Political Amoebas

Does anyone else find it humorous that the latest stunning evidence for evolution, a giant colony of clonal amoebas (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090311131608.htm), chose to take up residence in a cow pasture in Texas, the state that can't seem to decide if it agrees with Charles Darwin yet? So now things are evolving from the microscopic all the way to microprocessors. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a High Performance Computing workshop at Rice University. There I learned that engineers working on the new Petaflop machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory are having to shield the dense cluster of chips from cosmic radiation that could impact its calculations (http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-039-s-Chips-to-Save-Mankind-From-the-Cosmic-Rays-Threat-83000.shtml). Wait a minute! Small incremental mutations to an encoding scheme, caused by random cosmic radiation, leading to changes in behaviour? Hey, that supercomputer is trying to evolve! Leave it alone and let's see if it learns to make an amoeba...

fixing your laptop...

My laptop plasma screen has developed a split personality. At first I thought maybe it was the fact that I recently had to switch to my backup pair of reading glasses due to an unfortunate act of gravity at the Rockets Game on Wednesday (don’t ask). But then I looked at some small font hardcopy as a control, and had other family members who do not wear glasses take a look, and yes, the image on my screen now has a doppelganger, a conjoined twin, a co-located nearby companion. The oxymoronically named IT Help Desk told me to make sure that my computer was out of range of any magnetic fields. I pointed out that would require moving outside the heliopause, a trip that took Voyager over 20 years, and I really needed the problem fixed sooner than that…

Predicting Flu Season...

Did you know that last year the people who track search trends at Google were able to predict the onset of flu season two weeks earlier than the Centers for Disease Control? This is because people started searching for health related information about flu symptoms online even before they started to make appointments with their doctors or miss work. This same kind of trending analysis is being looked at by large companies with internal search engines to try to determine other types of trends.

Inside the Mind of a Scientist

It's hard to explain to someone not of a particularly scientific bent how an analytical mind works, but I found myself trying to explain the other day to my wife, who is definitely more artistic...

What if, I explained, when you looked at your iron supplement pills in the morning, the first thing that went through your head was "I wonder if they contain ferrous sulfate because if they contained ferrous oxide they would just turn to rust?"...

Or if when you heard an interview with Ron Wood in which he said that any two of the Rolling Stones could have formed a band equally as good you immediately think "ok, so how many potential bands is that? Let's see, 4 factorial, but no because Jagger and Richards is the same band as Richards and Jagger", but then you hear the rest of the interview and he says only if he was one of them, so that removes the last factor, and then when you pose the question to your 15-year old son he wants to know how many of them are dead before he answers, and you think "good point".... anyway it's about 5 days before you really think about what a band composed of only Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts would actually sound like ...

Or you almost step on a stinkbug on the sidewalk and the first thing you think is, "What possible evolutionary advantage could there be to be shaped like an irregular polygon?"...

Now, who wants to be inside MY head?