Kill All Smokers part 001
There's someone outside the building smoking. We happen to be in the
lab next to the front door; to get a bit of 'fresh' air in we've opened
the windows. They've been standing there for the last fifteen minutes,
smoking away and listening to their iPod and obviously waiting for
someone to pick them up. The smoke has now completely penetrated the
lab and is completely distracting me. I could cope if it was a nice
aromatic pipe smoke as described by Neal Stepenson in "The Diamond Age",
but no; it's ordinary, 'dirty leaves on fire' smoke from a standard
boring cigarette.
Smokers, I think, just don't realise how annoying they are. Maybe it's because they've lost all sense of smell. Either the chemicals in smoke twist their brain into believing that no-one else minds their smoke, or they do so subconsciously out of the sort of retrojustification that we all indulge in to justify our own antisocial habits. Perhaps they just don't even think of the habit any more - their fingers light the thing, and their lungs breathe it in, without the slightest conscious thought. Maybe they justify it by thinking, "if someone wants me to stop they'll just come and ask me, and until then I'm going to stand here and make a good reek," (an idea which reminds me of a child saying "I'm just going to wave my fists about and walk toward you, and if you happen to get in the way that's your own problem.") I don't know. I've never smoked.
What I do feel like doing is going up to them and saying, "Do you mind if I just stand here for a while and let off some really noxious, rotten egg, toxic wasteland farts for a while? Because it makes me feel good, and it's actually quite good for my digestive system, and no-one else seems to mind or says anything to me while I do so anywhere else. Perhaps you'd like to join in, and we can comment on the types of food we eat to get the really horrendous birds-falling-from-the-sky smells that I think is a sign of a good fart. If you don't like the smell, just say so and I'll flip a coin - on heads I'll pretend to be polite and cork myself up, surreptitiously scowling at you in your persecution of my innocent pasttime; on tails, I'll discard all pretense at politeness and openly abuse you for daring to take my rights away, quite possibly openly farting in your face beforehand." Of course, to complete the effect, I'd have to eat a special food that costs about $30 per packet, stained my teeth and made my breath smell bad (so that even if I wasn't tooting merrily away it'd still be unpleasant to be in close conversation with me), the pack would have to warn me in violent, graphical detail that farting may kill or maim you permanently (!), and the fart would have to be a glowing cloud of green gas that everyone for fifty metres could observe and that you could never quite get rid of from your clothing.
Do you think that's going a little too far? :-)
posted at: 15:47 | path: /personal/goat | permanent link to this entry
Oooh goody, a new challenge!
"You know that sequence counting program you wrote?" Mark says to me.
"Can it read amino acids?"
"Not yet, but it will this afternoon," I reply.
"If it's not too much trouble, we'd like to get a frequency count on a large group of sequences."
"How large?"
"Several gigabytes..." Mark says, checking with Mathieu for confirmation. Heads nod.
"No problem. I just need to change a bit of the code around. Can you supply it in FASTA format?"
"You're sure it's not too much hassle?" Mark anxiously queries.
"No problem at all."
By which I mean that it's going to be an interesting experiment, in the hacker sense, and I can easily fork off another branch of the code in Subversion so that I don't have to sacrifice the workability of the existing code. I'm almost rubbing my hands with glee (10oz tin, £4s6 at all good grocers).
It isn't actually a particularly difficult change. There are four nucleotides (A, C, G, and T) and 20 amino acids (A to Z minus B, J, O, and Z; X is an unknown indicating a bad read, and * is the terminator of a reading frame, so it doesn't actually turn into an amino acid at all). Since most of my lookups are array based it'll just mean I have 20 elements in the array rather than four. Since three nucleotides combine to one amino acid (meaning that usually more than one 'codon' (group of three nucleotides) 'codes for' one amino acid - for instance anything starting with GC codes for Alanine (A)), this means an overall net reduction in the amount of information I need to store. So there's no worry about it using up any more memory or disk space than the nucleotide counter already does.
And I love working for an employer who asks if it's not too much trouble
to do something...
posted at: 14:01 | path: /work | permanent link to this entry
More research...
Hmmm - maybe I don't want bluetooth, maybe I want
Wireless
USB.
Of course, it's more pie-in-the-sky than existing technology at this
stage, but the bandwidth (480Mbit/sec unwired!) is easily enough to
just send a 48kHz 16-bit stereo pair unencoded across the wire. Hell,
the microphone and the palm player could both be talking to the WUSB
base station simultaneously and it wouldn't sweat at all. (I could
send multiple HDTV streams across it and it would be only marginally
irritated).
Of course, the distributor here in Australia doesn't have the headphone
kit that I want for kate in stock, they only have the more irritating
'clip onto the ears and attach with a loose cord' style. And they want
$200 for them. I wonder what their return policy is...
posted at: 13:07 | path: /tech/ideas | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.