Efficient Research Focus

In the last century alone, Homo sapiens has killed through war about 190 Million of his own species. First, that's not 'sapiens', that's stupid. Second, given that AIDS has worldwide caused 'only' 25 Million deaths, I guess many scientists of the biomedical research areas should change their focus, and rather ask for funds to cure war. Or stupidity?

A World of Justice

Wish you a phantasmagorgical New 2009!!
May Nutella be with you!

Hey, If you are a brave guy, and want to help obtaining some justice in 2009 with a simple email, visit this page and take action!
Cheers!
BLT

Fault Tolerance Added

[from wikipedia] "The power law distribution highly influences the network topology. It turns out that the major hubs are closely followed by smaller ones. These ones, in turn, are followed by other nodes with an even smaller degree and so on. This hierarchy allows for a fault tolerant behavior. Since failures occur at random and the vast majority of nodes are those with small degree, the likelihood that a hub would be affected is almost negligible. Even if such event occurs, the network will not lose its connectedness, which is guaranteed by the remaining hubs. On the other hand, if we choose a few major hubs and take them out of the network, it simply falls apart and is turned into a set of rather isolated graphs. Thus hubs are both the strength of scale-free networks and their Achilles' heel." What happens if one adds a hub? That's what many pathogens do... ?

INRI?

Jesus said he'd be the messiah for all the Jews. After 2000 years, millions and millions of people believe in him and his message, except all the Jews...

Museum of Forced Tolerance

In October, the Israeli Supreme Court decided to allow building the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. In doing so, it overrun legal protests from Palestinian families, attempting to halt the construction because a major ancient Muslim cemetery was found on the site of the building.

Durragham Saif, the lawyer who brought the Islamic Court petition on behalf of three Palestinian families, Al Dijani, Nusseibeh and Bader Elzain, all of whom have members buried at the cemetery, said: "It's unbelievable, it's immoral. You cannot build a museum of tolerance on the graves of other people. Imagine this kind of thing in the [United] States or England. And this is the Middle East where events are sensitive. If this goes ahead in this way it is going to cause the opposite thing to tolerance."(paragraph taken from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-plans-to-build-museum-of-tolerance-on-muslim-graves-466028.html)

Happy Christmas, World, and good luck for 2009

Real and Reciprocal Constraints

During evolution, vertebrates can develop some morphological features (e.g. lose digits, reassign function to building blocks) but not others (grow a second head, or a third arm). Re-dimension and re-shape is ok, but not to add. This however is not true for DNA and protein, where bits and regions can be changed, added, multiplied. Nevertheless, I wonder if the morphological limitations can be translated into constraints for DNA/protein evolution. A bit like solvent flattening for crystallographic phases. Yes, maybe this is a circular argument.