Some Interesting Quotes from "Capitalism and Financial Crashes," The New Yorker

Some quotes I liked from: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_fact_cassidy

For more see: http://delicious.com/mbgmbg/clust_bridge_keynes_quotes

Millennium Bridge

It initially closed in '00 then reopened: "The real problem was that the designers of the bridge... had not taken into account how the footway would react to all the pedestrians walking on it."

Keynes view on our "third degree" guesses

Keynes’s jaundiced view of finance reflected his own experience as an investor .... He compared investing to newspaper competitions in which “the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.... It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest... We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.”

Points on the Prisoner's dilemma

Because financial markets consist of individuals who react to what others are doing, the theories of free-market economics are often less illuminating than the Prisoner’s Dilemma, an analysis of strategic behavior that game theorists associated with the RAND Corporation developed during the early nineteen-fifties....

Imagine that you and another armed man have been arrested and charged with jointly carrying out a robbery. The two of you are being held and questioned separately, with no means of communicating. You know that, if you both confess, each of you will get ten years in jail, whereas if you both deny the crime you will be charged only with the lesser offense of gun possession, which carries a sentence of just three years in jail. The best scenario for you is if you confess and your partner doesn’t: you’ll be rewarded for your betrayal by being released, and he’ll get a sentence of fifteen years. The worst scenario, accordingly, is if you keep quiet and he confesses.

What should you do? The optimal joint result would require the two of you to keep quiet, so that you both got a light sentence, amounting to a combined six years of jail time. Any other strategy means more collective jail time. But you know that you’re risking the maximum penalty if you keep quiet, because your partner could seize a chance for freedom and betray you. And you know that your partner is bound to be making the same calculation. Hence, the rational strategy, for both of you, is to confess, and serve ten years in jail. In the language of game theory, confessing is a “dominant strategy,” even though it leads to a disastrous outcome.

Animal Symbolism

Supposedly....

Turtle is symbol of:
Patience longevity connection

Rabbit is symbol of:
Patience quick thinking timidity ingenuity fertility

Salmon is symbol of:
Determination fertility wisdom prophecy

Frog is symbol of:
Transformation creativity fertility water

Being bossy without being a leader

Is protein evolution as duplication + divergence + recombination ?

The FDR "balloon"

If you try hard enough, you can always find a way to be lazy.

The addition of small epsilons to give a big delta

Your fingers are the best comb.... -G Ray

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

Bad MILK. How does milk know when to expire? - Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum

Some useful quotes on what makes milk go bad:
"Generally, if kept constantly cold, bacteria in milk will grow at a constant slow rate. The bacteria generally feeds on the lactose, turning it into lactic acid. As it accumulates, it makes the milk taste more and more sour. But our taste buds will generally ignore the small bit of sourness. The milk is considered bad when the sourness becomes noticeable. The proteins in the milk will start to stick to each other in an acid environment. However, for this to happen on a large scale requires the milk to be fairly acid (pH around to 5.5). Our taste buds register sour at a much higher pH (~6)."

AOI

Interesting acronym: AOI = achievements, objectives, issues

think big, ask big, want big, do small!

Gene Themes

Data bleach

What is biophysics ?

Structures, interactions and functions of biological molecules studied and
understood through the application of quantitative methods based on
physics and chemistry.

Some flowery text on what Synthetic Biology is

Synthetic biology is a natural outgrowth of systems biology in the same way that molecular biotechnology was a natural outgrowth of molecular biology. That is, the molecular biology revolution (in the 1950s and 1960s) led to the discovery of the main molecular actors, thus paving the way for the fields of genetic and molecular engineering in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Goujon, 2001). At present, biology is undergoing another transition, first defining molecular and cellular systems in the context of systems biology and then using these to build new functionalities in the framework of synthetic biology (Arkin & Fletcher, 2006; Endy, 2006; Cassman, 2005; Vidal, 2001; Ge et al., 2003; Kitano, 2002a,b). One the main issues in early synthetic biology is developing sets of standard, interoperable, composable biological parts for manipulation (parts.mit.edu; Endy, 2005).

from wikipedia :

Systems biology is an academic field that seeks to integrate high-throughput biological studies to understand how biological systems function. By studying the relationships and interactions between various parts of a biological system (e.g. metabolic pathways, organelles, cells, physiological systems, organisms etc.) it is hoped that eventually an understandable model of the whole system can be developed.

from wikipedia :

Synthetic biology aims to create novel biological functions and tools by modifying or integrating well-characterized biological components (i.e. genes, promoters) into higher order genetic networks using mathematical modeling to direct the construction towards the desired end product.