http://madhadron.auditblogs.com Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:16:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I formulated a principle at a conference I just attended: ignore talks and posters with protein names in their title or the first sentence of their introduction. It's an issue of relevance. Each major discipline has its own concept of relevance. Roughly, a problem gains relevance as it constrains swathes of ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/09/27/protein-names-in-titles/ My laboratory does a lot of microscopy, and the image analysis tools available to us are largely inadequate. ImageJ is much more a viewing and processing environment, and the code base is sufficiently crufty and Java sufficiently inflexible to make extending it an exercise in futility. The academic libraries encoding ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/08/31/some-impressions-of-definiens/ 27 May 2008, Davos I left EPFL at 11AM this morning. The beautiful train trip to Zurich seems routine, so I read a math book. The beautiful train trip from Zurich to Landquart I spent half the time reading a math book. On the unbelievably gorgeous train trip from Landquart to ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/06/06/travel-journal-elmi-meeting-davos-may-2008/ (I'm posting a lot of things that fell through the cracks, beginning with this. ) CERN had an open day for the Large Hadron Collider before they turned it on. A group of us, biologists all except for me, headed out bright and early on Sunday morning from Lausanne to see ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/06/06/lhc-open-day-6-april-2008/ I found myself in need of a rough form for the [tex]\beta[/tex]-decay spectrum, so I went and fetched Fermi's Nuclear Physics from the library. I thought I would share a passage which suddenly made a lot of things go click for me: According to the relativistic theory of the ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/04/24/positrons-and-pair-production/ Everyone is familiar with the derivative of a function [tex]f[/tex] in terms of limits: for a sequence [tex]k[/tex] converging to [tex]x[/tex], [tex]D.f.x = \lim_{i\rightarrow \infty} (f.k.i - f.x)/(k.i - x)[/tex]. I spent a couple days playing with sequences which accumulate but do not converge, seeing if I could do ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/01/15/an-observation-on-accumulation-points/ First off, happy birthday to Don Knuth. If you don't know who that is, just crawl back under your rock. Among the things that came to light while reading people's response to this occasion was the font Euler. Add the following code to your LaTeX preamble, and suddenly your ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2008/01/11/fonts-in-latex/ Most metrics to compare programming languages --- lines of code, number of symbols, compressed lines of code --- hover between useless and harmful. Most of these metrics have one fundamental problem: they compare apples and oranges. Here's a way to get past that hurdle. The resulting metric ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2007/12/01/a-programming-language-metric/ I'll get around to quantum mechanics eventually. Bear with me. Biology is autonomous from physics. Any change to quantum mechanics will have at most cosmetic implications for biology. Quantum mechanics contributes nothing more than the existence of atoms and molecules, which are necessary for the lossless transmission of ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2007/11/28/against-the-copenhagen-interpretation/ There's been a hullabaloo about a New York Times op-ed by one Paul Davies which claims that rational ordering of the universe is an article of faith. Blog posts followed. Some gems: "The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics." ... http://madhadron.auditblogs.com/2007/11/26/faith-in-science/