Sirocco Research Labs

Archive: June, 2010

• The Future

  Lately I have been think­ing a lot about the great wide expanse of THE FUTURE. When all is said and done, I think every­body does a lot of think­ing about the future. Won­der­ing if they’ll be pen­ni­less for­ever, or whether they’ll really get to live the dream. I mean, the future is com­ing! It’s com­ing all the time! And peo­ple besides me think about it. For exam­ple, econ­o­mists. Or palm-readers.

  I also know that peo­ple besides me think about time and the future because I have been stuck for a few days sleep­ing very lit­tle because of a book called The Cul­ture of Time and Space: 1880–1919. I like read­ing it at night before bed, because it’s cool to read about total abstrac­tions when it’s dark out, and because I keep dream­ing about extreme inter­plan­e­tary space mis­sions and/or being in charge of a team of cool kids who are all wear­ing match­ing suits.

  So there’s a whole CHAPTER of this book on the early 20th century’s ideas about the future. I went for it. There’s a lot of ground to cover when address­ing the future, inci­den­tally. The war. Phi­los­o­phy, art, sci­ence, sci­ence fic­tion, tech­nol­ogy, psy­chi­a­try, the Titanic. I lost myself in there for a while. In the end, though, I came out pretty encour­aged by Futur­ism. Here is part of their man­i­festo, writ­ten in 1909:

  We intend to sing the love of dan­ger, the habit of energy and fearlessness…Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mys­te­ri­ous doors of the Impos­si­ble? Time and Space died yes­ter­day. We already live in the absolute, because we have cre­ated eter­nal, omnipresent speed.

  Man, I wish I could have seen some guy just stand­ing on top of a car let­ting the pub­lic have that speech. They were unafraid! They started try­ing new things! Just to see what would happen!!—and for the sim­ple fact that it was new and not like the past! Some really cool art came out of it, too, like chro­mophony (the color of sounds!) and paint­ing peo­ple that look like robots walk­ing up the stairs and expos­ing film in weird ways.

  As a move­ment, Futur­ism empha­sized the cel­e­bra­tion of change and orig­i­nal­ity. It spoke to the process of cre­ation, of mak­ing as a rem­edy for tem­po­ral­ity. This is what I like about it. It tried to get peo­ple to notice it, to be angered by it if necessary—but to notice! and to form their own opin­ions as a result. And yeah, also, its founders were com­pletely misog­y­nist, as many men in the early 20^th cen­tury proudly, irrev­o­ca­bly were, count­ing fem­i­nism as an “oppor­tunis­tic and util­i­tar­ian cow­ardice” they wished to demol­ish. (Whoa.) They also enjoyed exalt­ing war and fas­cism. After WWI, Futur­ism became a vehi­cle for Fas­cist pro­pa­ganda, and it mor­phed into a dif­fer­ent ani­mal from that of the orig­i­nal manifesto—one still addicted to destruc­tion and con­flict, but with lit­tle to no atten­tion to col­lec­tive cre­ativ­ity and the strength of youth­ful inno­va­tion and argument.

  And no, I’m really not so keen on the war or the misog­yny or the Futur­ists’ insis­tence on the cat­e­gor­i­cal removal/destruction of the past and all its dec­o­ra­tive trim­mings (I mean, let’s be real, I love the dec­o­ra­tive trim­mings part. That could pretty much be my tagline. DECORATIVE TRIMMINGS. Plus, three-quarters of my wardrobe is not from any­where near this decade and prob­a­bly has a hole in it), but I am inspired by the reminder that the future is a clean slate, a big stretch of what-ifs! and wouldn’t-it-be-rad-ifs! and lets-try-its! for us become bet­ter ver­sions of our­selves in. I am excited by the infer­ence that the process of think­ing this way is just as revolutionary—if not more so!—than the final product.

  There was this archi­tect called Anto­nio Sant’Elia who was all for the idea that new con­struc­tion should respond to the needs of the mod­ern age, using steel and glass and card­board (sub­marines…?) and con­crete, mak­ing every build­ing a dynamic, oper­a­tional machine. In 1914, he said THIS:

  From an archi­tec­ture con­ceived in this way no for­mal or lin­ear habit can grow, since the fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of Futur­ist archi­tec­ture will be its imper­ma­nence and tran­sience. Things will endure less than us. Every gen­er­a­tion must build its own city.

  Every gen­er­a­tion must build its own city?! Geeze. Yes! I mean, it isn’t about the fact that this archi­tect just told the world that he fun­da­men­tally believed that his build­ings not only would, but should, fall apart. It isn’t about the build­ings, or the art. It’s about the man­i­festo. The fact that some­one (or groups of some­ones!) went on the record say­ing that each gen­er­a­tion should build its own ideas. That rebuild­ing our­selves is the man­i­festo. That isn’t destruc­tive! It’s the most cre­ative! This guy say­ing that every gen­er­a­tion build its own city shows that some­one thinks it can.

  So that’s what we’re doing now. Pretty encour­ag­ing, right?

  I had a real bounce in my step as I did a (fig­u­ra­tive) vic­tory lap around my apart­ment. I felt so great, like I could make the fun­ni­est joke if any­one had been around to hear it. It was alright with me that no one was, because it was the poten­tial that felt so good. To think how our ideas mat­ter in that way! That our col­lec­tive manifesto—all the mantras we write over and over in our note­books and on our walls and at the tops of our blogs, that we might use as sign-offs if we had reg­u­lar spots on live net­work television—those are makin’ us a city and we can live in it.

  Man. So in my city (of the right here, right now) there is a lot of sewing and loud music for danc­ing in and really great pan­cakes, and every­body writes, and stretches their mus­cles in every skill they’ve got, and makes lists of things they want to learn, and learns them, one by one, and the world is at their fin­ger­tips just like the great wide expanse of the future.

  Published June 29th, 2010 by Annie Murphy

• Algorithms for Multiscale Characterization of Equilibrium Protein Motions

  Find­ings by Andrej Savol

  
  
  
  

  Con­for­ma­tional motions rel­e­vant to pro­tein func­tion span an enor­mous range of tem­po­ral scales. While the appro­pri­ate method for under­stand­ing these fluc­tu­a­tions may be spe­cific to a par­tic­u­lar timescale and detail level, the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of spa­tial and ener­getic tran­si­tions pro­vides our lab’s over­ar­ch­ing focus. To that aim, we have devel­oped advanced machine learn­ing tech­niques for extract­ing non-Gaussian and rare behav­ior in MD tra­jec­to­ries. Although out­comes of purely spa­tial fluc­tu­a­tions, QAA basis vec­tors seg­ment ubiquitin’s hier­ar­chi­cal inter­nal energy space with sur­pris­ing clar­ity, and we give insight for why pur­su­ing such rare events pro­vides use­ful bio­chem­i­cal infor­ma­tion, espe­cially when com­pared with estab­lished principal-component and full-(de)correlation based approaches.

  Longer tem­po­ral win­dows and larger spa­tial motions are con­sid­ered with Struc­ture–from–FRET, an algo­rithm that answers the fol­low­ing ques­tion: given a time-evolving dis­tance con­straint between two pro­tein residues, what is the most likely tra­jec­tory of the entire pro­tein? Our Kalman-Filter based approach gen­er­ates ensem­bles of tra­jec­to­ries that agree with sin­gle mol­e­cule Forster Res­o­nance Energy Trans­fer data. We high­light its util­ity with Adeny­late Kinase, a model hinge pro­tein, and describe how this appar­ently under­de­ter­mined prob­lem is made tractable by incor­po­rat­ing stan­dard bio­chem­i­cal con­straints (bond-length, bond-angle) into the state-space update algorithm.

  Published June 28th, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• Making Volcanos

  

  After care­ful obser­va­tion and stud­ies of nat­u­rally occur­ing Vol­canos, I have come to the per­fect con­clu­sion on how to cre­ate, with­out fail­ure, smok­ing vol­ca­noes for movie magic.

  With these illus­tra­tions, you will observe how to cre­ate vol­canos which will smoke. Unlike the ele­men­tary way of cre­at­ing an ooz­ing vol­cano, using bak­ing soda and vine­gar, these will not leave a mess on your minia­ture under­wa­ter movie set.

  1. From card­board, cut out 3/4 of a cir­cle. Cre­ate fold lines by slightly scor­ing the sur­face every five inches.

  2. Assem­ble a quite geo­met­ric vol­cano by tap­ing the two sides onto each other. Using plas­ter or joint com­pound, cover sur­face of vol­cano until it looks legit­i­mate. Crevices, cracks, and pock marks are all key to suc­cess. After allow­ing a few days to dry, apply desired fin­ish, paint, or sand.

  3. Using your lab­o­ra­to­ries sup­plies, place beakers into the vol­canos. Fill the beakers with luke-warm water. Using sci­en­tific gloves and safety gog­gles, break off small pieces of dry ice, with extreme cau­tion, and place into beakers.

  4. The chem­i­cal reac­tion which is now tak­ing place is the car­bon diox­ide sub­li­mat­ing into a gas.

  5. For a movie magic glow, place flame col­ored lights under vol­cano and watch the sci­en­tific fun begin!

  

  Published June 16th, 2010 by Adrianne Goodrich