My wife –-who is not Nicola James, no matter what other people say– is writing a blog about singer-songwriters.
She lovingly calls me ‘Science Boy‘ in her posts.
Anyhow, her latest articles are on Scandinavian singer-songwriter Ane Brun, and she also reviewed last weekend’s concert The Fiver in the Cambridge Junction.
Enjoy!
Florian
image source: private
Physicist Richard Feynman once said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”. A complex system is not understood solely by passive contemplation, it needs active manipulation by the researcher. In biology this fact is long known and some of the hottest areas of modern biology focus on engineering approaches to design and construct new biological functions. However, most of what we know today about gene function wasn’t found by creating a system, it was found by breaking it: “What I cannot break, I do not understand” is the credo of functional genomics.
“For thousands of years mathematicians believed there were just 2 types of geometry, the plane and the sphere. But another more aberrant structure lurks beneath the surface of Euclid’s laws – one that has been illuminated through the art of crochet.” *
You’ve heard correctly: crochet!
The Institute for Figuring features many ways to make abstract topics more accessible, one of them is to crochet models of hyperbolic spaces. A whole institute dedicated to aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics — this is awesome!
How do you procrastinate best?
I have a huge window in my office from which people can see my monitor, so obvious things like Facebook or Youtube don’t work for me. Writing this blog helps, and I can even claim that it has science-related content. But other people are much greater experts in doing fun stuff that is almost, but not completely work.
200 years ago the romantic novelist and poet Heinrich von Kleist shot himself at the Wannsee near Berlin. My post today is a text about the martial arts that I have written for people in my Karate-dojo probably in 2003. Kleist’s story Über das Marionettentheater takes center stage in it. I post it, even though it’s in German.
Miyamoto Musashi ist uns bekannt als unbesiegbarer Schwertkämpfer. Er war aber auch ein begabter Handwerker, ein Schriftsteller, der das „Buch der fünf Ringe“ schrieb, und ein Tuschezeichner, dessen Kalligraphien noch heute in Japan als Meisterwerke gelten. Ein Multitalent also, dem in jeder Disziplin Außergewöhnliches gelang.
Auf einer seiner Zeichnungen stehen die beiden Schriftzeichen für Senki, den Geist des Krieges. Und darunter: „Wie ein Spiegel im kalten Fluß – der Mond“.
Musashi hat an mehreren Feldzügen teilgenommen. Er hat 60 Duelle überstanden, fast alle Gegner hat er getötet – warum beschreibt er den Geist des Krieges mit dem idyllischen Bild vom Mond auf dem Wasser? „Knöcheltief im Blut“ wäre doch bestimmt passender gewesen!
How to build a great research environment?
According to a recent article in Nature the HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus is a success story. How did they get there?
Science is simple! At least, great minds have found simple formulas to describe it. For Paul Feyerabend it’s Anything Goes. For Karl Popper it’s Falsify! Falsify! Falsify! And Carl Sagan called science a self-correcting process that is perfect for finding out what’s true.
But how do these grand ideas hold up in practice?
Continue reading
Following up on yesterday’s post, here is another gem that I (together with all other group leaders at my institute) received this morning:
Hon’able sir,
I’m the undersigned humble petitioner with Bio-data (CV) attached herewith one final year M. Pharma (Pharmacology) student [..]I’ll be forever grateful if you give your valuable time and effort to guide me in my Ph. D work [..].
I’m very dedicated and promise thatI’ll never hopeless you if you accept my proposal.
I sent him my guide.
Florian
Here is an email I just got this morning:
Dear Prof.Group ,
How have you been? Hope you everything goes well.
This is -xxx- from -yyy- exporting peptides with good quality and low price. We adopt a new technology of peptide synthesis, I hope this information is of your interested.
No, it isn’t. But I’m not in the mood to start my working day either and decide to read on.
In today’s Guardian I read about a new Turner biography written by James Hamilton.
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is famous for his energetic land- and seascapes. And what’s more..
..fresh research suggests JMW Turner’s work was also rooted in groundbreaking scientific theories.
Well, sure, why not? It seems Turner had many scientists as friends and it’s not surprising at all that some of the things they have told him may have made it into his paintings.
But now here comes the greatest compliment you can make an artist:
Hamilton said Turner’s sun was more than art – it was almost experimental science.
Wow! Your art is so great, it’s almost science. Almost!
What hubris!
Florian
The Unanswered Question series is my institute‘s showing-off event: two days, four sessions, and the world’s best speakers. This year’s symposium happened just last week (Nov 4-5) and the topic was Unanswered Questions in Transcription.
The session I had organized on regulatory networks featured Daphne Koller (Stanford), Shirley Liu (Harvard), Dana Pe’er (Columbia), Joe Gray (OHSU) and Jan Korbel (EMBL).
Creative writing courses can be controversial: ‘institutionalized creativity’–doesn’t that sound like an oxymoron? And what about the standardised fiction they write in these courses: isn’t that technically smooth, but stone cold dead? Well, then The Tiger’s Wife might come as a big surprise!
