Curiosity

Something just came to my mind.

The Harry Potter series gave birth to a whole generation of readers. Now that the series is over, what are they reading now? What kind of books in what genre?

The moving is going smoothly, albeit a little hectic. The integrated heating/ac system in these new buildings are quite charming.

I haven,'t had much time to hone my syn bio studies, with all the school works converging on me during this transition period and all. Considering that I plan to be in Hong Kong this October for SB 4.0, this is a rather pathetic state of affairs. I hope I can make some substantial progress by the end of this week.

The days

I've been just a little too tired to make a decent post lately. I've been pushing myself at the lab, working out some models.

There are a few things I've been thinking about writing, and probably will do so by the end of the week.... Eric Drexler's predicament and future of nanoassember concept, or the nature of information and its relation with the practice of art? Hmm.

note

Integration of the prebiotic chemistry with artificial components.

Inkos white tea.

Have I ever mentioned that I'm really particular about teas? I usually don't go for those instant stuff. I mean the premium stuff, the tea leaves with pedigree. Of course, such teas are usually somewhere between somewhat and very expensive, and I can't often afford such teas with my budget, especially considering my equal love of good red wines. I try to make do with what I can find in this mass produced society, by filling up my diet with all things tea related. It goes without mentioning that my favorite ice cream flavor is green tea (why aren't there any other tea tasting ice creams? Hmm. Synthetic receptor issues?).

I've recently come across the white tea line from Inkos, and I must say that these thing are probably the best instant-packaged teas I've ever drank in my life. It's quite refreshing without being too sweet or having bitter aftertaste. Their taste is 'light' compared to similar sugar water being sold by, say, Nastea, which I consider to be a simple sugarwater compound/leftover coke with tea additives. The worse of the instant, packaged teas usually leave terrible aftertaste and bad breath. This white tea doesn't do that. Even better, they actually sell their products online by the box, at a cheaper price compared to what you would have to pay at a local convey.... I might get the full box later on, once I get my new apartment which should be by next week.

The evening.

A good Friday evening must be spent outside under the beautiful twilight and cool wind. Although I have to go back in to finish things up at the lab soon, being able to take a breather like this is like a blessing to me. With a good music in my ear, the wind caressing my mind, and the veil of twilight spreading across the sky in clearest blue and most subtle shades of red and violet, the day's stress seem to just melt away.

I think I just saw a firefly disappearing into the bushes. The summer really is here.

For some strange reason, I find it that I think and concentrate best in natural settings, like a garden in twilight, or a long walk through a forest. It is much easier to calm my nerves and come up with new things in such settings, and I must say that being able to do so really saved my hide in more than a few occasions. Is it psychological? If that is so, we are wasting away tremendous amount of time and men/womenpower shoving them into little partitions and welfare housing.

The world I see in front of me is far too beautiful to contemplate those matters however. For today, I will leave them be.

It's been a while since I wrote something like this. And recently I haven't been getting any time to write anything longer/deeper than this, which is a bit of concern for me.

Name to the moon

Apparently the guys at NASA are sending participating people's names along with the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter vehicle. All you have to do is to visit the website and click on the 'Send Your Name to the Moon' link, after which you'll be prompted to enter your own name. You can also print/save a certificate of participation as a pdf file.

Blog

I posted something on my other blog and tagged it with iPhone and Apple following the wake of the iPhone 2.0 announcement. The article itself was about possible market appeal of Apple products to scientific community, which might be integrated with the iPhone to provide high quality and high speed scientific computing on mobile devices.

My blog usually gets about 6 or 10 hits a day, 20 or 30 at the most. However, since I've posted about the iPhone I've been getting 400 to 500 hits a day... This is very peculiar, and perhaps reveals the vulnerability of the net based newsreadership... Any quack site can come up with bunch of popular terms and tag their advertisements with those terms... Flooding popular inventory services in the process. Though I guess google's method of counting links to a specific website when determining its query might prove impervious to such methods, what if the spammers create a 'microcosm' of websites where they link to each other centering on certain automatically retrieved popular tags?

DNA synthesizer

Took a look at some DNA synthesizer models today. I was particularly intrigued with the Dynatech ML1000 DNA synthesizer , since it's actually available on the ebay for measly $799 dollars, the cost of a crappy new laptop or a decent new desktop. The way DNA synthesizers work is simple (in theory, everything is simple). Hook it up to a computer terminal with requisite platform, enter the DNA sequence you want synthesized, pour in sugar in one end and the DNA comes out the other end. The problem is, the technology isn't really all that mature yet. Most machines today seem to get around 90% accurate synthesis with simple DNA fragments, say about 300 base pairs. But once we get to the more complex level of synthesis, the kind of sequence we'd actually need to do something that matters the accuracy drops significantly.  Human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long (with 23 chromosomes, but we all knew that), so synthetic human-like lifeform is unrealistic given the present state of biotechnology where we might or might not manage to stumble over 1000 base pairs.

Even so, this is quite interesting. With the Moore law seemingly applicable to the biotechnology sector as well as the traditional computing sector, seeing a DNA synthesizer capable of synthesizing DNAs of around a billion base pairs wouldn't be out of question during our life time. If the registry of standard parts , or at least something close to it can come of age soon, we might even be ale to expect certain synergistic relationship between the two, one field accelerating the other through financial support and academic endeavor. 

Relaxation

An unusual afternoon of relaxation and reading today. I'm listening to Bach's concerto for two violins in D minor. The music of violin is especially fitting with the calm afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows... It sounds as if the light and the instrument were made for each other, sharing some fundamental secret amongst themselves that mortal men are not privy to.

This kind of experience always arouses an intense wave of curiosity over my mind. Just what makes a molecular system react in such a way to certain vibrations of air? Is it complexity? Is it some innate characteristic of my components? Or is it purely dependent on the way the materials are arranged? Is it replicable? If this is a natural phenomenon, who's to say that another phenomenon of similar nature might be manifesting somewhere else in this universe, on entirely different materials and scales, like that of a whole galaxy?

My favorite cup of green tea ice cream is melting away. I should go and enjoy my life more.

Diet.

Ugh. I ruined my diet today. I couldn't help but to eat nearly a whole pie of pizza, plus a few extra (peer pressure I tell you). It was a thin crust cheese pizza, and that's 290 calorie per slice... I'll just say 300 per slice just to be safe.... I ate 5 slices so that's 1500 calories, a few extra should add up to around 300 calories so I had 1800 calories today. My diet plan calls for between 900~1400 calories per day, so I'm over 400 calories over my maximum limit... But even that's an optimistic count. It's probably safe to think that I had a little over 2000 calories today.

Right now my height's around 180 cm... So that's around 5'8, and my weight's around 140 pounds. I'm shooting for 130 pounds average, so I can gave a little room to gorge myself should the life provide me with an opportunity.

What really kills me about today though, is that the pizza was disgusting. I can't stand to fatten myself with things that doesn't taste nice.

Tonight's exercise will probably last around three hours. I hope that's enough to burn some calories away.

And I should skimp down on tomorrow's menu...

Hacker attitude

The 'hacker' culture had been around for so long, and involved in so much of the substantial progress of the last half of the decade, to have their own ethos and philosophy into codified laws, somewhat like the ten commandments. Except that these rules are, as pertaining to the hacker subculture itself, a matter of choice for the most part. If you are finding yourself agreeing to the code, than you are probably a hacker, regardless of whether you know about computers or not. Even if you regularly write in assembly language for living, if you cannot agree to the codes outlined by the hacker culture, you are probably not a hacker. In a way calling it a 'code' and comparing it to the ten commandments would be something of a misnomer. Think of it as something of an identification tag, to be used between people of similar disposition.

There are five fundamental common attitudes shared by most hackers, and they are as follows.

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

It is rather interesting that all of the five attitudes go against common beliefs and pratice held by most public school education system. At least for the inner NYC schools I know of. Around those schools teachers and administrators can say they are trying to teach children how to respect the authority without even blushing in shame. That's right folks, not respect to your fellow men/ladies, and not respect to yourself. The primary goal seem to be built around having the kids in middle and high school stages of education to respect the person who has the right to call the police or security on them. Of course, I am being rather crass here, but this is the sentiment shared by most if not all urban city youths, the same feeling I shared when I was their age. And who am I supposed to blame for current less-than-fantastic state the public education system is in? Kids or experienced, supposed 'professionals' who get paid to study the children and lead them to the best possible future?

As I grow older I'm finding that this 'hacker' mindset is not new at all. I believe it had been around since the very beginning of civilizations, and that this is a part of natural instinct of being a human being. It is becoming increasingly certain that you don't need to know about computers to hack things. What you need instead is the insight and wisdom to seem through the system of the world. It's like applied cybernetics. As long as things affect each other in certain way they form a system. A system of human society is a system like any other, albeit fundamentally more complex since such systems are usually evolved rather than designed. As long as something can be considered a system, it can be, and perhaps should be, hacked. A mudlark in highly hierarchical society later becoming a shipping magnate, or a leader of a nation, is as much a hacker as the computer science major hacking with python and C++ in pursuit of digital artificial life. A writer, a cook, a musician, the applicable list goes on and on. The field of synthetic biology, though fledgling at the moment, seem to be shaping up as the next contender to the hackerdom's primary pursuit, in the search of the ability to hack the life as we know it. Who knows what we'll be hacking some distant time into the future? Perhaps the very nature of space and time itself. Maybe even designer universes.

And from this standpoint of the universal hackery, I must ask, would it be possible to hack the human world? Would it be possible to hack the public mind and the generational zeitgeist to nudge the rest of humanity into some vision of future? Is it possible to hack the origin of all the situations and motivations, the human world itself?

Ice cream

Cold ice cream on hot summer night. I prefer mine to be green-tea. What gets better than this at relaxation? Almost nothing I say.

Outdoors

I'm in a small park by the Lincoln center right now (blessings on the public wifi!). It certainly feels quite different when I'm writing in outdoors. It's pleasantly chilly and windy right now, and the world is taking on the cool colors of the dusk, as the especially beautiful sunset today had left us in its last violet glow, spread out on the thread of clouds. I just caught a glimpse of the crescent moon, gleaming in pure pale light just above the sun sinking into the western lands.

I need to do some work again in a few minutes, but I feel refreshed already, so it doesn't matter anymore.

The day of number crunching is over. I need to fall asleep quickly if I want to make it in time for tomorrow's lab duty... I don't want to fall asleep on the way and miss my stop like some other days.

I've been listening to a tune from a violin all night... The Devil's Trill, actually. This particular version is played by Tsuneyoshi Saito.

In this world, the only thing that allows me to retain the barest form of human condition is the vibrations of that beautiful instrument. I always start writing with utmost passion and intensity whenever I listen to a well-played violin, only to falter and stumble in that I do not know the words and phrases to describe what I am feeling.

It goes beyond mere aesthetic satisfaction. There is a certain cord within me that resonate to beautiful strands of violin that makes me feel, alive. The gradient of the world becomes clearer to all the senses. I feel 'energy' within myself, that shakes down the dusts and tears of the day and replaces them with a brand new will, like new flesh taking the place of cuts and bruises. And the concentration. The intense concentration, that brings my mind into one focal point, a state that make me feel alive as a human being, an information construct, rather than a bag of flesh pretending to be something else in nature.

Perhaps someday I would be able to transcribe such moments of beauty, of both the living and silent kind, into words and atoms, to play them out on the strings of this universe and the strings of our minds.

Perhaps that one day might be closer than most people expect it to be.

Protein Folding at Home

I'm donating some of my computer cycles to this project, which I came across while researching some synthetic biology related documents. This isn't the only public domain distributed computing project I'm donating my computer cycle to. I'm signed up into various projects available on the BOINC site, starting from brain mapping to artificial intelligence project I mentioned earlier this year. If you are not doing anything computing intensive (like running mathematica for full scale physics simulation or doing non-stop 3d design), I suggest you to devote some computing cycle to a project you find worthwhile.

These little advances of the sciences using the medium of internet gives me such joy. It is almost enough to make me believe in bright future for the humanity.