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Tag Archives: biology

The minimal genome of Craig Venter’s Syn3.0

The J Craig Venter Institute has published a paper detailing the genome of their new Syn3.0 synthetic organism. The major accomplishment was to construct a viable cell with a synthetic, extremely small genome: only 473 genes and about 500 kbp. Even though it is considered to be fully “synthetic”, this genome is not built from […]

Posted 28 March 2016 † Johan § Bioinformatics ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , ,

Reactive software and the outer world

At Scala Matsuri a few weeks ago (incidentally, an excellent conference), I was fortunate to be able to attend Jonas Bonér’s impassioned talk about resilience and reactive software. His theme: “without resilience, nothing else matters”. At the core of it is a certain way of thinking about the ways that complex systems fail. Importantly, complex […]

Posted 12 February 2016 † Johan § Bioinformatics § Computer science § Philosophy § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , ,

Science and non-repeatable events

Scientific method is fundamentally concerned with repeatable events. The phenomena that science captures most easily may be described using the following formula: once conditions A have been established, if B is done, then C happens.  This kind of science is a science of reactions, of the reactive. But what about a science of the active? Is […]

Posted 29 May 2014 † Johan § Bioinformatics § Computer science § Philosophy ‡ Comments (5) ° Also tagged: , , , ,

Multiplayer protein folding game

You read it here first – Monomorphic predicted this development in February. In a recent Nature article, researchers describe a multiplayer online graphical protein folding game, in which players collaborate against the computer to fold a protein correctly quickly. (Also: NYTimes article.) It turned out that the human players were successful compared to the computers, […]

Posted 10 August 2010 † johan § Computer science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , ,