This Week in Celebrating Original Minds

The Fosbury Flop revolutionized the sport of high jumping. A clever thought and a graceful twist catapulted Fosbury to fame in the 1968 games where he took gold.

Guess whose middle finger

See if you can guess whose middle finger this is. Because the website is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License I'll atleast have to point you in the direction of this. (which is the answer by the way.)

Throw your cameras in the air

Clickykbd continues his excellent photography over at flickr. Recently, he has created some programs in Processing to display colorful polygons of which he takes time-lapsed photographs. To add to the excitement he's been throwing his camera though the air to create some stunningly abstract swathes of color. Unfortunately he broke his camera in a toss before finishing all his experiments. Let's hope he makes a full and fast recovery.

Documented Computer Defenstration

de·fen·es·tra·tion - (dē-fěn'ĭ-strā'shən) - n. - An act of throwing someone or something out of a window. [From de- + Latin fenestra, window.]

(link).

Scientific Literacy: Drafting Plans

Earlier this week I addressed my disgust over the rates of scientific literacy around the world as well as here in the United States. They are appalling low, so much so that I'm stirred to action.

My first small scale idea: starting a program/club at Duke University, where I currently attend, to advocate scientific literacy. The club would sponsor talks directed at the layman. Know of anyone particularly good at explaining complex topics in simple and enlightening terms? Also, we are committed to inspiring the generations to come to find science both exciting and inspiring. Enter Durham public schools. Oh, the moldable masses.

Steps:

1. Club formation
2. Mission statement
3. Fund raising
   
4. Advocacy
5. Work the media

Let me know if I missed anything or if you have any lovely suggestions.

Man vs. Wild Faked?

Apparently Bear Grylls, professional badass, still enjoys a comfortable stay at a hotel over the wet interior of a cave. Oh, the humanity! (link)

LOLCats + LOLGeenomz

First spotted on Mike the Mad Biologist:



P.S. Still working on that plan of action. No need to worry.

And check out The Aethernauts. It looks like it's finally getting going.

Scientific Literacy

I'm becoming a strong advocate of scientific literacy for all Americans. The problem is much more serious than I had thought. The theories that describe the inner workings of the world fascinate me but the majority of the population has disconnected from a scientifically accurate world view. Referred through More Coffee, Please, I found a New York Times article that shares some shocking statistics (from the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School):

"American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century" (Cornelia Dean, Scientific Savvy?).

This is appalling, not only from a scientist's perspective, but also from a citizen's. Technological advances and scientific theories are ever entering into the political domain: climate change, evolution, stem cell research. From the previous statistics it appears that an American's education is largely inadequate for responsible citizenship on scientific issues.

Perhaps less important, but equally pressing: the re-emergence of magical thinking. We all succumb to it in one way or another. (Don't say you've never crossed your fingers before hoping for better luck.) The foreseeable problem occurs when an individual sees a piece of technology and accepts a magical explanation for its properties just as well as a scientific one. I am worried that a remote control might just as well work by telepathically communicating button presses to a television instead of using infrared light pulses. And from the above statistic, only one in ten people might know of the radiated infrared light from their remote control.

Tomorrow's work: a plan of action.

Reading to relax

Time to take a sizable chunk out of The Best of Enemies: Race & Redemption in the New South by Osha Gray Davidson. Duke University has selected this book as summer reading for its freshman class. As an orientation adviser I'll to read it too.

I've heard that the summer book committee had selected this book without knowing that it was out of print. We've all received freshly printed books with custom covers for Duke Class of 2011. Looks like a good way to share at least one common intellectual experience besides complaining about freshman writing.

Star Wars Episode I: Racer

I dug up my old N64 today and proceeded to play video games for several hours. Best video game memories from childhood: Star Wars Episode I Racer. For some reason I always played as Toy Dampner. No real idea why. I had some pretty serious nostalgia for boosting, dodging, turning, all with cat-like reflexes might I add. Not sure why I ever stopped playing video games. Maybe it was the ladies.

My thougts exactly

Randall Munroe of xkcd.com delivers a knock-out blow to any overblown pomposity,
unless, of course, that pomposity was born by caesarian section.

What I haven't been reading

In honor of Marginal Revolution's "What I haven't been reading."

At Home In the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman, 10 of 304 pp.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen Jay Gould, 1 of 1343 pp.

Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, 63 of 391 pp.

The Best of Enemies, Osha Gray Davidson, 1 of 298 pp.

What is Life?, Erwin Schrodinger, 1 of 184 pp.

The Aethernauts

Some friends and I are starting a blog named the Aethernauts. We're all very interesting; I promise. No one has posted anything yet, but you should probably check it out. C'est fantastique, non?

Influence?

Today is National Show-a-Blogger-You-Care Day. It's a lot harder to write for an audience when you don't think they're there.

Don't get down; someone is not getting up

Sadly today was the first day I actually ducked against my bedroom wall because I thought a plane flying overhead was going to drop a bomb. In retrospect my own behavior scares me more than the perceived threat from which I hid.

I have become an adamant admirer of non-zero-sum games. That probably comes from my penchant for the economy as a complex system. A non-zero-sum game describes a situation in which the sum of the of loss and gain of each participating party does not equal zero. In contrast, a zero-sum game occurs when the benefit of the winner exactly equals the loss of the loser. For example, in a game of soccer, at the end of the match, one team has lost, the other won. The utility of each result is equal and opposite. In contrast, in a non-zero-sum game such as economy, both parties can gain. When you sacrifice your leisure time to work for your company, you benefit the company and are in turn rewarded with a paycheck.

Why doesn't any national political move in the last few years reflect this world view? I have never taken a political science or public policy class so please correct me if I sound naive. If only we understood our neighbors' utility to directly benefit our own. Man's inability to recognize his negative and positive externalities just might be his second fundamental depravity.

Atleast some people are thinking about the world in a non-zero-sum way, and some of them are even optimistic about the world's future! Meet Robert Wright, best-selling author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal. Catch a video of his inspiring talk to the TED conference at ted.com and realize that everything might not be so bad afterall if we just learn to lend a helping hand.

Investigations - Stuart Kauffman

For the past two weeks I have been inching through Investigations by Stuart Kauffman. I am only half way through the work that some have called as influential as Schrodinger's What is Life?, but already I can see for what Kauffman lacks in answers he makes up for in scope. Investigations is a declaration of a journey just begun, one to define a theory of the living organism.

Most simply, Kauffman describes life as any system able to perform autocatalysis and perform a thermodynamic work cycle, that is - a system able to split itself in two and able to extract energy from its surrounding system. On earth all living things possess DNA, the blueprint of the cell; RNA, the cell's messengers of instructions; and proteins, the cell's doers. Kauffman elevates his discussion of a theory of life by positing that these might not be necessary in all forms of life. The current facts presented in a General Biology textbook are merely the rules of Earth Biology, and may not be as pervasive as we have thought. Life is out there, but without a proper theory can we ever truly define it?

Seeing a video by Kauffman on edge.org when I was 17 years old firmly cemented me to a path in biology, be it theoretical or otherwise. His views of a theoretical biology have been just as large an influence on this blog as my own dreams.

To discover the true stuff of life...
If only, if only...

Jared Tarbell and Seed Magazine

Something that really made me smile today: seeing Jared Tarbell of complexification.net fame team up with Seed Magazine's Carl Zimmer. Tarbell's old art project Bone Piles complemented Zimmer's endeavor to describe the modern problems facing a standard definition of life. I might delve a little deeper on that some other time.

Organic Photographs

Sarcasm

Did you know that sarcasm doesn't exist on the internet? It's all too true.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

This summer I am researching oxidative stress at a lab owned and operated by Sloan-Kettering in New York City. When I'm not commuting, I divide my time between doing productive work and waiting.

Lab work requires its own form of patience. Cells never quite grow as quickly as you would like and experiments unavoidably incur periods of waiting. Rushing a procedure or juggling two experiments never seems to work out as planned; it's best to work with a patient trepidation to avoid losing a day's data.

The work is good. I'm trying to figure out a way to reverse the resistance that most cancer lines build up to chemotherapeutics. After chemo does its initial damage, the drug is often broken down into reactive oxygen species, as a secondary effect, that can cause the same if not more damage to the cell. Because of the high mutability of cancer cells, they can often have a natural immunity to this oxidative stress. If only one cell of a tumor survives the damage from chemo because of this resistance, the tumor will regrow with an unfortunate immunity to the same drug.

Goals (from easiest to hardest):
Must figure out how immunity develops.
Must figure out how to reverse immunity.
Must create drug to enhance existing cancer treatments.
Must cure cancer.

The Rules

Author's rules for posting:

1. Don't over do it.
2. Make this a habit.
3. Write for yourself (because no one else is reading this, yet).
4. Always in permanent marker.
5. It's theory! Be brash! You're not wrong until you figure you are or others prove you are.