Fast Followers aren't only in Pharma.

I'm back from my UK parenthesis, and almost ready for my french one.

In the meanwhile I've realised that I haven't posted for roughly 10 days.

And lots of things have happened. For the moment, though, I will only link you to this piece from the NY Times.

Asian phone makers are planning their answer to the iPhone, and the most common one seems to be: let's copy it!

tjhis is quite a common phenomenon in the pharma industry, known as fast follower - as soon as a company (say Pfizer) comes up with an innovative product (often known as first-in-class), a competitor (say Eli Lilly) change the molecule just enough to get around the patent, and markets it. Now things are getting more difficult, since these 'me too' drugs, as they're commonly known in the industry, have to demonstrate definite advantages over the first-in-class, to receive marketing authorisation.

Not so in consumer electronics, though, where a very similar implementation can still get you a viable product - however, even here the key is do more than the first-in-class, iPhone, without getting too complex. After all, the success of iPod was largely due to the human-friendly interface it presented to users, other than the appeal of being able to purchase music online and synchronise your mp3 collection between iPod and PC. And after all, iPhone is being marketed by Apple as a full screen, GSM capable iPod, not the other way around.

Good luck to Samsung and Nokia and whomever else may want to join the battle field. The more they fight, the more and better features we'll get, and the lower the prices we'll have to pay for them.

PacMan's Skull

Somebody scalped Pacman!!!

Remember your youth

listen to L'isola del tesoro, interpreted by Lino Toffolo.

Italian theme song of the japanese animated series "The Treasure Island" - L'Isola del Tesoro.

Calda e' / fredda e' / differenza c'e'.

Remember Ranma 1/2? During my university year it was one of my favorite comic books. here's the italian version of the anime opening theme.



So, why is this post tagged as science? Well, cause I was listening to Nature Podcast from 07/06/07 and heard that some scientist elucidated the reason why menthol tastes 'cold'. Long story short, it (presumably binds and) activates a Na/Ca ion channel, present in our tongue but also in other sensory terminations (see menthol shower-gels), which is normally active only at temperatures below 28 degrees. Hence, the 'cold' sensation. Cool, ain't it?

Why Ranma as title holder? well, cause for this character those termination were pretty important, since a bucket of cold water would transform him into a her (just like the song says). Now imagine if he had known this. May be now we would be able to cure his/her curse?

PS: the title says: Is it warm? Is it cold? It makes a difference! (from the italian theme song)

PPS: Incidentally, I've also worked on ion channels, during my previous year (expressed in the heart, though, not in the tongue) and will present my in silico models at Lille, France, this first week of july. See you there may be ;-)

What makes a GOOD mentor?

Nature has an interesting five-minutes in their latest podcast, on what makes a good mentor for young student, either at the PhD level or below (ehr, that would be me).

If I were to score my own mentor, I'd probably conclude that, with the exception of the last one, all of my official mentors did fail in one field or another. Still, I am not going to blame my own lack of success on them. It is, definitely, almost completely my fault. After all, they've worked hard to get where they are and it's up to me now to show my muscles. Outside of the gym, though.

Still, the single most important thing I need from a mentor is bouncing ideas back and forth, and a safe weekly (or fortnighly, or monthly) meeting to make myself accountable for what I have done in the intervening time. I know it's like admitting that I do not know how to prioritise my time and don't put the right importance to the various parts of my life but ehy, isn't this the reason while I am writing a blog post which will most likely be read by no-one?

So, in conclusion, I think I better press the goddamn button and start reading the paper. And not come back after five minutes to check how many hits I got. It's not that I am lazy, more that I am easily distracted. Gawrsh!

Space Carrier Blue Noah Vs Space Battleship Yamato

One of the step stones of my childhood.

I just happened to listen to its theme song on my shiny new MP3 Player - courtesy of the company, for winning the internal safety contest - in fact I did not deserve it, since during the drill I did ignore the fire alarm thinking that it was just a test of bells and whistles...

Well never mind.

Anyway, I did like this series, although I felt as if it was a rip off of Space Battleship Yamato, certainly more iconic - Matsumoto's style is unmissable.

Next weeks off-blogging

Some more time off blogging, next weeks.

I'll be in Oxford between the 22nd and the 29th for a training/workshop on various computational chemistry techniques. Then, will enjoy two free days in London. As soon as I am back to Beerse, I will have to leave again for Lille, France, where I will present my CV work in a meeting.

It'll be busy, yes.

Galaxy Dust

The stars like dust was one of Asimov's (worst) novel in the future history going from the robot's civilisations (I, Robot - The Naked Sun...) and the Foundation Cycle. In fact the Galactic Empire Cycle did suck, exception made for Pebble in The Sky (Paria dei Cieli), who told the story of a twentieth century man time-dislocated to this far-future where the galactic Empire is in full swing but planet Earth is barren with radioactive zones and only few survivors live in it as Pariahs.

But even Asimov could not imagine a dust made of... galaxies!!! The two big ones merging in front are quite known, although the name escapes me at the moment. Something like Tadpole's Galaxies.

- update: the one above being an artist rendering, and a crap one at that, I am posting below a real picture taken by Hubble:

click on it to get the full resolution: JPEG - 4.48 MB(2476 x 1669 pixels)

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Can you imagine Tom and Jerry wearing these?

Exoform artist Jeff de Boer's cat and mouse warfare equipment in gladiator, medieval, samurai, and Persian styles. And yes, he has tried to put one of his cats inside one of his suits of armor (and has the scars to prove it)



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42

I've listened to the whole of BBC's Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy, yesterday.

thenm, I went to look for it on the wikipedia. Well, not exactly like this but I ended up on the wikipedia page related to number 42.

quite a lot of unsuspected info, indeed. Makes you think that may be Adams had some insight after all.

t is a composite number; its factorization makes it the second sphenic number and also the second of the form {2.3.r}. As with all sphenic numbers of this form the aliquot sum is abundant by 12. 42 is also the second sphenic number to be bracketed by twin primes; 30 also rests between two primes. 42 has a 14 member aliquot sequence 42, 54, 66, 78, 90, 144, 259, 45, 33, 15, 9, 4, 3, 1, 0 and is itself part of the aliquot sequence commencing with the first sphenic number 30. Further, 42 is the 10th member of the 3-aliquot tree.

42 is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester's sequence; like the first four such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number.

It is the sum of the totient function for the first eleven integers.

It is the third 15-gonal number.

It is a Catalan number.

It is a pronic number.

It is the twenty-eighth square-free integer.

It is the reciprocal of a Bernoulli number. It is conjectured to be the "third moment of the Riemann zeta function". That means that when

is expanded as in powers of log(T), the leading coefficient—that of the 9th-degree term—is 42.

It is a meandric number and an open meandric number.

42 is a perfect score on the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO) and International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

In base 10, this number is a Harshad number and a self number, while it is a repdigit in base 4 (as 222).

The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.

The first digit (4) taken to the power of the second digit (2) is equal to the second digit (2) taken to the power of the first digit (4): 4² = 2⁴ = 16. It follows clearly that 24 exhibits the same characteristic, and in fact 24 is the only other two-digit non-repdigit number that does. (All two-digit repdigit numbers exhibit this characteristic.)

In Science

• The atomic number of molybdenum. The element following molybdenum with atomic number 43 (technetium) has no stable isotopes.
• The number of teeth wolves and dogs (canines) have.
• 42° is the critical angle of refraction by water - it is the angle between a rainbow and the antisolar point.
• The light leaving a rainbow is spread over a wide angle, with a maximum intensity around 42°
• The number of minutes it would take a theoretical "gravity train" to travel to any point on earth.
• In one Grand Unified Theory, the Georgi-Glashow model, the inverse of the coupling constant is approximately 42.
• 10! (10 factorial) seconds is exactly 42 days.
• On page 7-10 of Volume 1 of "The Feynmann Lectures on Physics" is a marginal figure that illustrates the strength ratio of gravitation attraction and electrical repulsion between two electrons as 1/4.17 x 10^42. The denominator is also written out by hand as a long, snaking 4,170,... followed by 39 more zeros. Feymann mentions the unified field theory, the similarity of the inverse square laws, the disparity of the relative strengths, and asks "Where could such a large number come from? ... it involves something deep in nature."

[edit] Astronomy

• Messier object M42, a magnitude 5.0 diffuse nebula in the constellation Orion, also known as the Orion Nebula
• The New General Catalogue object NGC 42, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pegasus
• The Saros number of the solar eclipse series which began on 1577 BC April 28 and ended on 297 BC June 5. The duration of Saros series 42 was 1280.1 years, and it contained 72 solar eclipses.
• The Saros number of the lunar eclipse series which began on 1293 BC January 24 and ended on 59 April 15. The duration of Saros series 42 was 1352.2 years, and it contained 76 lunar eclipses.
• Gliese 42 is a magnitude 7.17 K3 V orange dwarf nearby star (14.5 pc) in Sculptor, also known as HD 5133, CD-31°325, G269-049, GCTP 177.00, and LHS 1163.
• Ross 42 is a magnitude 11.52 dM4 e red dwarf nearby star (14.1 pc) in Orion, also known as Gliese 206, G097-047, and GCTP 1259.00.
• The planet Uranus' north and south poles face the sun 42 years before switching, (example) the north pole experiences 42 years of summer and 42 years of winter and vice versa.
• The moon Io hurtles around its orbit once every 42 hours at a distance of 420,000 kilometers or so from the center of Jupiter.
• In January 2005, Asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the name Asteroid Douglasadams, named for the author Douglas Adams that popularized the number 42 and died in 2001. With even his initials in the provisional designation, Brian G. Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center and the secretary for the naming committee, said, "This was sort of made for him, wasn't it?"

[edit] In Religion

• The number of generations (names) in the Gospel of Matthew's version of the Genealogy of Jesus. The forty-two generations divide neatly into three parts.

• The number of months the Beast will hold dominion over the Earth (Revelation 13:5).

• The number (in the Babylonian Talmud, compiled 375 AD to 499 AD) of the "Forty-Two Lettered Name" ascribed to God. Rab (or Rabhs), a 3rd century source in the Talmud stated "The Forty-Two Lettered Name is entrusted only to him who is pious, meek, middle-aged, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights". [Source: Talmud Kidduschin 71a, Translated by Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein]. Maimonides felt that the original Talmudic Forty-Two Lettered Name was perhaps composed of several combined divine names [Maimonides "Moreh"]. The apparently unpronouncable Tetragrammaton provides the backdrop from the Twelve-Lettered Name and the Forty-Two Lettered Name of the Talmud.

• In the ancient Chinese text the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, chapter 42 is an explanation of the universe.

• The number of men of Beth-azmaveth in the census of men of Israel upon return from exile (Ezra 2:24).

• The number of Jewish captive exiles who returned from Babylon is 42,360. This figure appears in two identical verses: Ezra 2:64 and Nehemiah 7:66. The number 360 is the number of days in the Jewish year, which further isolates the number 42,000. Perhaps the number 42,360 is both literal and symbolic similtaneously.

• God sends bears to maul 42 of the youths who mock Elisha for his baldness (2 Kings 2:23).

• There are 42 principles of Ma'at, the Ancient Egyptian personification of physical and moral law, order, and truth.

• The number of lines on each page of the Gutenberg Bible, the first and oldest surviving book printed with movable type.^{[citation needed]}

• 42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in Kabalistic tradition.

• In the Kabbalah, the system of cosmology explained the significance of the various divine names and added other divine names. The most significant name is that of the En Sof (also known as "Ein Sof", "Infinite" or "Endless"), who is above the Sefirot (sometimes spelled "Sephirot"). The Forty-Two-Lettered Name contains four combined names which are spelled in Hebrew letters (spelled in letters = 42 letters), which is the name of Azilut (or "Atziluth" "Animation"). While there are obvious links between the Forty-Two Lettered Name of the Babylonian Talmud (see further up this page) and the Kabbalah's Forty-Two Lettered Name, they are probably not identical due to the Kabbalah's emphasis on numbers. The Kabbalah also contains a Forty-Five Lettered Name and a Seventy-Two Lettered Name.

The Old world isn't that old...

The Economist has an interesting piece regarding Europe's recent demographics - lots of numbers and statistics, broken down when possible by ethnics and other big dividers.

It's in the eye of the statistician, though, so don't expect human cases or pondering on the difficult double role of the woman in the modern society.

But it seems tobvious to me that the main conclusion is: western women feel the traditional social pressure to set up a family; at the same time they want to be successful in the new way, i.e. having a career and so on. So, they settle for the minimums-size family, mom-dad-child. Once the shop is set up and they feel ready to have more, it's too late.

Immigrant women, who respond only to the traditional pressure, set up family very quickly and get 2.5 children on average.

Pity I didn't see Belgian (indigenous) girls cited, 'cause from what I can see here most of them are constantly pregnant. Well not exactly, but they certainly seems to have at least 2 children each.

Sunny sunday in Mechelen

Been resting from the previous day wedding party, fiddling with the furniture location in the living room, then off to a walk in the city centre with my lady - slideshow here:

Honda gets it right.

I did talk some time ago about how piracy can be good for business, with the exception of people whose services aren't necessary anymore: distributors, which in the TV case are the broadcasting stations.

Companies should, and will, advertise directly to customers through the production of high value content released for free on the p2p networks. Something like this is already happening, at the hands of Skype (and Kazaas') creators.

Now, Honda seems to get it, with this plan: to run smaller commercials for a smaller car in smaller versions of television series.

Honda will be the sole sponsor of what Sony Pictures Television is calling the Minisode Network, which is scheduled to begin next week. Visitors to the MySpace Web site (my space.com) will be able to watch episodes of 15 vintage Sony series like “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Facts of Life,” “Fantasy Island” and “Who’s the Boss,” edited from their original lengths of 30 or 60 minutes each to an Internet-friendly 4 to 6 minutes.

Now, you can see how funding for this stuff has been kept to the bare minimum, but this is just the beginning. Once the managers see the machine is working, money will pour in.

Welcome to our free as in beer future!

Grey Power

The Economist tackle the issue of Italy's education system breakdown (may require subscription)

The biggest fault in Italian education is that there are too many old teachers

Since 2000 successive reports from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment have shattered the belief that Italian schools are among Europe's best. The most recent put them near the bottom of the heap. In maths Italy's 15-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in all but three OECD countries. Almost a third were “unable to display the minimum level of mathematics proficiency needed to succeed in their professional and private life”. The share of young adults with essential qualifications was far below the OECD average.

No similarly exhaustive comparison has been done for tertiary education. But that so many young Italians study abroad, and so few young foreigners (2% of all foreign students) do in Italy, points to equally low standards at university level.

All of this sounds sadly true to me.

If I have to judge on the limited sample of high school students which I get to talk to (my youngest brother) , I can see the huge divide with what I was taught to, often by the very same professors (thirteen years apart, we shared the same math teacher). Even taking into account differences in personal attitude, the rest must be ascribed to decreasing quality of education.

We must find a way to fix this. I will certainly not be one of the meagerly-paid high school teacher for Italy's new path to education. 1100 Euros/month to tackle 25 teen-agers day after day is pretty close to my idea of Hell.

Ouch! Fantastic Four: The rise of Silver Surfer sucks, too...

The NY Times reviewer says so.

Well, I guess that I'll have to check it out as usual. Although since the move I haven't been very active in downloading movies. Miracles of commuting, I'd say.
(In the picture, the Silver Surfer leaves the cinema in a rush after the movie, to avoid furious spectators)

My movie time goes wasted on the motorway, now. Together with the hydrocarboms laboriously
accumulated by mother Earth during the last 500 million years. Ouch!

Adam was a PornStar

from FishFeet, comes this entertaining story:

The Creation Museum of Petersburg, Kansas has been wrought with criticism since before it even opened, but most recently, they have been embroiled in a ‘moral scandal’ by an employ hired to tell the story of the fall of man.

A variety of actors were hired to play out scenes from the bible and the man chosen to play God’s golden boy, Adam, has now been revealed to have a ‘sordid’ history. Eric Linden, owns a website called Bedroom Acrobat, on which he is (allegedly -I cannot say this myself as the site has apparently crashed due to traffic overload) pictured

Paradise exists

Bora Bora

Wiki Page

The importance of good data

Data is everything.

Without data, my models do not take off.

Whether you work with proteins structures, experimental results, or God-knows-what, the quality of your work is influenced by the quality of the upstream data, and the trust you put into them.

Unfortunately, data are not so easy to get hold of. Good data are even more difficult to catch.

Very recently, at my work, I have discovered that a particular section of
my company does not like other people sniffing around their databases - they're afraid that unskilled people may draw the wrong conclusions about their work - it is not simple science, we have been told, and please don't demean it as such.

A little back in time, during my PhD, I discovered that you should not blindly trust data you've been handed over either: always check, and if possible, double check them. Confirmation of this has come during the previous months, when I spent a LOT of time cleaning up a database of experimental data from all the crap that found its way in there during thirty+ years.
I can tell you, it's grueling. But in my line of work, I am told, data preparation is by far the most time-intensive activity one can pursue. Analysis of the results certainly takes less, and the actual model-building is a doodle.

Let's take a (real-life) example: Experimental measures of pKa of a compound: how difficult can it be? Well, first of all, you must make sure that your data is actual experimental data - has it been measured? Not always: I was told that sometimes the compound wouldn't bloody dissolve, so they would insert in the database the computed pKa, or the pKa of a similar compound(!).

Then, if you can get around this, there still is lot of room for errors, or at least weird uncertainties: in the case at hand, you get a handful of values for every molecule. How do you know which pKa corresponds to which atom? As it turns out, there's a way of detecting whether it is a base or an acid - by repeating the experiment in water/alcohol mixtures, the pKa values do change, with acids' values getting higher, and basis' values decreasing - or the other way around, can't bother to fact-check right now. So, in theory it is possible to say which is an acid and which is a basic pKa. Important, since a basic pKa will tell the pH at which your molecule becomes neutral (and below that, is positive) - an acidic pKa tells you when your molecules goes from neutral to negatively charged. Get them wrong, or worst mixed up, and your compound's predicted properties (such as permeation of the gut walls and other membranes, but also retention in a chromatographic column) will go haywire.

But thats more or less it: now you know which one is basic and which one is acid. But how do you assign down to the very atom its own pKa? if they're few, it's easy. I mean, if you have an acid and a basic functionality in your molecule, the choice is trivial. If you have two acids, though, it's all a matter of chemical knowledge, and intuition. You expect, from previous experience, some groups to ionize around certain pHs. However, the presence of charges and other substituents all around will greatly affect these numbers, and sometimes the ordering of them may even change. Big mess then - so how do you fix it? Well, some experimentalists use computer models to get a hunch, a suggestion on what may be going on. Which seems great, except when the reason why you're looking at those data is exactly to validate those very same computer models. Then it sucks. Add to this the well known fact that most of these softwares do get it wrong quite often, and by a mile or two, and you're left with a bemused expression...

Welcome to my frustrating world.

US professor plans to send message back in time

I have just finished reading Stephen Baxter's Exultant (which kinda sucked, by the way), where a future war is fought using pre-knowledge of events thanks to closed-timelike curves. In this fictiotious future, FTL ships sometimes get back from battle before they actually leave the docks, so that strategy can be planned based on what is known to have already happened (in the future). Understandably, our language, isn't fit for such a messy loopy time threads. This is just Sci-fi, right? Yet, now someone is trying to do it for real.

A West Coast scientist who believes it may be possible to transmit information backwards through time has been funded by individual donations after established mad-scientist groups refused to cough up.

from the original article on "The Register":

A West Coast scientist who believes it may be possible to transmit information backwards through time has been funded by individual donations after established mad-scientist groups refused to cough up.

John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, reckons that "quantum retrocausality" could "involve signalling, or communication, in reverse time."

The El Reg science desk passed this one over to us at the engineering-degree-a-long-time-ago desk, and all we really know about quantum is that it's pretty wild stuff.

We do know about DARPA, though, the US military's famously wacky research bureau. DARPA has happily funded all kinds of crazy stunts, including Terminator cyborg moths, mind-reading electrode hats, terror casinos - you name it. "Mad scientists are good scientists" is almost the DARPA motto.

But DARPA wouldn't fund Cramer. It said his planned experiment was "too weird". Coming from them, this does seem unfair. All Cramer wants to start with is a few lasers, prisms, splitters, fibre-optics, and suchlike doodads. He's not asking for a beautiful girl strapped to a table, living brains in bubbling jars, lightning, dead bodies, enormous monkeys, fossilized dinosaur DNA, or anything seriously outre.

"I'm not crazy," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I don't know if this experiment will work, but I can't see why it won't. People are skeptical about this, but I think we can learn something, even if it fails."

Others think so too. A diverse collection of private donors has apparently chipped in $35,000+ to get Cramer's experiments underway. They include a Vegas music-biz exec, a biotech scientist, and Richard Miller, an artist and photographer based in Washington state.

"I would say the predicted failure of this project is probably a good omen," Miller told the Post-Intelligencer. "Most predictions are wrong."

"Artists have experienced non-local space all along, we just can't prove it," he added mysteriously.

Cramer plans to attempt some basic instantaneous faster-than-light communication next month with his donation-funded rig. If that's successful, he reckons that mainstream funding will arrive and he can have a crack at sending information back though time.

It does seem a trifle odd, if the theory is sound, that Cramer hasn't already received advance notification of his success. Perhaps he has, and is keeping it secret. If one dons one's tinfoil hat, this line of thinking might easily lead to an explanation for DARPA's otherwise unaccountable lack of interest, too.

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Friday Movies featured by the NY Times

Movie Review | 'Fido'

Hard to Find Good Help? Not in This Little Town

Reviewed by MANOHLA DARGIS

In the ticklishly amusing satire “Fido,” the undead stagger along like stunned toddlers.

• Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailer

Movie Review | 'Eagle vs Shark'

Quirky Boy Meets Quirky Girl: It’s Animal Attraction

Reviewed by A. O. SCOTT

“Eagle vs Shark” is one of those movies that invite you to laugh at its misfit characters and empathize with them at the same time.

• Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailer

Movie Review | 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer'

Armageddon Comes Knocking

Reviewed by MANOHLA DARGIS

“Rise of the Silver Surfer” is an existentially and aesthetically unnecessary sequel to the equally irrelevant if depressingly successful “Fantastic Four.”

• Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailer

• Movie Review | 'Gypsy Caravan'

  
  Four Countries, Five Bands, One Coast-to-Coast Party

  Reviewed by MANOHLA DARGIS
  

  As a music document and as a labor of unabashed love, the nonfiction feature “Gypsy Caravan” could hardly be better; as a movie, it could stand some improvement.

  • Movie Details | Trailer

  Movie Review | 'Czech Dream'

  The Comedy of Capitalism

  Reviewed by STEPHEN HOLDEN
  

  In the documentary “Czech Dream,” two students at the Prague Film Academy use state money to stage an elaborate consumer hoax.

  • Movie Details