Four Letter Future

2007-04-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

RNA Transcription is the current topic of my Biochemistry class. Unfortunately I cannot pay attention because I think the secondary structure of RNA looks so aesthetic. Here I took some RNA sequences and traced over parts of the human skeletal structure. Looks neat, eh? I would like spend some time tracing other objects with RNA structures. Maybe I would convert a map of downtown NYC into RNA letters. Sadly I do not have the time. Oh well, on to other things...

I Miss Carl

2007-04-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

I could not sleep last night, so I made some photoshop about the things that have been on my mind the last few days.

The image does not look good, but it looks a little better if you click on it to see the large version.

The best part is the quote from Carl Sagan's Contact. I shiver everytime I read it:

"I want to know about your myths, your religions. What fills you with awe? Or are those who make the numinous unable to feel it?"
"You make the numinous also. No, I know what you're asking. Certainly we feel it. You recognize that some of this is hard for me to communicate to you. But I'll give you an example of what you're asking for. I don't say this is it exactly, but it'll give you a flavor of our numinons. It concerns pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. You know it well, of course, and you also know you can never come to the end of pi. There's no creature in the universe, no matter how smart, who could calculate pi to the last digit--because there is no last digit, only an infinite number of digits. Your mathematicians have made an effort to calculate it out to... none of you seem to know.. Let's say the ten-billionth place. You won't be surprised to hear that other mathematicians have gone further. Well, eventually--let's say it's in the ten-to-the-twentieth-power place--something happens. The randomly varying digits disappear, and for an unbelievably long time there's nothing but ones and zeros."
"And the zeros and ones finally stop? You get back to a random sequence of digits? And the number of zeros and ones? Is it a product of prime numbers?"
"Yes, eleven of them."
"You're telling me there's a message in eleven dimensions hidden deep inside the number pi? Someone in the universe communicates by... mathematics? But... help me, I'm really having trouble understanding you. Mathematics isn't arbitrary. I mean pi has to have the same value everywhere. How can you hide a message inside pi? It's built into the fabric of the universe."
"Exactly."

Carl Sagan used to teach at Cornell. I wish he was still alive.

Nerd Propaganda

Four Letter Future

I Miss Carl