Rambles at starchamber.com

For the next few days, I’ll be in Northern California participating in Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp gathering. Who goes to Foo Camp? Here’s who.

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This is a picture of one DNA sequencing machine: the Applied Biosystems 3730xl DNA Analyzer. It costs a few hundred thousand dollars and it’s starting to show its age, but it’s still the sweetest thing on the market if you want to sequence DNA accurately and fast. Here’s another DNA sequencing machine: RNA polymerase. It’s [...]

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This morning, as we were planning to go to the Boston Aquarium, I checked the website, as you do, to verify the Sunday hours. No point in showing up only to discover that it’s closed on Sunday or undergoing massive renovations or some such thing. As I began typing the letters “boston aq” into the [...]

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My nominee for the how-in-the-world-did-THAT-evolve-without-intelligent-design award is the web-spinning spider. While I don’t actually believe in intelligent design, it’s always astounding to watch a spider at work. Via Athanasius I came across this spider site that shows web construction movies and a web gallery. There is also an illuminating little essay on how web-spinning works, [...]

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From the O’Reilly Radar I came across this fun tip: use Google trends to investigate words with seasonality. What I like about this so much is that it gets at how we make sense of the world. Just as you can use Google images to see what a fleam looks like without knowing what it [...]

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Here’s a spooky game to play on Friday: Choose any two digit number you like. That is, think of a number that can be expressed like this

10a + b

where a and b are both single digit numbers. Now add a and b and subtract that sum from your original number, like so:

(10a + b) - [...]

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Ever since Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service launched, I’ve been wondering if it would really take hold. If you haven’t heard of it, the Mechanical Turk, which gets its odd name as an homage to an old chess-playing automaton, is a human-in-the-loop web utility offered by Amazon. Want to transcribe some handwritten notes? It’s hard for [...]

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I had seen pictures of sculptor Alexander Calder’s tiny toy circus before, and I had read how in Paris in the 1920s the “Cirque Calder” mesmerized the like of Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Jean Cocteau.

He would issue invitations to his guests, who would sit on makeshift bleachers munching peanuts, just like the real [...]

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Someone I work with went to SIGGRAPH this week and posted a link to a cool movie he saw. SIGGRAPH (which stands for Special Interest Group Graphics) is the biggest computer graphics conference on the calendar, and it happens to be in Boston this year. Anyway, I followed this link and stumbled upon the juiciest, [...]

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