Still here. Still going. Getting ready for HOPE XI and trying to get everything buttoned up and bolted down at work before flying to the other coast for same. That all hell appears to still be breaking loose all over the world isn't helping matters any; I'm certainly not sleeping all that well, consequently.
Rehearsal of my talk for HOPE started today. I really suck right now and need to get this one banged out before I present. At least I've finally stopped writing and rewriting the slides and settled on the text.
It's long been known that DNA encodes information in a four-bit pattern which can be read and processed like any other bitstream. Four different nucleotides, paired two by two, arranged in one of two configurations side by side by side in a long string of letters, many times longer than the size of the cell containing the full DNA strand. Every cell in every single lifeform contains the same DNA sequence, regardless of what the cell actually does. So how, many have asked, does a cell know if it should help produce hair, or skin, or pigments, or something else …
For the last decade or so, bacteria that are immune to the effects of antibiotics have been a persistent and growing threat in medicine. Ultimately, the problem goes back to the antibiotic not being administered long enough to kill off the entire colony. The few survivors that managed to make it through the increasing toxicity of their environment because they either had a gene which rendered them immune (and the toxins released when the other bacteria died weren't enough to poison them) or assembled one and survived long enough to breed and pass the gene along to other bacteria. This …
As you may or may not be aware, certain parts of the world have come under fire, literally. This has hit me very hard in some very tender places, and I'm not handling it well. Dealing with it has, to a large extent, required staying offline so I don't fry my forebrain.
Work's running me pretty hard, with multiple late-nighters strung end to end.
I'm working on my slides for HOPE in my spare time. I might even get to practice them soon. After that comes more proof-of-concept code that you (yes, you!) can try …
UPDATE: Now that the official HOPE schedule has been published I can say that I'll be speaking in the Noether room on Sunday, 24 July 2016 at 2:00pm EST4EDT.
I found out last weekend (yes, I've been sitting on this - timed posts are the busy blogger's friend) that the talk I submitted for The Eleventh HOPE in July of 2016 was accepted. I will be giving a presentation on Exocortex, my latest work (of mad science), entitled …
There is a graphic novel that is near and dear to my hearts by Warren Ellis called Planetary, the tagline of which is "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." This first article immediately made me go back and reread that graphic novel...
The field of deep learning has been around for just a short period of time insofar as computer science is concerned. To put it in a nutshell deep learning systems are software systems which attempt to model highly complex datasets in abstract ways using multiple layers of other machine learning and nonlinear processing algorithms stacked …
You know that problem child molar I just had worked on for the nth time? The one that required heroic measures and possibly divine intervention a couple of weeks ago? I went in yesterday to get the permanent crown installed.
It seemed like a pretty standard routine: Sit down, get the topical gel, and then out came the local anesthetic. My dentist went in for the first jab.
And hit the nerve.
For a good many years, I'd been afraid of just such a thing happening. It was only in the past year or so that I'd gotten over it …
The past couple of weeks have brought with them some pretty interesting advances in the field of genetic engineering. So, let's get into it.
The first is, as far as anybody can tell, a working genetic therapy regimen for SCID, or severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome. SCID has long been colloquially referred to as "bubble boy syndrome" after David Vetter was born in 1971.ev with the condition and a movie was released about his life in 1976.ev, due to the fact that children born with the condition utterly lack a functional immune system; the slightest illness is likely to …
Last Thursday morning I went in to have a certain problematic molar taken care of at the dentist's office before it got much worse. To recap briefly, there is a particular molar on the bottom-left side of my mouth that has been through hell: It's broken several times (once particularly memorable time while eating a German soft pretzel, of all things), it's been filled several times, and I've honestly lost track of the number of root canals performed done on it (somewhere between three and six in the last fifteen years). While getting the abscessed #19 tooth taken care of …
