Sasha

Ho Hum...

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 21:18:35 GMT

How common are alexanderwait's interests

Universal

books (201200)

Popular

none

Common

chess (13708)
nature (49816)
science (28250)

Specialist

aclu (1309)
agnostic (1835)
artificial intelligence (2670)
biochemistry (1419)
computer science (3186)
cryptography (1557)
economics (4354)
free will (1179)
genetics (4030)
humility (1031)
idealism (2309)
mathematics (5291)
metaphysics (5303)
quantum mechanics (1498)
quantum physics (2588)
random (3476)
security (2013)
social justice (2131)
the mind (1173)
windsurfing (1168)

Unusual

algorithms (575)
altruism (612)
analysis (858)
biophysics (125)
cellular automata (104)
cryptanalysis (79)
crypto (187)
cryptology (350)
differential geometry (41)
free software (759)
graph theory (134)
harvard (801)
irreverence (251)
m-theory (91)
mcgill (222)
mit (649)
molecular biology (615)
natural selection (375)
neurology (929)
new york times (486)
nyt (17)
occam's razor (117)
quantum teleportation (18)
quantum theory (657)
reverse engineering (240)
social change (459)
strength training (368)
the new york times (483)
the self (96)
the soul (317)
theoretical physics (882)
university of toronto (233)

Rare

artificial souls (2)
arxiv.org (3)
corewar (3)
focs (9)
icalp (1)
lyx (6)
physical review (1)
pnas (1)
stoc (1)
texmacs (1)

BioBricks Jamboree...

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 23:43:24 GMT

Earlier this year my supervisor returned from a conference oozing with enthusiasm. Shortly thereafter our lab joined forces with a BU lab on a fun project. This weekend all participating labs gathered for the BioBricks Jamboree to present results. Nathan Walsh, the team leader from HMS, couldn't make the Jamboree but he volunteered to kick off the first meeting of ALife Boston by giving a talk on Counting up to one with DNA.

If you are interested, feel free to join us at NECSI, 24 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, 2pm, Monday, November 22nd.

Live from ALife IX...

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 15:36:38 GMT

I am listening to an interesting talk about a computational model of DNA computing-- at the ALife IX conference-- this morning. My talk An Evolutionary Approach Generates Human Competitive Corewar programs seems to have gone OK. I was the first speaker at the Artificial Chemistry workshop. In a few minutes I'll be having lunch with my old adviser--Gilles Brassard-- who is flying to boston just to hear my tutorial this afternoon. If you are interested, please, sign up to my low traffic mailing list.

I also have a poster here. Have a look:

Memory lane...

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 06:53:32 GMT

Not long after I started undergrad at UofT, before the days of the world-wide-web, a program I had written in high-school was mentioned in a newsletter I found on the Internet. I've been slowly moving old references, such as this, out of ref_ (and friends) and into a more flexible archive here. I still think the article is cute and the program Net is a source of a lot of nostalgia. Here is the excerpt from the article:

Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck by Chris Lindensmith
In some of the past tournaments, one very effective type of program has used vampiric capture to defeat opponents. Cowboy won in 1988 with a fairly straight-forward vampire that used the captured cycles to try to bomb the remaining uncaptured cycles. In 1991 another vampiric capture program, Vlad, took third place. The generally good performance of vampires has prompted proposed variations on the standard such as the descendent count limit suggested by Jon Newman, but there do not seem to be many (if any) programs that are actually designed to counter-attack vampires. I will discuss here some of my attempts to make so called vampire killer programs along with their advantages and drawbacks .
Vampires work in general by preparing a section of code that I will call the "trap" and then attempt to hit their victims with a JMP trap bomb. Once a process has been captured, the victim process usually runs in a loop in which each time through the loop each captured process executes a SPL trap instruction in order to slow down the opponent. The trap usually contains a counter that tallies the number of captured processes until the maximum number of sibling processes has been reached, all of which then commit suicide leaving the vampire victorious. Some programs also subvert the capture processes and use them to throw DAT bombs at their own siblings.
It is obvious from looking at how the vampire captures its prey that it must provide some sort of pointer to its own location. This is what we will use to track and destroy the vampire, although there are limits and clever programmers can write vampires that are more difficult to track and kill.
Since the vampire is spreading information all through memory as to how an unsuspecting program can find its trap, a vampire-killer simply needs a way to find these bombs and take advantage of the information that they contain before the bombs find the executing part of the program. Perhaps the simplest, although not the most effective means is to look through memory one location at a time and bomb the location to which any non-zero memory location points.
This will not work if the bombs start coming from above instead of below, so you could easily extend this idea to check a few prepared "pickets", one above and one below, in each of which the contents are known, and then bomb the vampire when it alters one of the pickets. I tried a program like this for my first vampire- killer when all I had were the 1988 tournament programs to compete against. It clobbered Cowboy nearly every time. As long as the vampiric bombs did not begin closer to the program than to the picket, Cowboy was easily beaten, as are most of the vampires that appear in the tournament rosters.
Authors of vampiric programs can also try techniques to avoid being so easily killed by anti- vampire programs. One simple idea is to insert one or more levels of indirection into the jump instructions that lead to the trap, placing intermediate locations safely away from the executing processes and the trap.
For low order indirection, where there are only a few intermediate locations, an indirect-vampire killer is easy to write; just insert a few ADD @targ, targ instructions. Since most traps are small and the executing instructions usually refer only to locations within the trap, this will still leave targ pointing somewhere within the trap and will also reduce the effectiveness of indirect vampires.
There are a few catches though. Since many traps include bombing instructions, you could end up pointing to the next location that the captured cycles are intending to bomb. This is not much of a problem if the trap has not been used yet and the bombs are set to begin nearby, but if the target pointer has been running, the indirect- vampire-killer could miss entirely. Adding a large number of ADD instructions could also make your program a larger target and slow it down so that the JMP bombs can get ro it before it finishes off the vampire.
For higher order indirection, such as a long trail of JMP bombs that reference each other all the way back to the trap, the problem is more difficult but the vampire killer can expect to obliterate at least a part of the trail back and avoid capture. This still leaves the "captured" process jumping into oblivion, so it might be wise to split off a new process at a location away from the impending JMP oblivion.
Another simple technique is to separate the trap and the bomber section of the vampire by a large number of DAT statements at load time. A vampire killer would still be able to destroy the trap successfully preventing capture, although it would not get a quick and easy win.
Perhaps the most effective trick is used by the vampire program Net. It looks quickly through memory and only throws bombs when it finds a potential victim. This stealth can be devastating to nearly any program, and so far I have not been able to write a program that can consistently find it before being found. ¹
So far, all of this discussion has assumed that opponents will use an offense of vampiric capture exclusively, but this is not at all true and leads to one of the major drawbacks of vampire-killing programs speed (or lack thereof).
The vampire-killing programs are primarily defensive and need to have sibling processes that go through memory and attempt to kill off any other types of program that may be present. This leaves the vampire-killer running at half- speed or even slower against programs that do not try to capture their enemies.
It also greatly increases the size of the program, with perhaps a segment for offense, a segment to build and check pickets, and a segment to do the bombing when a vampire is found. The lack of speed and the large size can be serious disadvantages in tournaments where many small, fast bombers appear which quickly bomb memory and cripple or kill the vampire-killer. There is some comfort in that large programs can often survive corruption and be deadly even in some new, unexpected form.
In running one of my recent programs against the l990 tournament roster, it performed better that everything except XTC, Net, and three or four fast bombers like ZD. Hopefully some of the speed problems can be overcome and vampire killers can vie for the top spots in future tournaments.

There is something uncanny about this trip down memory lane. I remember enjoying a moment of "vicarious" pride at Net's mention and babbling about Quantum Mechanics (eg. in my QM class) and wondering how I should go about making a "Quantum" version of Corewar for a living. More than ten years later I've put up an Internet server-- Science.Fiction.Org-- running my Quantum Coreworld . And in the coming days, weeks (and months) I'll post more about it here.

I have to confess that all this is, somehow, terrifying. When you get a shot at child-hood dreams as an adult it's only your own fault if you mess up.

1. Lindensmith, C. 1992. Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck. The Core War Newsletter 5(4):5-8. GZIPed Postscript.

In the Quantum Coreworld Programs Engage in a Battle of Qubits

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 04:23:17 GMT

The first release of my Quantum Artificial Life simulator—the Quantum Coreworld—can be found here. Please visit! The subject is a word-play on the articles: "In the game called Core War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits" by A.K. Dewdney LJ:REF_SCIAM:554 and "The Coreworld: Emergence and Evolution of Cooperative Structures in a Computational Chemistry" by S. Rasmussen et al LJ:REF_ALIFE:749.

A challenge: test94qop.red (see link above) is a trivial example of using quantum operations to hide a secret. Programs that cannot use quantum operations see a random string. I have a few ideas about how to use this effectively but if you know Redcode or enjoy assembly programming you might want to try it yourself. Successful—and not so successful—attempts will be posted on this page. Details to be worked out.

Happy New Year!

Ideas I find interesting...

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 20:53:05 GMT

A finite volume of space-time can be (exactly) described by a finite amount of information (proportional to the surface area of that volume).

(See "Information in the Holographic Universe" by Jacob D. Bekenstein LJ:REF_SCIAM:1190)

The fundamental unit of information is the quantum-bit or qubit.

(See "Rules for a Complex Quantum World" By Michael A. Nielsen LJ:REF_SCIAM:948)

Biological machines are (always) nanomachines.

(See "The Once and Future Nanomachine" by George M. Whitesides LJ:REF_SCIAM:451)

Nanomachines are (sometimes) biological machines.

(See "Synthesizing life" by Szostak, Bartel, Luisi LJ:REF_NATURE:421)

I have a backup right? right?!?!

Sat, 31 May 2003 06:41:56 GMT

Someday very soon I hope to have full backups of my journal(s). If you do a search from my journal on "corewar" it should have a number of hits on my ref_corewar community. Unfortunately most of the entries in that community disappeared today. Luckily I came across a related thread here. Before that I thought it might have been a logjam bug. Eventually evan will have journal archiving polished up in logjam and I'll have backups... [Monday]... after a few goodnights of sleep LJ's servers seem to have replicated my entries.

Your future needs you!

Fri, 16 May 2003 20:28:58 GMT

post from lawrencelessig More detail at http://eldred.cc/.

Excerpt: we need your help
About a month ago, I started sounding optimistic about getting a bill introduced into Congress to help right the wrong of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. I was optimistic because we had found a congressperson who was willing to introduce the bill. But after pressure from lobbyists, that is no longer clear. And so we need help to counter that pressure, and to find a sponsor.

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford’s library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.

Stanford is not alone. This has long been a passion of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive, as well as many others. Yet because of current copyright regulation, these projects — that would lower the cost of libraries dramatically, and spread knowledge broadly — cannot go forward. The costs of clearing the rights to makes these works available is extraordinarily high.

Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them. They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world remains silent, they will win.

We need to your help to resist this now. At this stage, all that we need is one congressperson to introduce the proposal. Whether you call it the Copyright Term Deregulation Act, or the Public Domain Enhancement Act, doesn’t matter. What matters is finding a sponsor, so we can begin to show the world just how extreme this debate has become: They have already gotten a 20 year extension of all copyrights just so 2% can benefit; and now they object to paying just $1 for that benefit, so that no one else might compete with them.

If you believe this is wrong, here are two things you can do: (1) Write your Representative and Senator, and ask them to be the first to introduce this statute; point them to the website http://eldred.cc, and ask them to respond. And even more importantly, (2) blog this request, so that others who think about these issues can get involved in the conversation.

I have given this movement as much as I can over the past four years, and I will not stop until we have reclaimed the public domain. Stay tuned for more litigation, and more ideas from Creative Commons. But please take these two steps now.

I left this comment at Lawrence Lessig's blog:

I do all my work on Debian GNU/Linux and give Powerpoint presentations from a Debian laptop running OpenOffice. My own experience-- also conversations with Gerry Sussman, his students and colleagues-- has convinced me that protecting the Creative Commons is the decisive factor in actually benefiting from technology as a society or as selfish individuals. I’ve said as much-- sometimes too forcefully-- to anyone that will listen.
I’ve posted this on my Blog and will certainly help in whatever way that I can…
Sasha
PS. I’m in the process of assembling a Reader (on Mind, Soul and Reality) and I hope to convince the various copyright holders to license their work with a CC license. Thanks for making the licenses available!

The Future of Human Nature

Fri, 16 May 2003 19:31:30 GMT

Recently Martin Steffen passed around a link to "a Symposium on the Promises and Challenges of the Revolutions in Genomics and Computer Science". See LJ:REF_TALKS:3239. Our supervisor, George Church, spoke at the symposium. His PPT slides are here. I didn't have a chance to attend the symposium but George mentioned that another speaker, Marvin Minsky, came and left very abruptly. I've attended a few classes of 6.868 led by Marvin; in the last class of the semester he mentioned that his comments at the "Future of Human Nature" symposium sparked some controversy: Slashdot, Wired etc.

Marvin's actual thoughts from the symposium are in a Usenet thread here.

Excerpt: Most early researchers in artificial intelligence had the goal to build machines that would be very intelligent.
However, it soon turned out that solving hard problems usually needs a lot of knowledge. This was recognized in the early years— by researchers in the 60s and 70s who built knowledge-based systems. Indeed, in the 1980's, the so-called expert systems became widely productive and popular. However there was a problem with them: For each different kind of problem the construction of such systems had to start all over again, because they didn't have, or accumulate what we called commonsense knowledge. To be sure, each new system could use the same ‘shell' — but I think it turned out, at least in my view, that this was more of a fault than a virtue.
Only one researcher recognized that this was so serious as to commit himself entirely to it. That was Douglas Lenat, who has directed the multi year project called CYC—which has resulted in solving some problems in this area.
Unfortunately, in my view, the rest of the artificial intelligence community tried, instead, to find alternative medicines to deal with this problem. For example, many projects were aimed at what I call building baby machines, which were supposed to learn from experience, eventually to become as smart as people. These all failed to make much progress because (in my view) they lacked architectural features to equip them to think about the causes of their successes and failures— and then to make appropriate changes.
Instead, most researchers went in other direction— of trying to build an evolutionary system, that would start with very simple machines and then, by one or another mutation scheme, evolve more architecture. None of those projects ever have gotten very far.
The story is very much the same in the field of building large neural networks. These can frequently solved interesting problems However those networks don't have the capability, of reflecting on what they have learned, and then making appropriate changes.
Other researchers have aimed their work toward making make a ‘unified theory' of thinking. Each of those projects has proposed some good architectural ideas, but not enough to these to support good self-reflective processes, with which they could improve their own operations.

Evolving the simple into the more complex is receiving attention in high-prestige scientific journals and not just the computer science community. See LJ:REF_NATURE:1245. What happens if that simple starting point is quantum mechanical? I'm working on that now...

Two years at Harvard...

Wed, 14 May 2003 21:51:52 GMT

I flew into Boston, from Montreal, to find a place to live and attend the annual biophysics clambake roughly two years ago. Martha Bulyk, Pete Estep and Fritz Roth showed me how to eat lobster (former Church lab graduate students). As usual I babbled about Quantum Mechanics and Biology. And, not unexpectedly, I'm still babbling. It's hard to believe this will be my third year here in September.

Come Celebrate With Us!

The academic year is nearly over and it is time to celebrate the coming warm weather (cross your fingers) and to congratulate the Biophysics students who have received their Ph.D. degree this past year.

Please join all of us in the Biophysics Program for our Year- end Clambake

Date: Friday, June 13, 2003

Time: 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.

THIS IS A RAIN OR SHINE EVENT

The evening will include music from Inca Son, games, clam chowder, steamed clams, lobster, chicken, sweet corn on the cob, salad, watermelon, dessert and beverages.

Vegan meals are available and include fresh salad with fusilli and penne, roasted spring & summer vegetables, hummus & taboule with pita bread, sweet corn on the cob, cole slaw, and watermelon.

Spouses, significant others and children are most welcome.

Please RSVP to Michele Jakoulov no later than Friday, May 30th, and please indicate if a guest will be joining you. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Some ideas for an LJ "Social Contract" (and for Blogs in general)...

Sat, 12 Apr 2003 02:28:09 GMT

Dave Winer (scripting) and Philip Greenspun (philg) met recently and chatted about Blogs. It would be very cool to see them get together with brad et al. and hammer out the LiveJournal "Social Contract" (discussed here). Some ideas I've had for a while:

Let paid LJ users choose their flavor of content license when they post an entry or comment; there are good choices at the Creative Commons; free users only get the share-alike license;
Allow paid users to encrypt (some) posts so that clear-text entries never reside on LJ servers or cross the public Internet; this might require client-side support from a browser like Mozilla;
Offer the business and technical infrastructure to let people "pre-order" new features; that is, holding funds (or credit-card numbers) in escrow until "satisfactory" completion by the developers; this could be a new source of revenue for development of LiveJournal's free-software code-base; everyone benefits from an LJ feature to a different degree and everyone has a different ability to pay-- so why not let users vote with their pocketbooks?
More generally "pre-orders" could be a profitable way-- for LJ the business and LJ the community-- to create any content of interest to users: writing, artwork, music, or software; an appropriate "viral" license (such as the GPL or CC share-alike) would ensure that people who commit to paying for content (before it's created) continue to benefit from derivatives of that content.

The "pre-order" idea is something I've talked about for years but it requires a community, like LJ, where there is some sense of "reputation" for both "developers" and "escrows". For example, I'd trust evan as a "developer" and brad as an "escrow". If Evan promised to add a new feature to logjam and Brad promised to only bill me when he was satisfied with Evan's work I'd probably give Brad my credit card number (if Evan was offering a feature I wanted). Evan's incentive to do the work more quickly (because of my, and others', contribution) is my incentive to "pre-order". Brad's incentive to be honest is the promise of further "cuts" of Evan's (and other developers') fees.

While "pre-orders" might be an interesting source of revenue for LJ another issue for the community social contract is the current team's Exit Strategy! Every LJ user wants to know what will happen if LJ the business disappears. Would the management team be willing to keep a certain cash surplus (say 6 months)? What about promising to notify the community if it falls below that level? is there redundancy in the team so LJ can run if some managers get sick or abducted by aliens? Perhaps there is something to be learned from Philip Greenspun's http://photo.net and, also, from SourceForge and Savannah.

What do you think?

Blogs and copyrights...

Sun, 30 Mar 2003 04:22:19 GMT

I'm beginning to introduce this web-log (blog) to colleagues at Harvard. There is plenty of interest! The most common problem I've had is that LiveJournal is slow; MIT/Harvard professors and students are understandably skeptical of a system mostly used by teenagers talking about their hair. One of my old colleagues at the University of Montreal, Sébastien Paquet, has been promoting blogs for quite a while. I made a LiveJournal RSS feed for his blog at seb_paquet.

In other news, I've been using a Creative Commons License for my blogs and other writing. Harvard law is offering free blogs for anyone with a Harvard email address and they use the same license. I've made a LiveJournal RSS feed at harvard_blogs. Interesting people are already posting there. eg. Wendy Seltzer.

Daniel Dennett speaks at HMS 1pm Wed. (Feb. 12)

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 03:59:48 GMT

I'll definitely attend this seminar. Dinner with the speaker, later that evening, should be interesting too. Doug. Selinger writes:

Daniel Dennett will be coming to give a seminar on "Human and Evolutionary Engineering: Some Similarities and Differences." The seminar will be given this Wednesday (Feb 12th) at 1:00 PM in the Armenise Amphitheater in Building D.

Prof. Dennett is a renowned philosopher of mind, famous for his clear-spoken approach and his clever use of analogies and experiments to bring forth deep insights on even the most complex topics. He has always been a close observer of science, from which he draws abundant and compelling examples to support and illustrate his arguments.

Prof. Dennett has recently focused his thought on the implications of evolutionary theory, leading to the publication of, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." In this tremendously thoughtful exposition on the fundamental principles of evolution, which by the way, is the best I have ever read, he comes to the conclusion that there are deep similarities between evolution and engineering.

I am pleased to say that Prof. Dennett speaks as well as he writes, having seen him last year at a conference he organized on, "Philosophy and Biology." In his introductory speech, he called for more communication between biologists and philosophers, a call which he has taken to heart by agreeing to come to speak at Harvard Medical School.

I hope to see you at the seminar on Wednesday.

Lecture: The 2003 William Belden Noble Lectures

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 20:56:41 GMT

I'll probably attend this lecture tomorrow (Wed Feb 4th). In any case, I'll get dinner at Border Cafe. Interested people can meet at 6:15pm. RSVP if you want me to reserve a spot for you. Map with Border Cafe marked is here.

The 2003 William Belden Noble Lectures

Interest is mounting in the annual William Belden Noble lectures with the announcement that physician-geneticist Francis S. Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, will deliver the 2003 lecture series. “Genetics, Medicine, and Faith” will be his topic when he steps up to the podium on February 3, 4, 5, 2003 at 8:00 p.m.

As Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, Dr. Collins oversees a complex multidisciplinary project aimed at mapping and sequencing all of the human DNA, and determining aspects of its function. Many consider this the most important scientific undertaking of our time.

Raised on a small farm in Virginia and home-schooled until the sixth grade, Collins obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Virginia, and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Yale University. Recognizing that a revolution was beginning in molecular biology and genetics, he changed fields and enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina. Returning to Yale for a fellowship in human genetics, he worked on methods of crossing large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes, and continued to develop these ideas after joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1984. Collins’ team, together with collaborators, was successful in applying this approach to genes for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1, and a particular type of adult acute leukemia.

Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research since 1993, his own research laboratory continues to explore the molecular genetics of breast cancer, prostate cancer, adult-onset diabetes, and other disorders. His accomplishments have been recognized by election to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

No stranger to the Noble Lectures, Dr. Collins was a respondent in 1998 on the 100th anniversary of the Noble lectures, delivered that year by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi. Other distinguished participants in the series created through a bequest of Nannie Yulee Noble in memory of her husband have included Theodore Roosevelt, Hans Küng, and former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie of Cuddesdon.

Monday: From Atheist to Believer: A Personal Voyage
Respondent: Dr. Armand Nicholi, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

Tuesday: Can a Geneticist be a Believer? Evolution and Other Challenges, with respondent, Dr. Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology

Wednesday: Genetics, Ethics and Faith, with respondent, The Reverend Ted Peters, Director of the Center of Theology and the Natural Sciences, Science and Religion Course

The Memorial Church • Harvard Yard • Cambridge, MA 02138 • phone: (617) 495-5508 • fax: (617) 496-9166

URL: http://www.memorialchurch.harvard.edu/focus/noble.shtml

Biology lab techniques class needs more people.

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 03:46:33 GMT

These days lots of us have an engineering/math/physics background. BCMP-210 should be of interest to people (like me) that theorize about biology but need more experience in the lab.

Class is Mon/Wed 2pm-4pm and Fri 2:30pm-4:30pm at Harvard medical school (There are shuttles from MIT and Harvard square.) See: LJ:REF:COURSES:652.

Instructors have emphasized that it's OK to use the course to further ones own rotation/thesis research. If you are interested you should contact Prof. Stan Tabor directly at: tabor @ hms.harvard.edu

Please pass this message to anyone interested...

PS I think this might be a perfect opportunity for trying this in a class project.

Happy Birthday to me!

Tue, 21 Jan 2003 03:41:17 GMT

I'm catching a plane in a few hours. Talk on Wed. I didn't plan a party this year but thanks to everyone that made this another memorable birthday.

Open Source, Closed Documentation?

Sat, 28 Dec 2002 01:52:52 GMT

Interesting thread on Slashdot. See LJ:REF:SLASHDOT:357.

CSBi 2003 Annual Conference "From Bioinformatics to Biofabrication"

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 00:15:20 GMT

Two day conference January 9th and 10th. PDF. Open registration before Dec. 30th. Blurb:

In its 2003 Conference, CSBi looks inward at systems and computational biology research currently underway at MIT and at collaborating institutions. Research talks will cover a wide variety of science and engineering topics from bioinformatics to the fabrication of biology-based nano-machines. Research talks will be supplemented by five invited "Perspectives" talks that present historical, technical and scientific overviews of research relevant to systems biology.

LCSAI holiday party @ New England Aquarium

Mon, 16 Dec 2002 15:53:54 GMT

Definitely not to be missed-- party announcement...

This year we are having the first annual joint LCSAI holiday party.
It will be at the New England Aquarium in downtown Boston (right near
the "Aquarium" stop on the blue line) from 7pm to 11pm on
Sunday 15th December. [Note, there is just one holiday party this
year for the two labs combined, not one for each as in the past.]

There will be food, drinks, music, fish, and penguins. Enjoy watching
the divers during the special feeding presentation in the "Big Tank".
Bring the family and stick your noses up against a few inches of acrylic!

RSVP by Wednesday, December 4th,
with a head count if you intend to come.

Look forward to seeing you there. Penguin suits are optional!

-- Rod Brooks