Entries from November 2005 ↓

Breaking news!!! Security guards wrestled a man to the ground in a Wal-Mart after he cut in line to get laptop computers that were on sale Friday, a television station reported.

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Reading this, I’m just not sure whether to laugh or cry. Someone needs to develop this further into an O’Reilly book or something.

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In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since joining this past July, I can now share the gory details. On Tuesday, the NSF announced the Maize Genome Project, as a collaboration between Washington University at St. Louis Genome Sequencing Center (WUGSC), Arizona Genome Institute, and us. I’m the project lead for the CSHL phase, which involves analyzing and annotating the genome.

At about 2.5 billion bases, the maize genome is about 6 times as large as the rice genome, and about 80% repetitive. This makes it an extremely difficult genome to sequence. Since the estimated 50,000 maize genes lie in the more unique regions (most of the repetitive region is junk DNA), we will regularly need to analyze and annotate the genome to ensure that we’re targeting them.

Read the NSF press release for more paltry details like, why we’re doing this, the scientific, agricultural, and economic impact this will have, how much money we’re getting (cha-ching!), and how long it will take.

Google is offering Urchin website analysis tool for free now.

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“Producer Michael De Luca and Sony have apparently decided to dismantle the scrap and solder it back together for a 21st century version of the heavy-steppin’ police weapon…”

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A really cool applet visualizes name popularity trends across time as you type the name. Pretty addicting, whether or not you’re a prospective parent.

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My daily commute to and from work is 33 miles, each way. It takes me anywhere between 40 minutes and 2 hours to travel one way. Interestingly, 29 of the 33 miles account for about 35 to 40 minutes on the road. That’s right. The other 4 miles account for the rest — anywhere from 5 minutes to a whole hour-and-a-half of riding. And those 4 miles span that stretch between the Amsterdam Ave Exit and the Westchester Ave Exit on the legendary Cross-Bronx Expressway.

Running east-west, it is the only highway that runs through the heart of the Bronx. This is true in both the literal and figurative sense. Aside from bisecting the beleaguered borough, Robert Moses, its chief architect, in the 1950s and 1960s uprooted entire neighborhoods that defined Bronx culture (for more on on Robert Moses and the history of the Cross-Bronx, read The Power Broker: The Rise and Fall of New York, one of my favorite books ever).

Those four miles are a pure nightmare. Wes Craven or Sam Raimi, contact me if you want to brainstorm about a Cross-Bronx horror flick. I’ve got some great ideas. Traffic on the Cross-Bronx is only seldom caused by stalled cars or accidents. The highway is very steep at some sections. It was paved under train tracks and wide boulevards and over rivers and valleys. The lanes are narrow and there are hardly any shoulders. Because it runs east-west, the sun glares right at motorists at key times during the day. You can go blind having to readjust between the pitch darkness of the underpasses and the shimmering brightness on either side.

But the worst are the trucks. The Cross-Bronx, part of Interstate 95, is strategically situated in such a way that it connects New England to the rest of the United States. Trucks traveling to and from New England would literally have to venture into the Appalachians in order to avoid the Cross-Bronx Expressway. And so the thoroughfare seems to attract truckers from all over. Unseasoned truck drivers fail to downshift or upshift when necessary to maintain speed. Moreover, they stay in the fast lane, even though trucks and buses are prohibited. The result: a parking lot.

And when my little car gets wedged between a semi carrying ten silver Porsche Carreras from Connecticut to Nebraska and a wide WM truck carrying biohazardous waste from West Virginia to Rhode Island, I just want them to let me get to my little home in Riverdale. People often say, “well, at least you’re reverse-commuting.” On the Cross-Bronx Expressway, there is no such thing as reverse-commuting. Heck, sometimes, there’s no such thing as commuting. There’s just parking. There are other alternatives, but they usually involve going through Bronx streets, which may be just as stressful during rush hour.

On the upside, I get through huge segments of audiobooks on the Cross-Bronx. I also feel sometimes like I’m driving through history, trying to imagine how the landscape might have looked like before Robert Moses came and ruined everything. And, sometimes, from within the confines of my air-conditioned Prius, I shake my fist at him, partly blaming him for the fall of New York, partly for this morning’s traffic. That’s my form of social protest.
 

Scientists in Lucknow have unearthed a 65-million-year-old fossil, showing two tiniest members of the animal family in sexual union. What a way to go.

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