The Lorem Ipsum of Audiobook Reviews April 26, 2013
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Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 translated my recorded voice recording of my book review of Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay
“You a decade. Really really excellent author who is a zoo or a includes a charming afterward in the audio version that I advice I advance advance is most likely faintness, or it is thrilling renditions of all the audio books of every pinball game upon her fellow implement books plus microkernels on is grateful for the spirit of an I digress to guy like I go day is a nifty audio blog and a wonderful by Simon as his reading of them is a reading James Bond books for all this time I’ve been expected to have the kind of depth character in a wired slightly surprising, weighing way exceeded my expectations reprieves female characters with the real sympathy and creditable of a soft voice means masculine characters is very masculine and the in-between guide him in the event of a pre-reading while. It’s a really is a tricky little book tricky because of like I’d ever OKs wonderful descriptions of people and their reactions and their internal monologues are internal feelings captured and laid out like a map if it’s a map of a charming country and my favorite passage of all is listening to the Sea Captain bemoaning the fact that he has that fat and ugly daughters and a shrewish wife and subsequent charming. And it’s all but the most charming way and some advanced. So is to miss is like your work a stitch in the story to guy so sort of sorcery thing, which is an bit of a departure from him not really a sort and sorcery sword reader, but it came very highly recommended. It turns out to have been an excellent recommendation is the name of one of the snow over the in a peninsula called the Palm, which is a site based on course Renaissance Italy, which is conquered by a pair of sorcerers won from these one from the West, who picks off all these little city states or provinces like being weak and divided people that they are also I don’t use magic so magicians have a quite a large as there would comes the battle believe how they can figure out how is a Mexican nonetheless seen in the book, but I will not determine you would like to say however that nicely with allies a great deal of scurrying around and I’m very much magic that recursively defined in the country and the titular family think I may buy one of the missive at magicians who satisfy in the battle for it and a terrible vengeance on the whitening their very name name of province of them have nobody who is not foreigner in your were end of the book have been burned all the songs have been in her and the story of the Prince of the guy. You might coming back 20 years later to fund for the guy who killed the country. He realizes that he has a wife of Paul magicians at the same time on their way. When we do something over 1 1/2 at only half as wireless as a marvelous device for making sure that the the the the the the, that allows the young rates may the marvelous business to leave and I recommend it if you like Amazon and has been known were in place reaching agreement on.”
I may need to adjust my cellphone’s audio a bit.
Ghost in the Shell April 5, 2013
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On a walkway in McLaren Grove in Golden Gate Park, a cheery bit of vandalism. Anime geeks will doubtless recognize this mark. Everyone else will wonder “what the hell?”.
An Interesting Week February 18, 2013
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People think nothing of importance happens during holiday weeks, but not so this week. A fellow going by the handle Mamaich over at xda-developers.com has produced a beta version of the jailbreak for running x86 Windows applications on Windows RT (ARM) tablets. He is releasing it to the wider world for others to improve upon his list of programs that run, which is pretty short at the moment:
These programs are tested to work:
- WinRar
- 3D Pinball "Space Cadet" from Windows 95. Known problem: no sound
- Heroes of Might and Magic 3 with 32-bit patch. HD mod is compatible too, see this video: http://youtu.be/3uzjV406nVs. Known problem: no music. And I’ll recommend to turn off all sounds to increase speed. [UPDATE: that’s fixed]
- "7zG.exe b" – a 7Zip benchmark. "b" here is a command line parameter.
- Lots of tiny simple prog[ram]s.
He offers hints for debugging programs users may wish to try. Pop on over and have a look.
Me, I’m still looking for a nice, cheap 64-bit laptop suitable for Win7 or Ubuntu….very cheap. Suggestions?
Next, that triumph that is the innovator’s second-best friend (after the 3D printer), LEGO. Specifically, a LEGO implementation of the first machine to ever get programmability, the loom:
The programmability hasn’t been implemented yet; I’m sure it’s waiting for the next Agile sprint.
Finally, a little something from the future of energy storage: Ambri’s molten-metal battery has dazzling energy density at a high temperature. It’s a pair of disparate metals with a salt solution between…but not active until heated to 500C. Current models are sixteen inches across and look like this:
The plan is to make them for the military, and learn how to make’em cheap while selling to the customer who doesn’t care about cost all that much. Thing is, these molten batteries are made of relatively cheap stuff (magnesium and antimony) and could last a very long time, indeed. This technology could eventually be the battery backup for the entire power grid when wind and solar are much, much larger parts of the energy equation…which is a virtual certainty when the dead dinosaurs give out.
From the List That Cannot Be Named February 8, 2013
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On 2/8/2013 5:30 PM, UNDISCLOSED wrote:
> do you like banging your head against
> a table all evening and into the night?
Of course I do. I’m a professional programmer.
- UNDISCLOSED
Engineering Prototype January 30, 2013
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After finding this item in a cow-orker’s [hyphenation intentional] cubicle, I asked the lead mechanical engineer “Engineering prototype?”.
“Ship it.” he replied, straight-faced.
Looks kind of like a wind tunnel from this end.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore January 13, 2013
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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
If you are anything like a serious geek this will send a naughty thrill down your spine. Clay begins to pull at this bit of twine…and thus begins the story, full of modern tools and ancient tales, Silicon Valley whiz kids and dowdy librarians and a secret cult at the heart of it all.
I loved it. I especially liked how Clay’s romance of a sort with the Google girl (name already forgotten, since I think of her that way) reflects life’s vicissitudes. Also liked the realistic way the technophiles go at their enthusiasms with hammer and tongs—very lifelike.
Because this is a relatively new title, the Kindle version is only four bucks cheaper (but no waiting!) at US$11.99. There is an audiobook, but this reads really well when you have the flu.
Cheap And Easy Gene Therapy January 8, 2013
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A precise and elegant technique for cutting and pasting DNA to insert genes into human cells would radically transform medicine, making routine what now are expensive, complicated and rare procedures for replacing defective genes in order to fix genetic diseases was discovered last year by Jennifer Doudna and Martin Jinek of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California, Berkeley (and the LBL, too), and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine-Sweden. In the team’s June 28, 2012, Science paper the researchers described a new method of precisely targeting and cutting DNA in bacteria.
This paper caused a little stir, and other scientists began to use the method; two new papers published last week in the journal Science Express demonstrate that the technique also works in human cells. A paper by Doudna and her team reporting similarly successful results in human cells has been accepted for publication by the new open-access journal eLife (don’t be like that. Times change, man. Journals are for getting the information out, and e-journals are faster. So there).
People are already comparing the technique to PCR, the DNA-replicating technique which scored a Nobel for Cary Mullis, in terms of impact on the genetics field.
"I think this is going to be a real hit," said George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and principal author of one of the Science Express papers. "There are going to be a lot of people practicing this method because it is easier and about 100 times more compact than other techniques."
How does it work? The new technique uses a single protein that requires only a short RNA molecule to program it for site-specific DNA recognition, an enzyme called Cas9, and the replacement DNA. The nice part is that these molecules are all smaller than the kind of stuff you would have to sneak into a cell to achieve the cut-and-paste effect using the current techniques. "It (the Cas9-RNA complex) is easier to make than TALEN proteins, and it’s smaller," The complex also has lower toxicity in mammalian cells than other techniques, he added. "It’s too early to declare total victory" over TALENs and zinc-fingers (the two competing techniques—bulky and complex—don’t ask), Church said, "but it looks promising."
"The beauty of this compared to any of the other systems that have come along over the past few decades for doing genome engineering is that it uses a single enzyme," Doudna said. "The enzyme doesn’t have to change for every site that you want to target – you simply have to reprogram it with a different RNA transcript, which is easy to design and implement."
The delicious and not at all surprising part of this exciting new technique is that it’s the result of some rather more pure science; Doudna was looking at the unique immune system of a bacteria that cuts the DNA of attacking viruses, incorporates it into its own DNA and uses it to make RNA to intercept the viral DNA, rendering it useless. Nature is stranger than we imagine, and stranger than we can imagine.
Homework:
RNA-programmed genome editing in human cells (accepted for publication in eLife) RNA-Guided Human Genome Engineering via Cas9 (Church article, Jan. 3 Science Express)
Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems (Wang article, Jan. 3 Science Express)
CAD-assisted Drug Design Using DNA Strands January 1, 2013
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Scientists have developed a CAD drug development system that uses synthetic DNA as a programmable molecular substrate. These strands of synthetic DNA can be constructed to have any sequence of bases. And, because complementary sequences of DNA are mutually attractive, synthetic strands can be created with sequences that cause them to align with one another and bind to form nanostructures of virtually any shape. If the DNA strands are bound to other molecular species (say, tumor-killing molecules) before self-assembly is induced, the tumor killers can be pulled into desired locations by the DNA strands during self-assembly.
In other words, LEGO for molecules.*
This is paid for partly by NSF funding, but curiously enough a private company seems to have a lock on it. Parabon Nanolabs™ has simplified this concept down to CAD-based software for the budding mad scientist. The Parabon inSēquio™ Sequence Design Studio graphically enters designs and then determines the DNA sequences that will self-assemble into that design.
The graphic editor lays out a nanostructure visually. Users can rotate and bend strands, define bindings between base pairs, and copy and paste sequences and structures between design documents. The cloud-based number-crunching uses a bunch of known wet-chemistry values for the binding energies and calculates the complex molecular interactions required to make the molecule desired.
Neat, huh? This would be entirely impossible for a human to do, ever; it’s billions of calculations that need to be made and complex rules to be followed.**
Still, how they will mock up the synthesized molecules themselves should be an interesting technical feat; I would really like to see the execution of this, rather than a neat CAD program for molecules.***
Announcement here. Parabon Nanolabs here.
* Some assembly required.
** Another reason not to be a chemist.
*** It’s not impossible; use synthesizers to make the short pieces, PCR copy them, keep them salty enough that they can’t self-assemble before all the other pieces are made, mix together and pray. The devil is in these details. Maybe we can get Rob Park to do it.
The Autodoc’s Forerunner December 21, 2012
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Human health is usually described in general terms, based on averages of humans. After a hundred years of recordkeeping we have a fair idea of what an average man or woman should have in terms of height, weight, red and white cell counts, glucose levels, cholesterols good and bad, liver enzyme levels, potassium and sodium…you probably haven’t had this blood work done lately, but I have and believe me, this information is stored somewhere, and more is being collected all the time. It won’t be long before some data-harvesting medical company gets laws written to allow them to aggregate this information to provide them with diagnostic information…and then they will want more.
You think this is some kind of weird digression, but it isn’t. The graphic above is a 50-point assay (see the little red bars?) existing today which can examine most of the diagnostic panel I mentioned above using tiny little bits of antibodies, catalase, red dye and some H2O2. A drop is introduced, the antibodies cling to matching antigens (RNA or DNA chunks, lipids, whatever) and the catalase is activated. The H2O2 reacts forming O2 which pushes the red dye up the capillaries proportionally to the antigen (or whatever). Run a few calibrations and you have a good health snapshot of a human at some point in time.
Run two a year for life on thousands of people (and lots more moieties), match it to health outcomes for each person and have neural networking algorithms find correlations and you can now diagnose years in advance of some cancers, rare conditions, psychiatric disorders—all pretty inexpensively (when the patents on these antibodies expire)
Right, that’s sorted. Now I need some funding.
Multiplexed volumetric bar-chart chip for point-of-care diagnostics, Yujun Song, Yuanqing Zhang, Paul E. Bernard, James M. Reuben, Naoto T. Ueno, Ralph B. Arlinghaus, Youli Zu& and Lidong Qin, Nature Communications 3, Article number: 1283 doi:10.1038/ncomms2292
Android Development Environment—Part Two December 15, 2012
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In which Our Hero has a revelation about printed matter.
I bought a copy of Sam’s Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours (2nd Edition)
I stand corrected. the development cycle for android is pretty swift, and the book was obsolete before I touched it…also makes too many assumptions about the clarity of its instructions—but I digress.
The correct way to set up your Android development environment (and don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise) is to download the ADT Bundle from android.com (follow the link) and install that. Period. Seriously: if you try (and I did) to set up each piece individually you will find yourself a broken, bitter wo/man. It just doesn’t work to do it that way. The Bundle contains pretty much everything you need. I installed it to my (present from stepdaughter) Batman-shaped USB thumbdrive, and it seems to be working properly.
Finally. I had a lost weekend over this, and one weeknight. Harken to my tale of woe, and let your Bundle flow.
