Archive for May, 2006
Things I’m unsubscribing from today
Too many projects, not least The Distributed Proofreaders wiki. Too many email messages. Time to Get Things Done.
So I’ll write the losses here, so I can come back to them someday, or at least pass them along to you.
- Alternative Photographic Process has a Mailing List I’m no longer on (I hope).
- Pws –The Development list for CoWeb/Swiki is no longer so interesting to me, though the Swiki project is.
- Society for Mathematical Biology is less important now I’m not a mathematical biologist, and am definitely not looking for a job of that type.
- San Jose Mercury News’s 60-Second Business Break was sortof a dotcom-era folly of mine.
- The MySQL AB Newsletter would be more useful if I were dealing with nuts-and-bolts infrastructure, or cared about the newest releases.
- The Book_Arts-L mailing list for Book Artists caters to people on the primary production end of the biblio-ecological web, not the saprophytic end.
- The Yahoo! ebook-community group is mainly about hardware these days.
“We can make or break you, little men”
Uncertain Principles responds to admonitions and poorly veiled undercurrents:
Not only does that take an incredible amount of gall to come out and say (accepting government funding does not preclude private political speech), it pretty much gives the lie to her earlier assertions that the administration and the Republican party support science. Even leaving aside the issues raised by their cozying up to creationists and shady industry groups, if you really support science, that support should not be contingent on scientists holding opinions that you agree with. The idea that private political speech by scientists would affect funding decisions is another appalling example of the way the modern Republican party places politics ahead of policy.
A week away, and where the Hell is Bill?
Trying to jump-start
Back more tomorrow.
Want some, got some, not the same thing
In my garage and basement are scores (no, I mean “multiples of twenty”) of boxes of Old Maker Garage Crap. These are due to the dead: my father (a NASA physicist and ham radio operator), my uncle (an engineer and ham), my lost friend Nancy (an antiquer and accumulator of garage sale finds), not to mention the stuff we buy “incidentally” at estate auctions in box lots along with the crap we really want. Vacuum tubes, transistors, glass bottles, insulators, diodes, old clocks, gears and clockwork… and of course, baby food bottles filled with screws and nails. Things to inspire the Makers of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Boingboing passes along this amazing artisan’s work, today. Like all great work, this hints that you could do that. Go and admire, and be inspired.
Online, online, and back again online
The last couple of weeks have been filled with a stew of cognitive dissonance here: mornings spent in classes where I’m fumbling with basics, followed by afternoons spent in Expert Engineer mode; one day proving to my mentors that I may be qualified to pursue a degree in my chosen field, the next day at an invitation-only workshop catching up with luminary friends and old colleagues who do scientific and engineering work my previous day’s mentors [apparently] can’t imagine.
But, qualified or not, expert or not, friend-of-cool or not, it is summer. Nobody pays me now, and I can get back to the writing, the button-pushing, the Actual Work, and above all else the thankless task of thinking out loud.
Hell, thinking will be a welcome change.
All the thumbs from The Leaven in a Great City
As with previous such entries, these are little sneak-peeks at the figures I’ve just scanned and edited for a Distributed Proofreaders project. You can do the world a favor and proofread a page of the book yourself, if you like.
I think the more creative among you could tell me a story about them, even lacking the book itself.
What I’m reading instead of studying
While they say I have some sort of “qualifying exams” coming up in a few days, I’ve never been one to shirk my responsibility to pay attention to everything. I’ve been looking, in my off-time, at some of these:
- Thermodynamics of RNA/DNA hybridization in high density oligonucleotide microarrays
- The Random Edge Simplex Algorithm on Dual Cyclic 4-Polytopes
- Collaborative Tagging and Semiotic Dynamics
- Diversity-induced resonance
- A Basis for Systematic Analysis of Network Topologies
- Detecting degree symmetries in networks
- Log-normal statistics in e-mail communication patterns
- Emergent Criticality from Co-evolution in Random Boolean Networks
- Network analysis of online bidding activity
- Methods of robustness analysis for Boolean models of gene control networks
- Collaborative thesaurus tagging the Wikipedia way
- Alignment of biological networks
- Complex Qualitative Models in Biology: a new approach
- Complexity and Philosophy
- Unbiased Matrix Rounding What a great place to apply genetic programming….
- The transposition distance for phylogenetic trees
- Epistasis and Shapes of Fitness Landscapes
- Information and Protein Interfaces
- Recoverable One-dimensional Encoding of Three-dimensional Protein Structures
- Interplay between function and structure in complex networks
- Effects of decision-making on the transport costs across complex networks
- Dynamics of Naming Games in Random Geometric Networks
- The Kauffman model on Small-World Topology
- The Role of Redundancy in the Robustness of Random Boolean Networks
- Community Detection as an Inference Problem
- Community Detection in Complex Networks using Genetic Algorithm
- Persistent dynamic correlations in self-organized critical systems away from their critical point
- Algorithms for identification and categorization
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