24 December 2007

let. to ed. re. "For a Tunnel to Go 16 Miles, No Light Yet" -- NY Times

Here's a letter to the Times that wasn't published:
I was very intrigued by your recent column about a proposed tunnel
connecting Long Island to Westchester. As the piece noted, this
tunnel follows a route long ago advocated by Robert Moses. If such a
tunnel were ever to be built, it would validate one of Moses' original
designs for the road network encircling New York City; thus, in a way,
this proposal revitalizes his original dream. However, it is worth
pointing out that Moses' original plan was for a bridge, not a tunnel.
Moses, in fact, strongly disliked and actively opposed tunnels,
whereas he felt bridges made a stronger and grander statement. Thus,
the interesting twist in the column is how it simultaneously revives
Moses' original dream just as it implicitly criticizes his
stubbornness.


Letter in response to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/nyregion/29towns.html
November 29, 2007
Our Towns
For a Tunnel to Go 16 Miles, No Light Yet
By PETER APPLEBOME
GARDEN CITY, N.Y.
A reasonably sane person contemplating the modest proposal of the
developer Vincent Polimeni to build a $10 billion, privately financed,
16-mile tunnel linking Long Island and Westchester the longest
autos-only tunnel in the world and the first to be privately built in
the United States might start with two thoughts.
The first: This might be a brilliant idea or a nutty one, but in an
era of shrunken ambitions, give the guy credit for a big idea that
goes back to Robert Moses, who in the 1960s championed a bridge over
pretty much the same route.....

03 December 2007

Cycling in DC (TripBethesda)

Cycling from Bethesda into DC and back

Route taken on Google Maps
Summary: ~40 miles cycling
Geotagged images, served from [P]icassa or [F]lickr (also look at overall flickr map)

02 December 2007

Potential alternate terms RFBRs for chIP-chip "hits"

The ENCODE paper coined the term RFBR for "hits" in chIP-chip experiments, viz: "We refer to regions with enriched binding of regulatory factors as RFBRs. RFBRs were identified on the basis of ChIP-chip data in two ways..." Some other terms were considered instead of RFBR. Here's a list of some of them:

CHIRP -- chip hit of regulatory potential
EIGR -- experimentally identified genomic region (like mountain)
GRAF -- Genomic region associated with function
GRAB -- Genomic region associated with binding
MONOD
RELIC -- Regulatory element in living cells
GELC -- Genomic element in living cells
FELC -- Functional event in living cells
MOJO
EDGE -- Experimentally determined genomic element
GEMMS -- Genomic element defined by multple methods
LORE
REIVE -- Regulatory element in vivo
GERP -- Genomic element of regulatory potential
TRE -- transcriptional regulatory element
GIVE -- Genomic in-vivo element
LRE -- long-range element
RFBS -- regulatory factor binding site