Wednesday 12 December 2007
The Inner Life of a Cell (Harvard)
Small wonders from the 'ordinary day' of a living cell.
Present knowledge of molecular machinery that execute life often rewards the researcher with surprisingly coherent views on how pieces can work together. The overall picture, however, is a maze of big unanswered questions.
Self-organization is everywhere in the movie, but its definitive law is still missing.
Thursday 6 December 2007
Statecharts
Since then, D Harel implemented the new language in a number of research projects across computer science and biology. He is currently Professor at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
As an example of above mentioned research we shall consider Reactive Animation.
Statecharts can be connected to a graphics engine interface to give Reactive Animation (RA): this topic is widely explained in a recent paper, where RA connects data from molecules to organs in a large multiscale simulation framework (search 'Harel reactive animation').
Statecharts plus graphics would be an interesting tool for wise people and geeks, but actually they are under patent, even for academic research. The good idea is trapped in a golden cage, far away from its native sandbox and even farer from the huge collaborative playground known as web 2.0.
Patented software sometimes poses the challenge of reinvent the wheel. This requires an amount of serious work, along with the possibility of making out something new by means of combining already existing things. Fortunately, the latter aspect is a well known force that drives collaborative, formerly non retributed efforts like Wikipedia and the free software development.
The new wheels often perform better, as a result of continuous, community-wide beta testing. Moreover, hackability/reusability is the key that puts the good ideas back into the web reactor, where they can be collectively evolved and distributed.
Tuesday 4 December 2007
Saturday 8 September 2007
Ribosome in action
Saturday 11 August 2007
Kinetic Sculptures
From his website:
Thursday 9 August 2007
Friday 3 August 2007
The smallest Linux Computer in the World
Wednesday 1 August 2007
The Book of Kells
The book is a concordance of the four Gospels according to the text of Saint Jerome, with almost as many drawings as there are pages, each decorated in wondrous colors. Here one can contemplate the visage of divine majesty miraculously rendered; there, the mystical representations of the Evangelists, some having six wings, some four, some two. Here we see the eagle, there the bull, here the face of a man, there that of a lion, and innumerable other drawings. In looking at them casually, it might appear that they are no more than idle scribblings rather than formal compositions. One might not see the subtleties, whereas all is subtlety. But if one takes pains to study the book attentively, to penetrate the innermost secrets of the art, one will find embellishments of such intricacy, such delicacy and density, such a wealth of knots and interlacing links in such fresh and lustrous hues, that one will unequivocally pronounce it the work not of man but of angels.
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