The Book of Kells

A period of history I wish to know more about 

The space between

Shockwaves in outerspace 

Bread and Roses

I found out that one of my closest friends has a talent that I was completely unaware of. It light of seeing this I have little idea what to do with the rest of my talentless existence.


http://studio.forbreadandroses.com/

Link

Waves, Caves and Kayaks

Separated from the California mainland throughout recent geological history, the Channel Islands provide the earliest evidence for human seafaring in the Americas. It is also the site of the discovery of the earliest paleontological evidence of humans in North America.

The man who wanted to know everything

Not a bad ambition

The Quintessential Spaniard - Supposedly

A quite gripping biography.

The Barnes Foundation

Just watched the movie: The Art of the Steal. The subject being the artwork and will of Albert Barnes.

Alzheimer's

I was startled to find out that our understanding of this disease is still very much in its infancy. The current leading candidate is the so called tau hypothesis. Tau proteins, or rather their over expression, can cause the microtubules in the neuronal cell body to aggregate in an insoluble way messing up cellular transport. This seems like an interesting problem to work on.

The Emperors New Mind

Penrose (above picture) is known for his quite remarkable theories and deviations away from conventional interpretations of physical laws. One such deviation is Orch-OR theory. Perhaps an interesting read. I take a more conventional stance and see his insights as mostly non-scientific. He can sell books though.

Open

An extremely honest book.

Gauchos and Tortillas

My first time watching the Gauchos play. Despite them winning in overtime the most exciting part of the game were the tortillas.

Biology

A fantastic paper from Bialek and Wieschaus challenging the paradigm of morphogen dependent positional information in a growing embryo. Another example of not taking existing paradigms as truths but only as a reflection of the level of ignorance in a field.

A bone deep hook - Colbert

Fox News

Bratt and Hardwicke

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: Still as compelling a duo as ever. The BBC production of Doyle's works are outstanding and haven't aged at all.

de Gennes

A recent project of mine involved adapting various concepts and calculations from this book. For those who haven't had the fortune of running into de Gennes' work, this is an excellent place to start. It is hard to describe the joy one gets in reading his work.

Cocaine is a hell of a drug

Chapelle at his best: sketch

I withdraw my offer of sex and shall scuttle away in horror!

Another fantastic sketch

No one leaves this show empty handed, so we're going to cut off his hands

Perhaps the greatest sketch

Thats well harsh blud

  sketch 

England's Leonardo

Amidst the plethora of "great" scientist of the last few centuries the work and legacy of Robert Hooke appears to have been lost along the way. For some reason I decided to find out a little bit more about England's Leonardo and found it interesting reading.
A few interesting things that I found out 1) he was the first person to coin the word cell to describe the unit of life 2) in many ways he embodied the Baconian method of doing science, now known as the scientific method 3) although he didn't progress as far as Newton in proposing the inverse square law of gravitation he was amongst the first to suggest a gravitational force between celestial bodies as opposed to the aether theory.

Illusions

Recently I have been thinking about optical illusions and having fun subjecting myself to them. Boris told me that there are similar auditory phenomena. Josh sent me this article following perhaps the most random unstructured conversation I have ever been witness to.

Sure I can bike home alone, just tell me where the highway is...

An hour later I found myself lost at 1am amidst a web of highways north of downtown SB. My phone's battery was on the verge of giving up on me. I found myself more disorientated than I expected.

Diwali

Moon

Finally someone makes a decent science fiction movie. Its been a long time. Also the optical illusion in the image above is pretty cool (scroll up and down while looking at the image). This got me thinking about optical illusions. Some wikipedia based extensive research got me to this one

(Left) Square A and B are the same color. I thought it was wrong...but it isn't. I am confused. (Below) Another one: Move towards (or away) while looking at the black dot in the middle

If you have made it this far then you might be interested in this article. This got me thinking about how far our visual system has evolved. Within the last decade it has been convincingly shown that the visual system in vertebrates is accurate enough to detect a single photon, that is, its about as accurate as it could/can be. Yet, simple pictures like this can completely confuse our visual system. Taking a more evolutionary stand-point this says something about the statistics of objects and images found in the natural world. These images are anything but natural, but what does that mean? Why aren't things in the natural world like this? Are there two sets of optical illusions, one where however hard I train I could never resolve the illusion and second where I could? For example, the classic vase or a pair of faces illusion is a classic example. I have seen that enough times to now be able to hold both those images simultaneously in my mind (whatever that means) without switching back and forth. So how much of an optical illusions is novelty and how much of it reflects neurophysiological limits. Thats interesting I think.

The Habit Burger Grill

Concert

Two friends played at a bar in downtown SB. Carlos made these drawings for the cover of their cd.
Everyone here is talented, all I can do is write about them.

Biology

Noise in Genetic Circuits: Eldar and Elowitz
If you spend some time modeling a particular developmental or regulatory system in biology you will realize that various architectures can result in identical functions in a deterministic limit. Considering noise however can bias particular wirings over others from an evolutionary standpoint. This paper elaborates upon three generic circuits 1) state switching 2) excitability and 3) procrastination. Each one depends on noise in a characteristic way and biases certain phenotypic responses over others.

KITP

The chair of the KITP says a little bit about the Institute.

Vibrams

I recently bought a pair of Vibram Five Finger KSOs. Despite it being very enticing to start on long runs with them its important to allow your entire body to adapt to running essential barefoot.
Wearing them provides a completely new sensation to running and even walking outside.

Biology

As ideas go, this is an order one new idea. A brilliant scientific study that belongs to the following school of thought

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" 

Biology

One of the classic papers in quantitative biology and potentially in biology as a whole. Protein synthesis and DNA replication are two examples of processes where the error rates are minute (10^-4 and 10^-9, respectively). Purely thermodynamic considerations require the right and wrong processes to have enormous energetic differences leading to Arrhenius alterations of the probabilities of complexes forming. Hopfield appeals to an additional, energy consuming, step that is able to lead to dramatic reductions in errors while leaving the relative energetics of the substrates and complexes unchanged.

Feynman

I have had the fortune to meet some great scientists over the last 8 years or so, mostly I am astounded by their ability to withstand painful calculations. This man on the other hand seems to have a completely different take on science and life. He appears to have an intuitive understanding of how things work. I suppose it is fair to say that I feel inspired after an evening of watching various youtube videos of his interviews and talks.

Halloween

Foolishly instead of going to IV, where the second biggest college party in the states was going on, I wound up at a dive bar in Goleta with a few friends, got drunk and sang what is love.
During our rendition of this 90's classic Stephane (the douche with the headband) managed to give himself a black eye by attempting to look cool with a mic. Pathetic...

Sailing with Carlos and Joao

We learnt how to sail in Capri 14.2's in the Santa Barbara harbor. This picture was taken on our first day where we sailed without the jib (the strange little sail in the front of the boat - clearly missing in the above picture). Subsequent days got more interesting due to the presence of a certain Chinese exchange student and gusts of wind upto around 18 knots, which itself has an interesting origin.

Biology

John Hopfield at the KITP
I had the fortune to be in the audience for this talk. He seamlessly takes the audience from an introduction to a theory of theories to how he thinks about consciousness and finally thinking and mental exploration.

Biology

Architecture-Dependent Noise Discriminates Functionally Analogous Differentiation Circuits
An elegant experiment and theoretical analysis of how the wiring of biological circuits can matter despite the functionality being preserved. In short, (and borrowing their terms) the architecture of circuits can alter the susceptibility to environmental noise. As it turns out for the particular system being looked at here, competence in B. subtilis, a susceptibility to noise is beneficial since it aids the ability of the organism to be able to respond/adapt to variations in its environments.