But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil
Sunday, March 30th, 2008

If pigs could fly

is a book that I am currently reading. There is also a brief German/English account how this sentence came into life. What the hell did you expect when reading the title??

Something like “winners don’t punish”? A smart letter in this week’s Nature with the 3 options of Cooperation(C) – Defection (D) and Punishment (P)?

"nice people"
player 1: C C C C
player 2: C C C C top payoff!
"punish and perish"
player 1: C P P P P
player 2: C D D D D extremely bad!
"turning the other cheek"
player 1: C C C C C
player 2: D D C C C payoff still positive!

we should have known this earlier…

Addendum

link to an earlier post here on “tit for tat”
link to “vengeance is ours” at Edge
link to “sermon on the mount”

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Calcium gradient in skin, vitamin D and filaggrin

As filaggrin – one of our best atopy genes – is vitamin D dependent, I tried to find out more about epidermal differentiation. The plot here summarizes an earlier review:
cagradient.png
There seems to be a clear calcium gradient with the expression of differentiation specific marker in the single strata. So there is some good chance that filaggrin effects may be modified by external vitamin D supply.

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Vitamania

For everybody who wants to follow up the most recent discussion about allergy promoting effects of vitamin D here is a short summary. The Harvard group basically wrote three articles that were immediately contradicted. The comment on the first article in JACI was by a NIH researcher (Show me more…)

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

Central limit theorem

The central limit theorem states that a sum of independent identically distributed random variables (lets say allele counts in genomewide association scans) of finite variance will be approximately normally distributed. Unfortunately the maximum of the distribution will not reflect the true value … or did I get it wrong?

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