Single or Double

When I first began typing, I used to put three spaces after a sentence. Somewhere along the way, I whittled it down to two. Apparently now, it's accepted that you should use a single space after a sentence.

Looking into it, the double space originated during the typewriter era where they used monospaced fonts (all the characters are the same width). It made it easier to distinguish where the sentences were. I think this applies mostly with question marks and exclamation points. Periods tend to have a lot of associated white space anyways, so I don't see the problem there. Apparently, double spaces were also used after colons or semicolons as well.

Anyways, as times progressed and variable width fonts came to prominence, the double space was reduced to a single space. I'm not sure if it improves readability or not, but for those old school folk, it reduces the number of bytes that the document takes up. Besides, web browsers don't render two spaces, from what I've been told. However, there could be potential confusion when a sentence ends in an abbreviation or acronym and the following sentence begins with a proper noun.

Kitty Spies

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions. A battery and a microphone were implanted into a cat and an antenna into its tail. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be removed in another operation. Surgical and training expenses are thought to have amounted to over 10 million British pounds.

The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C.. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately. Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.

(taken verbatim from Wikipedia)

Edward Hopper

I went to an Edward Hopper special exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts the other day. I've never been one to "get" art. But it makes it easier to see themes and get an overall impression when an entire gallery is dedicated to one artist. The placards set the tone using words such as "vernacular" and "bittersweet". Maybe that's all brainwashing to give the viewer a bias. While true, most of his paintings depict a quiescent solitude, should that be necessarily attached to any given emotion? His human subjects do tend to emit a kind of plainness and despair though. Oh, and his utility poles tend to be a bit curved.

female dog = bitch

tuesday, 29 may, 2007 15:25 MAT

whilst reading a new scientist article on dogs, the term bitch was used when referring to a female dog. looking that up on dictionary.com the first definition was indeed a female canine animal, especially a dog.

if it was used in this way on television during the normal broadcasting hours, would this word be allowed or bleeped out ? how many people realise this and would not be offended ?? to many, the word bitch is considered a curse word and nothing more, not aware that it can be used to scientifically refer to a female dog.

,` )

rockhampton mathematics

saturday, 26 may, 2007 15:10 MAT

i live in the city of rockhampton in queensland, australia. according to the may - june issue of the community newsletter, rockhampton has evolved with some very interesting mathematics.

1860 - rockhampton proclaimed a town
1902 - rockhampton delcared a city
2005 - rockhampton celebrates 150 years a city

i don't remember any big celebrations in 2005 when i was here, but i didn't much pay attention. either they celebrated really, REALLY early or there is some new form of mathematics down under that i am not aware of yet.

,` )

Math sale

So, I was like, waiting for someone outside a restaurant and it was soooooo hot, at least as hot as it's been this year, but I was in the shade, so it wasn't too bad, but still I was almost prespiring just standing there. Ick! Anyways, there was this store on the other side of the street that was having a grand opening sale. On the sign, it read:

For each

$50 take off $5
$100 take off $15
$150 take off $20

And I was like, OMGWTF!!!!?????

Hijabs

The hijab, in the context of most Western discussions, refers to Muslim women’s head and body covering. Islam has often been the subject of criticism by feminists and others who believe that the hijab is a symbol of oppression, of secondary status. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, women are required to wear the national version of Islamic dress or else face punishment. Although there are verses in the Quran prescribing modesty in dress, some scholars argue that neither the Quran nor Muhammed himself required the hijab of women. In fact, according to some interpretations, the idea of wearing headscarves originated with Muhammed’s wives, who wore them as a sign of status; only later did the wearing of hijab by women became a social custom and, much later, expected and/or compulsory.

Sources: Karen Armstrong's Muhammad: Biography of the Prophet; Wikipedia

Sleep . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Asleep On The Job

More companies are allowing workers to take afternoon naps, finding that it increases productivity. A NASA study confirms this, claiming a workers output can be boosted as much as 34%. I guess that depends on how you measure "output".

Anyways, it definitely would be nice to find one of these companies, if I ever graduate. I've definitely found myself to be more productive after a nap, but I usually only take them when I'm really drowsy. I'm glad there's something I can at least point to now.

RNA Interference (RNAi)

RNA interference (RNAi) is a cellular mechanism for regulating gene expression. RNA, in contrast to DNA, is usually single-stranded in cells. Exogenously-introduced double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which can come from a variety of sources such as viruses and synthetic dsRNA (i.e. for experimental purposes), trigger the RNAi pathway in the cell.

The RNAi pathway:

1) The enzyme dicer chops the dsRNA into small double-stranded RNA fragments of 20-25 base pairs. These fragments unpair to become single-stranded RNA, which are called siRNA (short interfering RNA).
2) The single-stranded siRNA's are incorporated into a complex called the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC).
3) When the siRNA's base-pair with complementary RNA sequences such as in messenger RNA (mRNA), the business end of the RISC - argonaute - degrades the target mRNA.

Recall the central dogma of biology:

DNA --> mRNA --> protein

DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which exits the nucleus and is translated into protein, which mediates biological functions. Since RNAi results in the degradation of mRNA, the effect is that protein production is reduced, or "knocked down."

Biological Functions of RNAi

Why does the RNAi pathway exist? There have been theories about RNAi playing a role in the immune system. It has been reported in plants that RNAi plays a role in cleaving an intruding viral dsRNA. The immunological role of RNAi in animals and humans is less understood.

RNAi in Research

RNAi has become an indispensable tool of molecular biological research. It has become one of the major ways to downregulate a specific protein's expression. In simplistic terms, scientists often want to study the function of a protein. So how do you know that Protein A mediates Function A'? You can increase the expression of Protein A and see if the effect (A') is increased. This is called overexpression. You can reduce the expression of Protein A and see if the effect is decreased. RNAi is one of the main techniques used to reduce protein expression. The other major technique is a genetic knockout, which is more cumbersome, and sometimes can result in lethality of the animal or cell line if the target protein is essential for survival.

No Injuns Allowed

Did you know that until May 2005 a law existed that banned Native Americans from entering the city of Boston? The law was enacted in the late 17th century and has been on the books, pretty much unenforced, since the early 18th century.

Here is the relevant article from the Boston Globe.

Mark Rothko

Last night, May 15, 2007, Sotheby's had their Contemporary Art Evening Auction. The star of the show was the beautiful piece shown above. It is known as White Center (Yellow, Pink, and Lavender on Rose) by Mark Rothko. It sold for a record breaking $72,840,000.

Many people have asked me what makes this piece so important? And is it worth all that money? I leave the latter question alone, but I will attempt to convey some of the history and importance regarding this piece of work.

In short, this piece was painted in 1950 and is largely regarded as the first "fully-resolved" piece of Rothko's vision that would become his signature style. If one looks at the paintings by Rothko before this time, one will find a much more calligraphic and representative/pictorial style. As David Anfam puts it, "Certainly, White Center's dazzling amplitude and finesse invite an otherwise overused label-the appellation of masterpiece. In short, its commanding scale, sumptuousness and sheer intensity bespeak a modern master in the first full flush of his mature creativity. As such, White Center is also a summation." We should remember that visions and concepts such as this do not come overnight. It is a culmination of Rothko's evolution from 1924 and reflects the influence of Bonnard, Matisse, and Mondrian.

Outside of the painting, there are also some notable points. The provenance of this painting reads as follows: Sidney Janis Gallery (New York), Eliza Bliss Parkinson (Niece of one of the founders of MOMA, New York, before 1960), Sidney Janis Gallery (New York, 1960), David Rockefeller (New York, June 1960). On the advice of Dorothy C. Miller, one of MOMA's most well-known curators and champion for upcoming American contemporary art, Rockefeller purchased the piece for $10,000. [Inflation calculator from the previous post puts it at $66k today.] It was Rockefeller's first abstract work.

More from Snapple

The first ball point pens were sold in 1945 for $12.

From an internet inflation calculator, that $12 in 1945 translates to $132.91 in 2006. I haven't really gone shopping for high class pens. Is that about the going price for them now, or did other economic forces cause a downturn in the retail price for ball point pens?

nokia 2280 user's manual

monday, 14 may, 2007 09:55 MAT



gosh... who wouldda thought !!

,` )

US Patents

In preparing a proposal for a department engineering competition, I've been reading some patents. Here's an simple link telling you how to read the front page of a patent. Interestingly enough, it provides a little tidbit that states the date of issue on US patents are all Tuesdays! (Why is this??)

I'd post about patent term lengths, but upon reading another site, I found it very confusing. I'll leave it up to someone else to explain.

Pouf

So I learned that those scrubber ball thingy's you use with bodywash are called poufs. Or at least that's what someone told me. Apparently, it hasn't made it into the online dictionaries yet. However, when I do look up pouf, one of the definitions is that it is a slang and offensive term of an openly homosexual man.

Coffee Cups

So apparently, coffee cups have a lip/feet at the bottom in order to lift the bottom of the cup off the surface of whatever it's sitting on. Having that pocket of air under your coffee provides thermal insulation. In other words, it reduces the amount of heat lost from your coffee through the bottom of the cup. And all this time, I thought it was just there so you could hold the cup without burning your hand or using those sleeve things. You ever notice that Chinese bowls have feet on the bottom? Yeah, so much more convenient than lots of "American" bowls.

More from Snapple caps

In 1900, cars in New York City were electric. There might have been a fraction or percentage after the comma, but it goes in hand with one of my previous tidbits.

A dragonfly has six legs but cannot walk.

Kissing Randomness

When a Kiss is More than a Kiss (NYTimes) The article comes out of the recent hoopla surrounding Richard Gere and Indian actress Shilpa Shetty. It also mentions other public kisses by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (president of Iran), Al/Tipper Gore, Hillary Clinton, and mobsters.

Random facts from the article:

• Romans identified 3 different kinds of kisses: basium - standard romantic kiss, osculum - friendship kiss, savium - the passionate "french kiss"
• Monkeys don't kiss, though apes do to show respect (Only on the arm/chest)
• Earliest written record of kissing comes from Sanskrit, 1500 BC
• Is kissing an innate human act? There is debate. Some argue it comes from the mother passing prechewed food to the baby. Yum-o

blue lights on emergency vehicles

monday, 7 may, 2007 10:50 MAT

we were driving to uni this morning and noticed an ambulance vehicle with blue and red beacons. that prompted me to investigate why it had blue lights. this is different to what i am used to in america.

There is practical advantage of using two colors for high intensity lights on police car beacons. Blue is easier to see during daytime and red more clearly discerned at night. Blue also is chosen for its long association with police in US (e.g: blue lights in front of police stations, blue uniforms in many states) and because of its high daylight visibility. Red has long been a symbol of warning and danger and a signal to stop. No other emergency service uses blue in its beacon. Firefighters and ambulances use red. Construction and emergency transport vehicles (towing etc.) use yellow or amber. Only police beacons are two-colored.

i guess in australia, it isn't regulation that only police cars use blue lights. i also didn't realise that in america ambulances and firefighters use only red. i always thought it was red and white. i'll have to pay more attention, i guess.

source: http://www.garamchai.com/askadesi/askgov08.htm

,` )

Why the Toyota Way Works

Toyota, as you all know, just became the largest car manufacturer in the world, surpassing GM. For many years now, their incredible efficiency and production line methods have been studied, analyzed, and have been publicized. GM, itself, tried to learn from Toyota by owning and operating a joint manufacturing plant in California--the deal was that GM would learn how Toyota makes incredible quality-cars and Toyota would gain a sales channel in the US. Well, although that plant was successful (like all of Toyota's other plants) GM did not figure out how to turn their other factories into money-making machines.

Yet, the Toyota-way is not a mystery. In theory, it's all very simple and intuitive. If there is a mistake on the production line, a worker pulls a cord, and the entire line is stopped. A manager will rush over to the source of the error, and if the problem is not fixed immediately, the worker will pull the component/part off the line and will resume the rest of the production line. The worker is in charge of reporting the problem and working with people to develop a solution. Once a solution has been created, both the problem and solution are announced to the company, so that the issue does not occur again. With this incredible process, Toyota continues to learn from their own mistakes about quality and improvement.

However, no other car manufacturer in the world and most other factories, in general, have not been able to use this same method. This is a mystery, as Toyota is very open about their processes and the Toyota case is touted by b-school professors everywhere. So why does it work in Toyota and not elsewhere? Is it their corporate culture? Is it because American unions disincentivize workers from doing quality-work?

My classmate Yas, who is an up-and-coming manager at Toyota, gave a lecture today in class and presented a perspective that I've never heard before. He thinks their success has to do with respect. At Toyota, the line worker, though he may not have had a college education, is expected to problem-solve at the level of an ivory-tower-trained engineer. Furthermore, he said that the line workers are willing to do this because they are given incredible respect. Hierarchy is minimal at Toyota. People don't think line workers are idiots or are unsophisticated--they realize that the line workers are the ones who make the company successful. If a line worker has a design-idea, there are processes in play that allow immediate implementation of the idea, further supporting the notion of acknowledgement across all levels of employees.

But how do you teach people this kind of respect? Yas, himself, who is an Ivy-league trained engineer, fluent in English and Japanese, has worked on the line. Apparently every new employee regardless of the position he/she was hired for, must work on the production line for a few months, side-by-side with all the line workers who will not be assuming other positions in his/her career. Yas said that it taught him respect for what line workers do, because not only did he have to do it himself, but he ended up becoming friends with everyone on his line. With those kinds of friendships, it's hard to disrespect people on the line, even when he moved on to higher positions and they stayed. In addition, all new hires must also sell cars for a few months, so Yas learned to appreciate sales and became friends with car salespeople as well. I think this is an amazing way to build camraderie.

Fire Starters

So apparently, in lieu of lighter fluid, you can use flour. Something about high surface area. -Gabe Vieth

On a similar note, I had a friend who would light non-dairy coffee creamer on fire by tossing it up in the air forming a cloud, then lighting it from the bottom creating a nice quick fireball. -eyewitness account

1%

More than one percent of all the energy used by humankind goes to synthesizing ammonia. Ammonia is used to make nitrogen fertilizers. The higher grain yields obtained with nitrogen fertilizer are absolutely necessary to feed more than 40% of the world's population, and to support the nitrogen-intense diet of the rest of the world.

Anthropogenic sources (primary ammonia synthesis, but also NOx from fossil fuel combustion and cultivation of leguminous crops such as soybeans) account for well over half of the flux of nitrogen fixation in the world (on land). This is a huge perturbation to the global geochemical cycling on nitrogen. Biogeochemists, however, haven't yet figured out what happens to all the nitrogen fertilizers we put in the ground. Some of it forms nitrates which enter groundwater via leaching from the soil or runoff into lakes and rivers. No one knows what happens to all the nitrate after that, though. Either it is "denitrified" by soil and freshwater microorganisms, or it is being trapped in some unknown and huge nitrate reservoir, possibly deep underground.

The full environmental consequences of all this extra nitrogen are largely unknown.

Hot Fudge Sundaes

The very first hot fudge sundae was made at CC Brown's Ice Cream Shop located in Hollywood, CA.

-Hampton Inn mint box

Jim Koch is content

Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams), gave a talk about sales at MIT today. At one point, someone asked him for how much would he sell Sam Adams to Anheuser-Busch. To paraphrase his answer, he said that he already eats three meals a day and being able to eat six meals a day adds no extra value and isn't interesting to him.

Jim's first experience as a beer salesman landed him on Washington Street, which apparently has no bars, and State Street, which also had no bars. Luckily, he eventually found a bar and made his first sale. The company currently has some 400 employees of which 240 are salesmen, 100 are brewers, and the rest do all the other things. They did not have anyone in marketing for the first 10 years of their existence. The lesson is sales, sales, SALES!

Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR)

The kidney is one of the most important organs in the body, performing numerous key functions such as excretion of waste products; regulation of blood pH, serum electrolyte concentrations, blood volume, and blood pressure; and the secretion of hormones such as erythropoietin (for synthesis of red blood cells), renin (for blood pressure control), and vitamin D (for bone health). The anatomy of the kidney is therefore complex in order to accomodate all these functions.

The basic functional unit of the kidney is known as the nephron. There are millions of nephrons in each kidney. One of the key components of a nephron is the glomerulus, which handles the filtration function of the kidney. Blood is carried into and out of the glomerulus via afferent and efferent arterioles. Surrounding the afferent arteriole is a filtration barrier, which allows fluid carrying wastes and electrolytes to pass through into what's known as Bowman's capsule, which is part of an extensive collecting system for that filtrate, commonly known as urine.

Kidney function is often measured by the glomerular filtration rate (GFR), which is the volume of fluid filtered across that filtration barrier per unit time. The GFR represents the total ability of the kidney (e.g. the sum of all glomeruli) to filter blood. Hence as we age, or as the kidney gets damaged in some disease process, nephrons begin to die, and the overall rate of filtration drops.

GFR is commonly estimated by the body's creatnine clearance. Creatnine (Cr) is a molecule synthesized by your muscles. It is freely filtered by the glomerulus and neither secreted (actually it is minimally secreted) nor reabsorbed into the urine. In other words, the only way for the body to get rid of creatnine is by filtering it through the glomerulus. Thus, measuring the creatnine filtration closely approximates the GFR. In the hospital, serum (blood) creatnine is routinely measured. A rise in serum creatnine may suggest a defect in glomerular filtration (i.e. if the glomerulus is not filtering properly, then creatnine cannot exit the body and therefore builds up in the blood).

Normal GFR is approximately 100 ml/min, with men usually having higher baseline GFR than women. Normal aging can decrease the GFR at an approximate rate of 1 ml/min per year after the age of 30. Various disease processes (e.g. diabetes, hypertension, lupus, etc) can reduce kidney function. Whatever the disease process, renal disease may be classified into 5 stages, based on the GFR:

Stage 1: GFR > 90. Kidneys are largely intact, and treatment is aimed at halting the disease process to preserve kidney function.

Stage 2: GFR between 60-90. Kidney function has declined slightly, and treatment is still aimed at halting the disease process.

Stage 3: GFR between 30-60. Kidney function is significantly compromised. Anemia and bone problems occur with higher frequency (recall that the kidney is responsible for synthesizing erythropoietin and vitamin D).

Stage 4: GFR between 15-30. Kidney function is severely compromised. At this stage, you have to make preparations for dialysis and think about a kidney transplant.

Stage 5: GFR < 15. This is also known as end stage renal disease By this point, your kidneys no longer have sufficient filtration capacity to maintain life, and you will need dialysis or a transplant.

The kidney is an organ that cannot regenerate or repair itself (at least with current medical technology); whatever is lost is lost forever. So treat your kidneys well!

My rental car is a Mercury Grand Marquis. That's historically pronounced mar-kwis.

Marilyn Monroe's famous subway grate is located at the northwest corner of 52nd and Lexington in New York City. -Hampton Inn mint box