Biological parts

What could be more fun than playing with Lego? Playing with Living Lego.

At the Registry of standard biological parts you will find a wiki that documents various biological parts. These components can be used together to build up more complex structures, or genetically engineered machines. OpenWetWare.org tells us to think of DNA as a low-level programming language and the genome as a program. Just as programming languages provide libraries of routines for developers to use, so the idea of making libraries of biological parts, or BioBricks, exisits to allow people to share and use constructions that exhibit some, hopefully, well defined behaviour.

Some examples that are mentioned, are making a yeast cell that counts to three and then turns red, or making a bacterial cell that expresses lots of human insulin. See, told you it would more interesting than Lego. Of course trying to debug your creation may be bit of a sticky problem.

And if you like a challenge, you can always try and participate in the iGEM Synthetic Biology competition.

You have to smile at this ...

Another classic from xkcd

What happened to the lights?

Disappointment. A depressing word and one often found in the company of failure. It’s also happens to come to mind when considering the utterly dismal service our main, and only, electrical power supplier now provides. The sad thing about the need for load shedding - a great marketing term, which tries to pass off this euphemistic phrase for what is still a power failure to the end users - is that it now seems everyone in the industry was well aware of the impending crises and has been for the last several years.

Well that's great. Thanks for telling the rest of us. Or perhaps, if you did, please shout a little louder next time. Let's take a quick look at some of the statements made in previous years. I’m not trying to pick on anyone here, this is just , after all, a sample. I’m sure there is plenty of blame to spread among those not mentioned here. The 2003 Annual report shows T.S. Gcabashe as Chairman of the board and E. Banda as the Chief Executive Officer. It seems that problems with capacity are not an issue. In the section entitled 'Challenges ahead', we get this piece of drivel, 'Our challenge will be to embed the transformation process into every part of our daily working lives.' Well, you got that right; pity the process was about not having reliable power.

Jumping three years ahead to the 2006 Annual report. The chairman is now M.V. Moosa and the Chief Executive Officer is T.S. Gcabashe. The cute and colourful graph showing 'Timeframe for new capacity' seems to be fairly accurate with respect to current loads. But, in the Chairman's report we get this fine homily, 'Eskom’s financial results for the year underscore the strength of the group and should not be overshadowed by the unfortunate incidents in the Western Cape. Eskom’s response strategy was clearheaded and its partnerships with other role players ensured predictability and minimised inconvenience. This extraordinary combination of factors tested Eskom’s systems to the utmost and they passed, confounding those who argued that a national energy crisis was unfolding.' My, looks like some contrary people were actually telling the truth about an unfolding crisis.

In fact it seems that there were mounting concerns for future capacity problems in 2000. But, again, there was no need to worry; we had eight years to come up with something. Now we don't.

Current blog watch

Thought I would list a few blogs that I currently keep an eye on. I would be lying if I said a read a fraction of what these authors write, but those posts that I have taken the time to read have always been well worth it.

• Pharyngula - Never a dull moment here. Great observations and comments on a range of subjects. Notably, evolution, biology, and debunking.


• Good Math, Bad Math - Really nice articles on math and computer science related topics.


• Bad Astronomy - Astronomy, science, and debunking. Lots a good explanations and pictures of our amazing. universe


• physics arXiv blog - Entertaining way of keeping up to date with articles posted at arXiv.

And a special mention to The hunting of the Snark - which I only found a few days ago. Nice work Mahendra. When you publish your work I'll definitely buy a copy :)

The oddest prime - part 1

Which prime number do you think is the oddest? Well, thanks to Euclid around 300BC, we know that there are an infinite number of primes, or as he put it "Prime numbers are more than any assigned multitude of prime numbers.'' Except of course he said it in Greek, and for many that's probably still how it sounds. So, its not like you don't have a lot to choose from.

Of course, you can't say 1, I know you would like to. But 1 is called the unit, and falls into a class all of its own, it is neither a prime nor a composite. Anyway I'll leave the question open until later. And there really isn't a right answer ... you never quiet know what oddness is hiding in the murky fog of infinity.

Itinerant Salesman

I've just come across a great looking book on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) titled 'The Traveling Salesman Problem:A Computational Study' by David L. Applegate, Robert E. Bixby, Vasek Chvátal & William J. Cook - http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/book/index.html. This is a fantastic problem for introducing many mathematical concepts in discrete maths, computational geometry, combinatorics, theory of complexity, heuristics and approximation algorithms, and of course graph theory. Not only is it an interesting launching pad for many topics in math, but it also appears in a number of applications spanning several disciplines. Prehaps we can use some of this theory in our hunt for the Snark .. (and maybe the TSP is a Snark itself).

Bell Number - part 1

A famous nonsense poem composed by Lewis Carroll was published in 1876 and titled the 'The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)'. The rather odd 10 man crew (well 9 men and 1 beaver, did I mention the crew was a bit strange) is lead by the 'Bellman', whose main claim to fame is his famous statement that everything said three times is true.

Now, once our trusty band of men (and beaver) lands on the beach to begin the hunt, in how many ways can we partition them to start the search. The answer is simple, it's the 10th Bell number, or B₁₀ . Ok, I hear you say, and just how to we calculate B₁₀? Hmmm ... good question, and one I'll explain in future posts. For more on the hunting of the Snark see http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/.

portmanteau

Pretty odd looking word isn't it? And given one of its meanings, it seems appropriate that it should appear a bit strange. The word can either refer to a leather suitcase that opens into two hinged compartments, or, it may refer to the action of merging two words together.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a master of using this technique to come up with many strange and colourful (strolouful :) words that appear in both his stories and poems. Words like 'snark' (snail or snake + shark, snarl + bark has also been suggested), and 'frumious' (furious + fuming) are just two of many examples that can be found.

Science and Reductionism

I suppose, is some sense, its funny when people confuse a tool with the discipline that uses the tool. For instance thinking that electrical engineering is all about volt meters, or painting is really about the type of brush you use. However, the same mistake is made when people confuse the methodology of science with the investigative process of reductionism. More on this later.

20 petabytes is this big ...

Apparently Google is now processing over 20 petabytes a day (www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html) . Hmmm, I have an 80GB drive, so let’s make that a round 100. Then that is the equivalent of 200 000 drives. Which means they are processing approx 2.3 of these drives a second, yikes?

Let say the above paragraph took you 10 seconds to process (… I like round numbers). That means you processed it at roughly 24 bytes / second. If this were a race and we let one byte = 1mm, then you travelled 24mm and the Google monster travelled 230 000 Km, about 36 times around the earth.