Favorite season

I am falling in love with fall after 2 yrs of New England autumn :)

Cooling yet sun-filled and always the correct combination of hues. A pity that it's always so short. But perhaps that's how the heart grows fonder .

Ginger supremacist?!

What the hell is a Ginger supremacist?!? lolx...

http://www.fox.com/glee/full-episodes/1332133/

But the new episode of Glee is really much better than the other episodes so far in the season.

Windows 7 VS Vista

Stumped when M asked me what is the difference between Windows 7 and Vista, when you look at it?!

Speed is definitely the main difference I felt, between the two. W7 is MUCH faster to start up - less than a minute - Vista takes AGES. Same applies for Microsoft Apps as well, especially EXCEL. But then again, it could be that it's on 64-bit. Also, speed can be relative thing, even though for a gizmo-insensitive guy like myself, the change in speed from 7 to Vista was quite palpable.

It was 12 midnight in the office, so I rambled something about the gadget bar in Vista not being customizable, until I found a site that taught me how to modify the registry to get rid of it. Talking about trivial lolx

Anyway found this more thorough comparison:
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-compared-windows-7-vs-vista-vs-xp-615167?artc_pg=6

Biologically Useful Numbers

http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/

This is an extremely useful site!

I am always forgetting numbers like the diffusion limit of enzyme reaction rate in a cell especially (10^8 - 10^9 per M per sec). I had to stick something on my desktop to remember. LOLX...

Cite this pretty recent paper: Milo et al. Nucl. Acids Res. (2010) 38 (suppl 1): D750-D753.

The Gerstein Lab @ Yale also has a good compilation of Genome Statistics:
http://info.gersteinlab.org/Genome_Statistics

Proteins compilation:
http://biosite.se/ViewPage.aspx?PageID=33

Genome-Transcriptome-Proteome Triad

The buzz has mostly been about the three entities separately. I was trying to squeeze out a proposal for my research project for a fellowship application. Was doodling on a piece of paper.

Drawing first genetic interactions: epistasis, linkage. Then RNA interactions, among themselves, where for example you can have 22-nucleotide microRNAs (miRNA) interacting with messenger RNAs (mRNA) or you can also have RNAs regulating genes (pretty good symposium review: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088955/). Finally, proteome can be regulated by RNAs, such as tRNA, and they can also regulate the genes via transcription factors. Basically, I drew some edges and nodes on a scrap piece of paper.

The same day, I stumbled upon this article in ScienceDaily:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111013121514.htm

Four Cell papers, published back to back. I haven't read the papers but four independent studies showing the influence of non-coding RNAs and its networks in cancer, on four different ncRNAs: long coding, miRNA, mRNA and a new ceRNA (pronounced SIR-na, competing endogenous RNA)... It shows that it seems quite a big deal. But I thought it's quite obvious for the levels in the central dogma to be interconnected. Perhaps the novelty lies in the context. 

I am working on ncRNAs for now too. So might actually good to take a look at the papers.

Self-discovery

It's still amazing how much more I can find out about myself.

Curiouser and curiouser

To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.

Kofi Annan

(Ghanaian diplomat, seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.)

This quote is stuck on my laptop desktop ever since I started grad school.

Who are you?

What do you stand for?

Where do you want to go?

Why do you want to get there?

"Who are YOU?" said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, "I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."

Basic questions under any kind of scenarios - so much so that it feels like a joke to be actually asking them. But I guess it is exactly because they are so fundamental, people miss them...

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or if you'd like it put more simply--'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'"

"I think I should understand that better," Alice said very politely, "`if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it."

I know enough of my strengths. I recognize and acknowledge my weaknesses. I wanna head in a certain general direction, but nothing more precise than that. Sometimes, when I get introspective, I mull over it and starts to end up in a circular thought...

`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where--' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'

Many a times, I do not know where actually precisely I wanna go. Life can be like boxes of chocolates (instead of one) - spoilt for choices. But I know my preference, my idiosyncracies, my habits. Good choices or bad choices, they all add on to your experience. So that you know more of YOURSELF to choose again when you are faced another box of chocolates...

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.

"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

Lewis Carroll "Alice in Wonderland"

Then I guess I will just trudge on ahead fearlessly.

Learning how to trust myself along the way.