Technology – Page 32 – David Bradley

Google Search: chemistry

Try searching Google News for “chemistry” and you’ll be very lucky to find a report on the latest developments in molecular architecture. Chemistry, it seems is US college sports journalists’ favourite subject and they’ll swing us science writers a curve at every opportunity, chucking in a mention at every tee off:

“…Head coach Greg Shamburg will be looking for the right chemistry…”

“…Penn State builds better chemistry this season…”

“…Carolina building chemistry on and off the ice during fast start…”

the list goes on…

Nobel Prize for Literature 2005

Is it any surprise there is a gulf between science and arts?

This is what the art world seemingly considers important: Harold Pinter "in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms"

Whereas science renders discoveries in chemistry that offer “Fantastic opportunities have been created for producing many new molecules – pharmaceuticals, for example. Imagination will soon be the only limit to what molecules can be built!”

Genetic Google

Google is fast, you have to agree…it can somehow narrow down a search of billions of webpages and bring you a list of the “most relevant” within fractions of a second. Admittedly, sometimes that list can be long, but it’s still quite astounding how it does it. Anyway, it occurred to me that maybe its indexing method and algorithm might be useful to those who search DNA databases.

Chemists are slowly beginning to recognise how Google can be used to search for unique chemical structures using the INChI format, so maybe there is potential for DNA searching. Maybe DNA searching is already fast enough, but I somehow doubt it.

Genuine Free iPods

Those free iPods ads are everywhere on the net and in your email inbox, but are they for real? They sure don’t look it at first glance. Almost everything about them screams “scam!!!” But only almost. What at first appears to be a “something for nothing” pyramid marketing scheme is nothing of the sort as Wired magazine, CNN, Good Housekeeping, MSNBC, New York Times, and others have reported over the last few months.

In fact, what it boils down to is simply signing up, partaking of a special offer such as freebie DVD rentals or making your first bid on ebay (you don’t even have to win the auction!), or, perish the thought, signing up for an AOL trial, and then persuading a few friends to do the same. You can always cancel the agreement after any minimum period.

Of course, if you’ve got a website, any visitor can become an instant friend if you can both get a free iPod out of that visit. The organizing company Gratis Internet has sent out tens of thousands of ipods and other pricey gadgets already. In return they get a bung from the likes of ebay and AOL who might gain a new customer out of the deal. They don’t sell your name on to mailing list companies so it really is a win-win situation.

Science and Art

An interesting preprint popped up on my physics eprints page this morning: “Fractal Dimensions in Perceptual Color Space: A Comparison Study Using Jackson Pollock’s Art.” by J. R. Mureika. Apparently, the standard RGB colour system used across the imaging industry from graphic design and photography to computer monitors and TV screens is not up to the job of representing fractal images and does not reveal the nuances of colour in perceptually different colours. Best avoid Pollock desktop wallpaper then!

Retronyms

Blair Bolles discussed the Sunday Times Acrostic puzzle recently on one of the NASW discussion groups. Apparently, he was rather intrigued by a “new” word – retronym. As examples, he cites “silent movies” and “acoustic guitar” all retronymic phrases – i.e. the qualifier was added after the original word lost its original meaning.

Another example he gives is “special relativity”. Einstein talked of his “theory of relativity” but then he came up with another “theory of relativity” so the first one was retronymically referred to as “special”.

Puzzlingly, Blair says Google only lists one page carrying the word retronym – a google whack blatt, in other words. But, I see more than 20,000 hits when I search…

This article ties in quite neatly with a more recent item I wrote on redundancy in phrases such as male semen, as if there could be any other kind.

Pines Lab People

I’m not yet sure whether it’s uber-geeky or just clever-clever, but the “people” web page for the Pines Lab at Berkeley, that’s Alex Pines, in case you didn’t know, divides up past and present team members into “Current Pine Nuts”, “Old Pine Nuts”, and “All Nuts”. There are also Global Pinenuts, presumably those Pines lab members who have fallen far from the tree.

Just be thankful, Professor Dogg at MIT hasn’t had a similar idea…or worse still Hadley Cocks at Duke!

Pines lab people can be found here

Porn Star Names

TL:DR – This article from 2005 warns readers not to indulge in pornstarname memes that might expose their password secrets, such as mother’s maiden name, first pet, and other such personal information.

Porn star names seem to be the modern trendy equivalent of star signs. People at parties ask you what your porn star name might be, and others have a useful little formula for generating them. First name comes from the name of your first pet, say. Lucky. And, the last name, your mother’s maiden name. Cocker. Hence my PSN might be Lucky Cocker. My wife’s is Goldie Black…

It’s fun and seemingly harmless. But, watch out for websites that offer to generate a PSN for you…typing in your pet’s name and mother’s maiden name might seem innocuous enough, but remember that very information usually forms the basis of the security checks for your online banking too…

Incidentally, my pet wasn’t called Lucky and my mother certainly wasn’t a Cocker. I’m not that stupid, it’s Snowy and Hedgecock.

UPDATE: It turns out I needn’t have bothered coming up with a porn star name for myself, apparently there is a David Bradley porn star out there somewhere as it is. Check out this Sig Figs post for photos of several other people with the name David Bradley (but not the pr0n star, I hasten to add).

UPDATE: A self-styled Wikileaks for porn has revealed the real names of dozens of porn stars who use stage names (industry pseudonyms). The Independent reports that, “The ability of those pornographic film performers to hide their identity behind sometimes bizarre stage monikers has been shot to pieces after a website published a leaked database containing the real names, dates of birth, and official nicknames of more than 15,000 of the adult industry’s hard-working performers, past and present.”

wHy aRE LeaRNeD SoCietIES SO KeEn on ACRoNyMS

Just in, a press release from the Royal Chem Soc. I really didn’t get far into it because I stumbled at the first major acronym – EuCheMS. Why is it that learned societies and academics in general opt for all these acronyms with mixed upper and lower case letters?

I realise they’re an aid to remembering and pronouncing the acronym, but EUCHEMS would look soooo much neater on the page.

TtFn

US Patent 6,907,350

Fed up with -omics (you know what I mean, genomics, proteomic, metabonomics etc etc etc etc ad infinitum…….?)

Well, a recent US patent from Japanese chemists seeks to create yet more. They claim to have coined the term “chene” meaning a chemical substance (what was wrong with chemical or compound I don’t know), and that we can now look forward to chenomics – the study of the interactions of chenes with biological systems.

What annoys me about their choice of word is that they’ve hybridised chemical and gene to make chene (obviously), but I would have thought the natural successor to the word chemical would be a cheme (a la Dawkins’ “memes”).

The word chene could have a bright side though, if science writers and journalists were to adopt it, we might be able to stave off some of that rampant chemophobia that litters the media these days.

Imagine the headlines: “Explosion at chene plant leads to thousands evacuated”, “Chene spillage closes freezes traffic into DC”, “Chene sensitivity causes eczema”….it would obfuscate the underlying public relations problem nicely…or maybe not.