to the infrastructure and civilians of the world (though I expect that they will be no less fierce).

The problem, then, is how such international organization would rise to such prominent position amidst all the scheming supernations of the world, and how such an organization would be able to guarantee fairness and diplomatic coverage to the less advantaged portion of the globe, preventing them from turning into groups of violent dissidents like so many supernations had done before.

Good weather

Good weather today. Lot of rain, and lot of fresh wind. I spent the whole day digging through books and references for my thesis and synthetic biology diy group preparation, from nine in the morning to ten in the night. It seems that I can only feel alive when working my brains out. Hope this is a good thing.

The wind really cleared my mind up of all the little troubles and questions, brushing them aside for leisurely introspection later on.

It's amazing how this world can look so beautiful.
Will I be able to have my part in it?

Wondering

Recently I haven't been posting much on the blogs.

The reason is that I've been insanely busy lately, with all the course work/labwork and my other activities regarding synthetic biology, something I've been quite taken with past few years. It is amazing how easy it is to learn this new discipline. And the relatively cheap price of the experiments and accessibility of entry level tutorials (of sorts) are added pluses that makes the field of synthetic biology all the more alluring.

I'm actually thinking of starting a synthetic biology DIY group of some kind in NYC, centering around the wonderful database from biobrick foundation and related iGeM projects. I get a feeling that 'hacking life' will be something taught to elementary and middle school students sometime in the near future as the industry matures. Wouldn't it be wondeful? If only my old middle school taught me how to engineer a blue rose I would have been able to actually enjoy the three years of brutal boredom.

Synthetic biology as a discipline is more of an approach to biological engineering, thus innately accessible and interdisciplinary. However, there are still prerequisite knowledge and skills that must be known by heart, like some degree of proficiency in a scripting language like perl or python (and programming mindset, which is apparent in that the beginning of synthetic biology actually came from bunch of traditional hackers), fluid understanding of the tenets of micro/molecular biology, and certain degree of (in)organic chemistry. It might sound like a lot but it's nothing past the level of a decent high school AP class, so most people of adequate education should only need to brush up on their old memories rather than learning something new altogether. Along with violin, synthetic biology is a habit I can see myself committing to ten years in the future, so I'm going into this with long term goals in mind.

... Which means lots and lots of preparation. Sigh. This is something of a problem for me since I'm preparing to submit application to the Rockefeller University graduate course (it almost makes me want to pray to god/or godlike thing(s?)).


The fact that I have too much things I've been thinking about outside my field of expertise doesn't really help matters either. Like the relationship between information, physical state of the universe, and the morphological mechanism possibly linking all of it together (this sounds a little nuts without all the requisite reasoning, but I don't want to go into them at this moment). Or the reconstruction of the origin of life scenario beginning from the concept of biosphere. Since the carbon cycle doesn't quite apply to the biosphere (the Earth, due to lack of any other observable habitable planets), the life-like system at heart has to be a physical phenomena based upon base elementary compounds and electromagnetic radiation, rather than biological. The problem of life-like system in that light should be the problem of material and scale. Is there min/max scale requirement for emergence of life-like systems? All the life-like systems we can observe so far are composed of carbons. Does that mean that only certain type of components can form life-like systems? If so, what is the mathematical and physical property of carbon that makes it the preferred constituent of a life-like system?

I can see the questions inetrlocking with each other and coalescing into something profound at some stage, but how would I get there? I'm doing some complex plasma system modeling and there have been some helpful clues, but none of them are significant enough to provide a lucid answer on it own.

So many questions and curiosities, and I don't know how to answer any of them. I think there is an underlying basis linking all the questions into one whole, but I don't know if it's true or a mistake borne of inexperienced mind......... Sometime I even fear that I'm questioning something beyond my personal ability to answer, like a Greek philosopher in helpless reverie about the origin of the universe.

At least this beats boredom, huh?

Deus Ex 3

If there is one game I'm looking forward to this (or next) year, it would be Deus Ex 3. I was such a fan of the first Deus Ex game, and I found the sequel pretty enjoyable too. I'm not much of a conspiracy nut, but the semi-realistic portrayal of the future society, its issues, and intelligent conversations really captivated me during those oh-so-impressionable years.

Apparently the development team is getting upto speed on things these days, and I found this french article (googlified) floating around the net showing supposedly leaked concept art screen.

The release of the game itself, of course, is very unlikely to be within this year, and perhaps even the next year. But I know I'm getting it once it is released.