I had problems with my handwriting since elementary schools, or at least my teachers had continuous problems with it. Even during my university years I was asked sometimes to read out loud my essays, papers to them otherwise risking bad grades. Maybe it’s because I am a hidden right-handed using my left hand for writing or maybe I am just too impatient over the slow pace of handwriting (needless to say computers mostly solved this problem).
On this George Dysonphoto here you can see the SciFoo schedule in progress and I think you can easily pick the one with the ugliest handwriting on Aging and Life Extension:
Ok, I am officially done with New Orleans and moved to the Bay Area for the next couple of days to come, BioBarCamp and SciFoo Camp. On the photo some things I left behind and contributed with them to the culture of this special city.
Internet celebrities are not celebrities in a sense that you can easily communicate with them on services like Twitter (assuming the services are not down). There’s no such thing as an internet bodyguard except some firewalls in Windows. So this day I found Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder tweeting this:
Also a good presentation by Linda Avey, other co-founder, for instance on data privacy and service security:“We take the security of our customers’ data to the highest degree…you guys (Googlers) are very much of the same mind..One of our leading engineers is probably the most paranoid man we’ve ever meet and he is the perfect guy for that.
Here are my screenshots on the genetic puzzle on the Google triumvirate presented by Anne Wojcicki:
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder is a very interesting man. His story is the number one immigrant success story in the USA today, I dare say. I have 2 Brin videos to show you today:
In the first one, Sergey demonstrates mobility in 2000 in 3 ways with his ‘faint accent that is no longer identifiably Russian’ (I really like this presentation as you can learn many things on how to give and not to give a talk):
In the second video Sergey speaks in his native language, Russian but with a “huuuge american accent” as a Russian colleague of mine wrote to me in an email.Read the rest of this entry »
A good introduction in Nature on the risks and advantages of letting people know their genetic risk information via personal genetics services. I do hope that the test-takers will finally become the risk overtakers.
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a rapidly growing market — the past year has seen the launch of companies, such as Navigenics and 23andMe in California and DeCODEme in Iceland, that offer DNA screening for a range of common genetic variants linked to disease. The testing outfits have created a buzz in the business and research communities as well as in the wider public: Google has invested in two of them and Navigenics briefly opened a store in New York’s hip SoHo district.
“It’s an intriguing idea that you can peel back your genome and reveal your future.”
The idea is that test-takers will be alerted to risks and so take preventive action where possible. But psychosocial scientists who study how people respond to risk information say there is scant evidence that people are affected deeply by genetic test results, or that such tests spur much change in behaviour.Read the rest of this entry »
Desktop background images are important parts of people’s everyday lives in terms of unintended staring time. Usually they are picked up for the eyes (sg spectacular & cool and/or sexy) and hearts (family members), but why not use them for information uptake and learning? So I’d like to ask: What’s your current science related desktop image, if there’s any and how can you utilize it? Here is my current desktop image with the source;
Bonnet et al.:
A Mitochondria-K+ Channel Axis Is Suppressed in Cancer and Its Normalization Promotes Apoptosis and Inhibits Cancer Growth Cancer Cell Volume 11, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 37-51
Figure 1. A Reversible Metabolic-Electrical Remodeling in Cancer Contributes to Resistance to Apoptosis and Reveals Several Potential Therapeutic Targets
Say Hello to my new 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.2 MacBook right from the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, New York City! We are back in New Orleans waiting for the swarm of the formosan termites.
Let me recall some Manhattan moments with the help of quick iPhone photos.
F. Murray Abraham is one of my favorite actors, the Coen Brothers are one of my favorite movie makers. So we enjoyed ‘Almost an evening‘ the first ever play of Ethan Coen (half of the Coens) featuring Abraham as god amongst others in Bleecker Street Theatre, Off-Broadway. (The play itself probably won’t be an evergreen.) /picture at the top right corner via Flickr
a very geek Warhammer game player at the end of Washington Square Park in the Village
Anna and me are visiting New York City from 8th to 11th, Sunday this week. We are eager to meet geeky figures particularly as our current location, New Orleans is not really a heaven for tech-savvy people. If interested to meet with us, drop me a line: [attilacsordas][at][gmail.com]
In 2007, Google made headlines when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a genetic screening start-up company began by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and a business partner. But if you thought that was Google’s only interest in genetics and DNA, you’re wrong. Google has also been investing in a second DNA start-up called Navigenics, which for $2,500 and a small bit of saliva will provide you with genetic test results delivered securely online containing information about the likelihood for 18 medical conditions.
What’s really funny here is that I predicted this investment last Friday, on the 18th, on Twitter. The original idea was Aaron Swartz’s Google thought experiment: Imagine you were suddenly put in charge of Google. What would you spend your time doing?I came up with this answer (picking Navigenics because of ther profile and location) on behalf of Sergey Brin:
With TweetClouds (scripting:John Krutsch design: Jared Stein) people can generate the Tweet Cloud of a Twitteruser. In case of bloggers/Twitters it is an interesting question whether there are any strong differences between the category cloud/Tweet Cloud of the same person suggesting patterns in web behavior. I’ve just generated mine. One obvious difference is that with TweetClouds including replies to other Twitters (there is an option to suppress @replies, but why would you?) there is also a social/networking component (check the names after @) instantly visible on the generated cloud.
So here is a short analysis and an answer of mine to this most important philosophical question from the point of view of a life extension supporter:
1. premise: this question could be answered only if it not about the general meaning of all life, but the particular meaning of individual human lives.
2. analysis: let’s fill the question up to show the variables in it: ‘what is the meaning of an individual human life (x) for somebody individual (y)?’Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve always loved the following scene from LOTR, but I’ve always imagined that they are the words of a man who is in a healthy physiological condition due to a robust life extension technology and not due to a mystical ring:
Bilbo: “Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday!”
Hobbits: “Happy birthday!”
Bilbo: “Alas, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits.” [cheers abound.] “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
Larry Page is 35 years old today and it’s really easy to consider him as a representative man of his/our generation (I am 33 years old) including his future prospects. A company with an unlimited potential was built on Page’s unfinished PhD. research project.
From now on I start every “thesis live” post with the standard introduction: In the live thesis building blogxperiment I edit (digest, compile, write, rewrite, delete) my ongoing doctoral thesis in blog posts and put the parts together on thesis live. The title: The physiologic role of stem cells in tissues with different regenerative potential
I am not aiming any perfection, my focus is clearly on getting things (the PhD) done here. Anyway, I found the idea of “writing” a complete, lengthy and formal thesis outdated and inefficient (after all, scientists should conduct nice experiments and publish their results in short, inforich and accessible research papers in order to share it ASAP with the research community, not in book-length, otherwise unaccessible PDFs) and so I try to keep myself motivated by
- doing this “thesis live” series as an open science experiment and getting useful feedback from my fellow scientists and readers
- trying to include as many systemic, whole body level material into it that could be relevant for systemic regmed approaches
- reminding myself every day that without a PhD it is hard to move further in science officially (that’s the least motivating factor though as it is official)
After the blah-blah let’s start with the planned introduction points:
1. Introduction:
1.1 Stem cells and regenerative medicine
1.2. Tissues, organs with different turnover and regenerative potential
Gut epithelium,
Blood – hematopoietic system
Epidermis,
Mammary epithelium,
Vascular endothelium, Read the rest of this entry »
In November we participated in the “Give One Get One” program in which people can donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one. Yesterday we got ours, named Boo and Anna recorded the first moments of Boo at our home and published it on her blog Videovoo with detailed account. Unfortunately we don’t have information on where our “Give one” laptop has been landed and who (and how old) is the happy owner of it from now on.
Or is it the strongest personal indication of the future of technology? No, it’s not my job to answer this question, but I could be optimistic about the consequences of it. By now the story of Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin and 23andMe is a commonplace in the blogosphere. While Anne is graduated with a BS in Biology from Yale, Larry Page’s future wife Lucy Southworth happens to be a biology (genetics) grad student at Stanford interested in aging research too.
Learning new things from your partner is the most effective way of quickly acquiring ordered, contextual and practical knowledge. A good example is Aubrey de Grey who learned biology from his wife, experimental drosophilist and fine-tuned scientist of chromosomal mechanics Adelaide Carpenter.
For instance here is how Lucy explains nerve structure and Multiplex sclerosis: Look, Larry you’re familiar with this…
Many nerves are like an electric cord. An electric cord usually contains a thin metal wire covered in plastic that insulates the metal. The plastic layer keeps the electricity from leaving the wire. This can both speed up the electrical flow and keep nearby objects safe from the electricity.
But this could be interesting for you too: The metal wire in a nerve cell is called the axon. This is the part that carries the electrical signal. The insulation on a nerve cell is called myelin. Like in the electric cord, the myelin keeps the electrical signal from leaving the nerve.
As I said, in MS a patient’s immune system attacks the myelin destroying it. This affects a patient’s nerves like stripping the insulation off an electric cord does. Some of the electricity will short out causing the nerve to not conduct electricity as well any more. Also the electricity might jump off the axon and affect other nerves.
IT friendly explanation, isn’t it? Now I can imagine an average conversation amongst Lucy and Larry on how to solve the following problem: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s weekend which means I am not just about biology and biotech blogging and can allocate a little time to spend on other projects like visiting the nearest Barnes & Noble at Metairie (it is a shame that there are no big bookstores in Uptown New Orleans except the Tulane Campus) and buying new books for entertainment like the one called The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. I slowly got interested in Houdini due to the account of my friend Csaba on the Houdini figure in the book Ragtime by Doctorow. Another indirect hint was Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Guess where was Houdini born: Anne Fleischmann was urging Cecilia Weisz on, alternately wiping her brow and giving her some ice chips to suck on. On March 24, 1874, the small room at Rákosárok utca 1. sz. had been emptied, the three young boys sent out to play. Only a few neighbors were there as Anne expertly cradled the baby’s head and turned it slightly to allow the shoulders to emerge. She gently grabbed the baby’s chest as the rest of the bloody body was expelled from the womb.
Of course, a newborn meant another mouth to feed, and another warm body to share this typically small “room-and-kitchen” flat in the predominately Jewish section of Pest, part of the newly consolidated town of Budapest, Hungary. That made four sons now for Mayer Samuel Weisz, who had recently graduated law school. One could only assume that Mayer Samuel would make a very eloquent solicitor if the story of the courtship of his future wife was any indication.
Ok, let’s move with our Google weapons to figure out exactly where is this location in present Budapest:
badge (actually I used my SciFoo badge just inside out, there was a modified Google Search Box on the other side with an “I am feeling Evil” button)
components desperately needed, but I haven’t had the time to make them: horns and Google spiders for crawling (the arachnid-centric names for the Web are ideal for Halloween reasons)
Problem: For a Halloween costume to be cool it should be targeted for the local Halloween audience and New Orleans is not the geek but the freak capital of the world, so almost nobody recognized me.
P.S. Actually I wanted a dead Google employee costume, but then Grady came out with the idea of Mr. Evil Google
Mark Zupan is a tough guy, he is the captain of the United States quadriplegic wheelchair rugby team. Mark was the main character in the award-winning documentary entitled Murderball, a film I was impressed so much when I had seen it back at home in my favorite Toldi mozi. Mark was restricted to a wheelchair due to a truck crash when he was thrown into a canal and was stuck in frigid water, barely clinging to a tree branch, for fourteen hours and had broken his neck. Mark co-authored a book, called GIMP in which he tells his story on how he could totally redefine his life “through love, friendship, and an introduction to a new sport. Mark realized that he could live a more-than-full life in a chair and has gone on to create an existence that’s truly exceptional. Now a Paralympic athlete (playing quad rugby, aka “murderball”) who’s starred in a movie, Mark explains in his memoir that, in a way, getting hurt was the best thing that could ever have happened to him—and that despite people’s prejudices, a guy in a chair still gets to have sex with his girlfriend, party with his friends, and even crowd-surf at Pearl Jam shows.
And yesterday at the Juan’s Flying Burrito Restaurant on Magazine Street, New Orleans (Irish Channel neighborhood) we’ve just ran into Mark Zupan. Normally it is not my taste to bother celebrities, but Mark is different, I found his real life character respectable so I dared to approach him and ask. Finally Anna shot the following picture: Read the rest of this entry »
Show me your feed reading habits and I’ll tell you who you are! I hope this statement is not true as according the item reading trends on Google Reader I have been a serious Valleywag addict in the last 30 days and more, I suspect. Although extensively reading a funny, well-informed but malicious tech gossip site like Valleywag of the Gawker Empire admits no excuse my explanation is this: after 10-12 hours of experimental lab work I do need something light and ridiculous for mental regeneration at home before switching to more serious content. I want to laugh and for some reason Valleywag is tuned to the frequency I need for entertainment (and also gives me the option to instantaneously present the posts to my wife disturbing her web time). If my click path is a body with different physiological functions, then Valleywag is my Read the rest of this entry »
Did you now what oracy means? Never mind. From late September, Oracy is the blog of Tulane grad student and colleague Gregory Block, whom you can catch now just in the middle of finding his blog voice. Topics are focused on rants about science (specially stem cells), Greg’s melancholy music and stories from New Orleans. His intro post says: My old supervisor, David, taught me that science is an exercise in humanitarianism, and that if balanced properly can be an enriching experience and a gratifying lifestyle. So, if you want to complain about your western blots not working or chat about whether your formamide has gone off, this probably isn’t the best place to be.
For advanced scientists I suggest Greg’s favorite thoughts on the The Mortality of Immortal DNA.
At last a real family event for Anna and me: we are heading to Travis County Fairgrounds, Austin, Texas on October 19th to visit the MakerFaire. This will be the 3rd American MakerFaire, and the first outside the Bay Area. I am prepared to meet enthusiastic makers and mind-blowing DIY projects there, as well as to say hello to Phil Torrone, Dale Dougherty or Mike Hendrickson, the latter 2 I met at the Euro Maker Faire in Brussels (and Mike as an old Foo was at the SciFoo Camp too, offering me to laser etch my then-new and then-beloved iPhone).
I am off to Cambridge to the SENS3 conference. The New Orleans – Washington – Heathrow London – Cambridge trip is about 16 hours from house to house. I’ll be based at Pembroke College. The picture was made by Anna last year in Cambridge at the steps of the old Cavendish Laboratory Building on Free School Lane, near to the Eagle Pub.
So far I’ve had the wrong belief that my favourite Wired Journalist, Joshua Davis is the same person as Joshua Davis, the designer, who once has been featured in Wired (not by Joshua Davis, the journalist). The root of my misconception was the common source of my knowledge on these 2 guys, namely Wired magazine. After all, it was good to think that there is this man, who could not only be the subject of a Wired article due to his terrific design work but he is also capable of writing really good stories as a journalist. But then doubts have arisen as I saw that the Joshua Davis I had in mind, is writing at least one major article in almost every Wired issue reporting from different locations all over the world, so how on earth could he find time to do his everyday designer job? Instead of figuring out the “Joshua Davis situation” with 1 simple Google search, cognitive dissonance led me to ignore this emerging doubt and I still maintained my belief that the journalist and the designer is the very same creative person.
But at the SciFoo Camp, Thomas Goetz, another camper, deputy editor of Wired magazine (good job: hunting for good stories and suggesting them for journalists) and blogger behind Epidemix taught me that this one double-faced Joshua Davis is in fact 2 people, although other people used to believe in their unity too. Conclusion: Do not trust in your non-Googlised beliefs.
Ok, I am living in New Orleans with my wife, so here is a true local color: online hurricane watching as we are in the middle of the season. Unfortunately we don’t have a car yet, just bikes, but we try to rent one tomorrow, who knows. I’ve just set up a 2 week cell survival experiment, and I don’t plan to leave the city, just in case of real danger. There are many evacuation pros around who where evacuated at least 10 times.
One particular advantage of being an experimental scientist is that you are getting nicely packed gifts all the time as you are constantly ordering the kits and material that you need for you experiments. For instance I’ve just got this cute, childishly designed Micro BCA Protein Assay Kit developed for measuring protein concentration in the small range of 0.5-20 µg/ml.
At the opening session at SciFoo at the Googleplex, everybody had to stand up and say 1 intro sentence and 3 words or phrases describing the interests and expertises of the person. pseudonomad caught my intro (the name of the picture: 3minutemadness) with his iPhone:
What did I say exactly: don’t remember the intro (a dense moment of my life) just the 3 phrases: regenerative medicine, science hacks, life extension, which are actually 2: life extension via regenerative medicine and science hacks.
My favourite 3 words intro was this, anyway: Sergey, Brin, Google.
The Sci Foo check-in process is a happy one, unlike other check-ins: when you are in, the organizers give you gifts, take a photo on you (to put it on a board) and you are asked to fill in a short intro paper with 2 points: 5 words or phrases that describe your interests and expertises and 5 people we should invite to next year — and words or phrases that describe them.
5 words or phrases: stem cells (regmed), biotech, science hacks, life extension, IT-BT
5 people (actually 4): Chris Patil of Ouroboros (biogerontology), Curtis Pickering (JeffsBench), Gábor Csányi (network science),
There wasn’t too much time to think about the choices, so here I’d like to add 5 more people to the recommendation list: Dániel Varga (social network analysis, coding), Jeff Huang (neuroscience), Jim Hardy (Gahaga BioSciences), Thomas Rando (regenerative medicine), Grady Gunn (stem cells).
I just got back to my Uptown New Orleans apartment from the 5300 Tchoupitoulas St. Cingular store, where I was unable to buy the last 4 gig iPhone. Why? I do not have an American social security number yet as I’ve just arrived to the States 2 weeks ago and applied for the SSN last week and it takes about 30 days (don’t ask me why) to get one. And without an SSN you are nothing in the United States of America in the eye of an administrative person, or for a Cingular shop assistant. From the web it seemed to me, that an SSN is not compulsory for an iPhone, and as good capitalitsts Apple and Cingular only care about my money. But there are deeper considerations here.
So I had been there at the store at around 5.45 PM. and I was the 42nd in the line. Rumor was that only 40 iPhone had been shipped to that store and the rumor turned true. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve already made some hints here, but now it is “official”: we (the new family) are moving to New Orleans on the 16th, June and I start my first postdoc job in a terrific laboratory I’ve already visited back in March.
We have only one problem left: finding a proper appartment in New Orleans from the next week. My main source here is: Mapskrieg, New Orleans, that is Craigslist combined with Google Maps: but at that point I really need personal advices.
So if anyone out of the readers has an irresistible apartment offer, or a good apartment tip please do not hesitate to contact me at [attilacsordas][at][gmail.com]
Or is it the strongest personal indication of the 
Many nerves are like an electric cord. An electric cord usually contains a thin metal wire covered in plastic that insulates the metal. The plastic layer keeps the electricity from leaving the wire. This can both speed up the electrical flow and keep nearby objects safe from the electricity.
It’s weekend which means I am not just about biology and biotech blogging and can allocate a little time to spend on other projects like visiting the nearest 
Components from top to bottom:
Mark Zupan
Show me your feed reading habits and I’ll tell you who you are! I hope this statement is not true as according the item reading 
Did you now what 
The Sci Foo 
