Monday, April 27, 2009

Swirly bacteria

Spent yesterday drawing pretty pictures of bacterial genomes with Perl, BioPerl, and R. Given the genetic sequence of different bugs (ACCTGTCGATGCTA...) we're looking for fingerprints in the composition of those sequences. Pick out the 200 most frequest 5-letter "words" (oligos), sort and plot those, and maybe we can see the fingerprint of each bug.

It seems to work. The black line is E. coli., which is very different from Staph. aur. (red and green) and Staph. epi. (blue). You'll also notice that the 2 Staph aur. lines are very close to each other, since they're almost identical; they're very similar to yet distinct from Staph. epi; and distant from E. coli.

Cool, huh? The details (username: guest, password: guest)

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Einstein for dummies... wait, a little less dummy please

Strangely, even after 30 minutes on Wikipedia, I still don't understand quantum mechanics.

I'm trying to figure out how/why my shiny new faster-than-light radio can't work given that all my quantums are entangled and I've got the "spooky" knob on my action at a distance cranked all the way up.

The Simple English Wikipedia tries to help but falls short. I need some of Albert's pre-tween publications or something? :)