The September issue of Science magazine had a review on “Casting a genetic light on the evolution of eyes” that summarizes a lot of interesting facts like that light travels in straight lines, information is carried by wavelength (and produces hue) or intensity and polarization (produces contrast). Inevitably, the review starts by quoting Darwins view of the human eye as an “organ of extreme perfection”.
As a photographer with an own lab, a proud owner of Leicas and Rolleis, I have read of course the books of Anselm Adams and of Andreas Feininger. Feininger once compared the human eye with a camera lens. The human eye is probably more a video than a still camera, with a single wide angle lens of 22 mm focal length, an aperture of 7, a resolution 500 megapixels. The dark adapted eye has an equivalent of ISO 800. We all know that the optical quality isn’t so good, with much aspherical, chromatical and other optical aberrations. The apparent perspective is also not a wide angle but more like that of a 50mm or 120mm tele lens.
These are the reasons why I believe that brain matters (and not so much the “organ of extreme perfection”) – the realtime processing of a rather limited retina picture will allow pattern recognition in milliseconds. I would even go further to the reflections on photography and art by Alain Briot

… countless articles are written daily about the many scientific aspects of photography. From equipment reviews, to image processing techniques, to tips on how to be a more efficient photographer… However, learning about the artistic aspect of photography is just as important. Unfortunately, there is a much lesser amount of information on photography as art. Far fewer essays are being written, far fewer discussions are taking place, and far less information, help and tips are available. It is as if photographers, for the most part, discovered how much they have to learn about photographic science and, overwhelmed and enchanted by equipment and technique, stopped there and looked no further…

Finally, here is my bonus link to wonderful megapixel photos: the early Bryce Canyon National Park, Machu Picchu and the Gigapxl project.

In medieval ages messengers had tattoos under the scalp hair. Charles Dickens also described how women used to purl and to knit for hidden messages. Many software developers also insert messages or features in the code. The motivation may be to sign it or put some artistic touch on it – you will find a lot of websites out explaining the necessary keystrokes and web links.
I wonder if also other colleagues are hiding initials, words or messages in scientific papers? Unfortunately due to the online submission, publishers will now recognize faked references. What about using steganography to mark pictures or PDFs?

It seems that the German word Zeitgeist is increasingly used also in English texts. When thinking again and again about science and scientists, I always come back to a famous assay of Karl Jaspers written in 1932 (he lost his professorship in Heidelberg 1937; in 1938 he was forbidden to publish any more).

The title of the essay is “Die geistige Situation der Zeit”. The chapter “Wissenschaft” is always a comfort to me when being desperate about the inequity of the scientific world. Here is an excerpt:

Wissenschaften leisten auch heute Außerordentliches. Die
exakten Naturwissenschaften haben einen aufregenden Gang
rapider Fortschritte in Grundgedanken und empirischen Ergebnissen
begonnen. Ein über die Welt verbreiteter Kreis der
Forscher steht in den Beziehungen des rationalen Sichverstehens.
Einer wirft dem anderen den Ball zu. Dieser Vorgang
findet Widerhall in der Masse durch die Handgreiflichkeit der
Resultate. Das sachnahe Sehen in den Geisteswissenschaften
hat sich zu mikroskopischer Feinheit gesteigert. Ein nie dagewesener
Reichtum an Dokumenten und Monumenten ist vor
Augen gebracht. Kritische Sicherheit ist erreicht.
…
Die Krise der Wissenschaften besteht also nicht eigentlich
in den Grenzen ihres Könnens, sondern im Bewußtsein ihres
Sinns. Mit dem Zerfall eines Ganzen ist nun die Unermeßlichkeit
des Wißbaren der Frage unterstellt, ob es des Wissens wert
sei. Wo das Wissen ohne das Ganze einer Weltanschauung nur
noch richtig ist, wird es allenfalls nach seiner technischen
Brauchbarkeit geschätzt. Es versinkt in die Endlosigkeit dessen,
was eigentlich niemanden angeht.
…
Nicht also schon die immanente Entwicklung der Wissenschaften
macht die Krise zureichend begreiflich, sondern erst
der Mensch, auf den die wissenschaftliche Situation trifft. Nicht
Wissenschaft für sich, sondern er selbst in ihr ist in einer Krise.
Der historisch-soziologische Grund dieser Krise liegt im
Massendasein, Die Tatsache der Verwandlung der freien Forschung
Einzelner in den Betrieb der Wissenschaft hat zur Folge,
daß jedermann sich mitzuwirken für befähigt hält, wenn er nur
Verstand hat und fleißig ist. Es kommt ein wissenschaftliches
Plebejertum auf; man macht leere Analogiearbeiten, um sich
als Forscher auszuweisen, macht beliebige Feststellungen, Zählungen,
Beschreibungen und gibt sie für empirische Wissenschaft
aus. Die Endlosigkeit eingenommener Standpunkte, so
daß man in häufiger werdenden Fällen sich nicht mehr versteht,
ist allein die Folge davon, daß ein jeder unverantwortlich
seine Meinung zu sagen wagt, die er sich erquält, um auch
etwas zu bedeuten. Man hat die Unverfrorenheit, „nur zur
Diskussion zu stellen” was einem grade einfällt. Die Unmenge
gedruckter Rationalität wird in manchen Gebieten schließlich
zur Schaustellung des chaotischen Durcheinanderströmens der
nicht mehr eigentlich verstandenen Reste früher einmal lebendigen
Denkens in den Köpfen der Massenmenschen. Wenn so
Wissenschaft Funktion von Tausenden als jeweils zum Fach
als Beruf gehörender Interessenten wird, dann kann wegen
der Eigenschaften des Durchschnitts auch der Sinn von Forschung
… durcheinander geraten.

In a recent blog I described high resolution SNP datasets that are available on the net. To work with these datasets you will probably need to upgrade your hardware and software. For data handling many people stick nowadays to commercial SQL databases that have plugins for PD software.
My recommendation is to save that money and store the data in a special format that may be more useful for these large dataset; details are in a technical report that I will upload later this day. In the meantime you can already check some software tools to work with these large datasets. This is what I know so far

• David Duffy has recompiled his sibpair program |link
• Geron(R) has something under development |link
• Jochen Hampe and colleagues offer Genomizer |link
• Franz Rüschendorf developed Alohomora |link
• I renember about SNPGWA, a development at Wake Forest University |no link yet
• there will be a R-Bioconductor package by Rob Scharpf |no link yet
• R library GenABEL by Yurii Aulchenko |link
• R library SNPassoc by Juan González |link

Addendum

A technical report how to work with large SNP dataset is now also available at my paper section. Alternatives to what I am suggesting in this paper, have been set out by an anonmyous reviewer

For R users, if SQLite limits are reached, hdf5 (http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/) may be one way forward for really huge table structures since there is an R interface already available. PostgreSQL column limit depends on data type with a maximum of 1600 for simple types. MySQL with the BerkeleyDB backend may be like SQLite with no obvious column count limit. Metakit is not mentioned – it is column oriented and probably also has “unlimited” columns as long as each database is < 1GB or so.