or in his won words
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
There has been so much progress with electric motors and high capacity batteries finally reaching widespread use. There are kayaks with an electrict support (Torqeed here in Starnberg, that I wished to have one yesterday at Ammersee). There are engines for ultralight planes like the Electraflyer while I just read at science.slashdot about an electric airplance.
The most fascinating piece, however, I have seen last Sunday at bike expo here in Munich is a 1200 Watt kit that can be mounted on most frames of current MTBs. Tthat’s a lot of savings compared to buying a custom built e-bike like the KTM eGnition, Elmoto, eRockit, Grace or eSpire that all come at weights of 25-35 kg.
The kit will be sold by the next month by ego-kits.com while here are two pictures from the Munich fair.
Continue reading It’s all electric now … The 1200 Watt bicylce
We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements. Continue reading Science is an emergent system too
I have seen recently a TV documentation about the Dabbawalas in Mumbai who deliver freshly cooked food to the workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer’s home. According to Wikiedia.
In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality Continue reading Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries
The screenshot below shows my desperate search why my Macbook wouldn’t boot again (following a cold reset writing a large Photoshop CS5 file for more than 15 minutes).
The verbose boot mode (APPLE+S) showed some error with the journalling system, basically an error as described at the currently non functioning Apple Support Board
jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header @ 0x4bra50 (checksum 0xega0fee1 != 0x927a5993)
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).
Unfortunately nothing helped. Booting from an external disk just showed a normal, error-free HD in disk utility. Continue reading A Mac OSX journalling error can inhibit the boot disk to be mounted
Here is another post as the field seems to progress so fast with a new study on enterotypes of the human gut microbiome from
22 newly sequenced faecal metagenomes of individuals from four countries with previously published data sets, here we identify three robust clusters (referred to as enterotypes hereafter) that are not nation or continent specific.
The 3 clusters are Bacteroides (enterotype 1), Prevotella (enterotype 2) and Ruminococcus (enterotype 3) – no idea if these are under selective pressure from the host (genes!), from enviroment (antibiotics!) or from microbial competitors. When we look, however, at another study published also last week at Science magazine, it seems that at least one cluster has it’s own trick to get the right of residence by synthesizing a symbiosis factor. Continue reading Will the bacterial flora protect you from you allergies?
Undoubtly, there is an avalanche of poor research – as the Chronicle wrote last June, “we must stop the avalanche of low-quality research”
the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further
Also Genomeweb writes
Pedro Beltrao at the Public Rambling blog says there never seems to be enough time to keep up with all the literature researchers keep churning out. In 2009, 848,865 papers were added to PubMed, he says — that’s something like 1.6 papers per minute.
Continuing a discussion Continue reading LIMIT TO 5! What about a maximum of 5 papers per year per scientist?
Found at project-syndicate.org, a piece by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Professor at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate in Economics):
In the end, those gambling in Las Vegas lose more than they gain. As a society, we are gambling – with our big banks, with our nuclear power facilities, with our planet. As in Las Vegas, the lucky few – the bankers that put our economy at risk and the owners of energy companies that put our planet at risk – may walk off with a mint. But on average and almost certainly, we as a society, like all gamblers, will lose.
That, unfortunately, is a lesson of Japan’s disaster that we continue to ignore at our peril.
Here is another take home item of the recent EMGS 2011 meeting at the King’s College. Located in the apse there are 5 topics as originally conceived by Gilbert Scott: Christ in the carpenter’s shop, Christ and the lawyers, Christ healing the sick, Christ teaching the people and The Cruxification. While that may all be appropriate for today’s Sunday Continue reading The DNA window at the King’s College Chapel at the Strand
A longstanding wish has become true – a useful graphical interface for R. While recent versions still had major problems on my Mac, the most recent nightly build works as expected, thanks Josh!
Having now a SSD in use for more than one year, here are my accumulated tweaks. The first one is Smart Sleep which greatly enhances sleeping/wakening time. Disabling the motion sensor (“sudo pmset -a sms 0”) doesn’t hurt but is isn’t really necessary. Mounting the SSD noatime , however, gives a measurable performance gain. And at the end, I dropped that RAM thingy as it breaks with every system update.
a screenshot from Pubmed without words
probably as good as an email that I received recently:
This is the final reminder of your registration.
THE ABOVE BARCODE CONTAINS YOUR BADGE AND TICKET INFORMATION!
Please be sure to PRINT out this e-mail and BRING it with you to the meeting. The barcode included on this reminder will speed you through the registration and materials pick-up area.
…
Please consider the environment before printing this email.
I flew this night to San Francisco, having a chance to read some magazines in flight, including an interview of Stefan Klein with Peter Singer in ZEIT MAGAZIN yesterday. The interview has been done by Skype as Singer says “it is immoral to travel without serious reasons” – a classical Utilitarian perspective that does however not even stop him arguing Continue reading 4 tons of CO2
