Productivity

Spent the early hours of the morning going through papers in the lab. Since about 6 in the morning to be precise. I needed some place to work on my stuff and it turns out that I didn't have much choice during such wee hours of the morning.
 
Now the day is almost over and I'm writing this as I wait for a friend of mine to join for dinner. Such is the lifestyle of the modern datamancer.
 
Also got some light lunch at the cafe zaiya's. The place is really beginning to go down hill I think. I can still remember the days the cafe had a whole lot more on the menu for a lot less. I guess the economy is hitting away at one of my favorite hangout spots as well(at least in the midtown region I guess).
 
Spent much of the day cooped up in the rose reading room at the central library, concentrating on drafting papers for my lab work and some side stuff for the diybio group. There must be something strange in the air at that place. It feels as if I do my best works in that place. I just find it much easier to concentrate in that place for some reason. There is a kind of intensity in the air, and you can't find anyone dicking around in that place. No one chatting with a friend, no one watching some video on the net or browsing some meaningless website. The air of pure academic learning and pursuit of something that normally remains beyond the reach of average men.
 
As I was writing down equations after equations, and drafting course ideas for the synthetic biology class I saw rays of afternoon sunlight streaming through the old windows. The effect was nothing short of solemn. I wish I was able to capture the feel of the
 
Other than the usual, I wrote some rough draft for diybo $300 course. The idea is to be able to offer a decent 2-day diybio course with full wetlab component for $300 per head. It's a sort of side idea I came up with after reading about the $3000 five day MIT course. Mac Owell sounds quite enthusiastic about that idea, and I really think it might be able to take off. I think the group will be able to offer something by the October of this year, but of course I would need to talk the whole thing through with the group members first and thus the need to think about all possibilities and come up with a workable draft. I will be putting the whole thing up on my blog soon, after I put some finishing touches on the agenda and such.
 
Being able to come up with some sort of diybio courseware had always been a secret passion of mine. How amazing would it be to be able to do a full scale wetlab exercise in diybio style? Any suitably motivated person would be able to do a biology related research on his or her own. Well, it's already possible actually. Anyone can learn minimal amount of python coding and run BLAST interface through the internet by connecting to GenBank. It's diy bioinformatics and there are some people making noticeable contribution to the field by working with a laptop and minimal scripts.
 
I see two main problems at being able to run a diybio class though. The first is the relative ignorance of the target audience. Any diybio class would be targeted at novices with no background in academic research. I'm fine with that. I am however, worried about the kind of people who have preconceived notions of what diybio is/should be. There are so many people out there who can't tell the difference between reading stuff on computer screen and actually researching something in academic capacity. It's easy to teach something to people who don't know. It might even be fun. But attempting to teach something to someone who already thinks he/she knows everything there is to know about the subject is painful both for teacher and the student. It's very disheartening to see people who cannot tell the difference between studying and glossing over textbooks.
The second problem is the usual. The need for materials and resources for diybio. It's very difficult, perhaps impossible to grab hold of basic biobrick materials, at least any organization that is not sanctioned by the local government as an educational institution. There will be a lot of red tapes to jump through if I were to pursue an actual wetlab project.
 
On lighter note, I finally got the java based irc client working on my blackberry. Apparently the program can run on 'regular' cellphones as well since it's completely based on java architecture. Maybe I should give it a try on some of my older cellphones as well. I'm having a bit of fun speaking to the peeps at phys lab and funcom server people trying to solve the arg puzzles. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

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