Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Cloth physics, genetics research

peterthomas introduced me to this interactive cloth physics demonstration via Twitter. It's awesome. Click it!

This is what I was hoping my bionerdary would reveal. Perhaps the rules of biology are very complex, but as you discover them useful patterns emerge, systems are revealed, and eventually you can actually do useful things.

I'm not quitting, but I think I've lost hope that genetics research will reveal itself in the useful way cloth physics does in my lifetime. Perhaps biology is too complex for my feeble mind. Perhaps it is too complex for the collective efforts of all of humanity to encapsulate effectively. Or perhaps, long after I'm dead, our children will pull up little "curing cancer" simulators on their computers and wonder what took us so long.

In any event, my desire to witness tangible progress arising from my daily/monthly work seems a poor fit for the current state of the art in mankind's attempts to grok biology via computers.

1 comment:

BrotherBemused said...

I remember visiting the Library of Congress and realizing how truly voluminous writing is, and wondering what one more volume could possibly matter. But on the other hand I know what great impact just a few writers have had on my life, so I figure one more voice really does enhance the chorus. And who knows, maybe we'll together sing a new song!