Sirocco Research Labs

Author: Jimmy Marble

• We Can Spin Some Yarn

  At some point peo­ple began giv­ing our gut­tural sounds mean­ing, and ever since exis­tence has been full of mys­tery, allure, and frus­tra­tions.  “What did he mean by that,” the cave-girl won­dered, peek­ing at her cave-boyfriend’s lips after he said, “You’re one of the good ones.”  How can we ever say what we actu­ally mean when each of us has such a unique rela­tion­ship with words?

  And that’s not even touch­ing on the sta­tic nature of the sym­bol vs the fluid nature of mean­ing.  Which is prob­a­bly the most fas­ci­nat­ing part of com­mu­ni­cat­ing and what I’m try­ing to explore almost always.  Pos­i­tively or neg­a­tively, the mean­ing of the words change with dura­tion, but the words stay the same, some­times enhanc­ing their orig­i­nal mes­sage, but just as often reveal­ing deep ironies.

  Which inevitably brings me to Love.  As Cleo says in Cleo in the Uni­verse, “How can I love some­body when infin­ity exists?”  How can I tell some­one “I love you,” when what’s mak­ing my heart beat isn’t those three words, but some­thing much nicer, big­ger, and more sin­cere?  I’m stuck with these clunky lan­guages which don’t allow for any sort of unique­ness, and are tied to his­tory, mythol­ogy, and all that.  There just aren’t enough words.  I need an infi­nite amount.

  But, that’s life.  We only get “I love you.”  And so, we put our most frag­ile hopes and thoughts into these sta­tic words that stay the same, while the mean­ing remains in flux.

  With this project, I wanted to explore the fragility of the mean­ing, and impose it on the sta­tic sym­bol.  Instead of impen­e­tra­ble, revered, and absolute, the words are del­i­cate, made with the flim­si­est, most ephemeral mate­ri­als at my dis­posal.  I want the words to be vul­ner­a­ble.  I want them to be affected by peo­ple pass­ing by, by grav­ity, and by their own imper­fect construction.

  The project is on-going, but this is Part One:

  

  

  8x12’ Acrylic yarn and scotch tape.

  Published August 31st, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• The Jazz Hour Radio Program

  Here at the Labs, we know it’s been a gru­el­ing week­end, and now that it’s Party Mon­day, you’re ready for some relax­ation to help ease back into the work week.  We invite you to pour your nicest bot­tle of wine, gather your co-workers, and unwind with us as we explore the world of Jazz Music and Pub­lic Radio.

  Here is the much-anticipated debut episode of The Jazz Hour with Jimmy Mar­ble.  Tonight’s guest Eric, Leg­endary Jazz Musi­cian, dis­cusses with Jimmy his forth­com­ing album, “Nuclear Red Fusion Trib­u­taries,” which is drop­ping later this week.

  Join us for a jour­ney of self-discovery where jazz is our vehi­cle and destination.

  

  Host Jimmy Marble

  

  Leg­endary Jazz Musi­cian, Eric

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

  Published August 23rd, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• Telepathic Devices

  Not every­one gets to live in the same city, unfor­tu­nately.  What’s worse, this even applies to friends who really wish they did.  Pos­si­bil­i­ties are mul­ti­plied by prox­im­ity; inten­tion­ally or not, pos­i­tively or oth­er­wise, things nat­u­rally grow in the same direc­tion when they’re near to one another. Granted, this is the great­est time in human his­tory to not live in the same city, what with all the oppor­tu­ni­ties for sleepy phone calls and care­fully crafted e-mails to let all the far away friends know they’re #1.  But, what tech­nol­ogy has never been able to dupli­cate is the sacred alone-but-together time.

  My friend Nora and I found our­selves in this sit­u­a­tion just recently.  Not being the types to wal­low in pas­siv­ity, we took it upon our­selves to dab­ble in invent­ing our own tech­nol­ogy to make expanses of geog­ra­phy eas­ier to shoul­der.  The result is what we’re now refer­ring to as the Tele­pathic Device.

  

  Nora mod­el­ing the Yel­low and White Tele­pathic Devices

  The Tele­pathic Device DOES NOT allow the wear­ers to com­mu­ni­cate with their minds in direct and secret con­ver­sa­tion.  For exam­ple, by using the Tele­pathic Device a sub­ject could not say to another sub­ject, “I wish we were hang­ing right now.”  The Tele­pathic Device is much, much more nuanced than this.  It oper­ates in a more sim­i­lar way to lying with your friend in a field, pos­si­bly a beach, or moun­tain top,  and gaz­ing at some­thing very big and remain­ing very quiet.  The Tele­pathic Device guides two thoughts in the same direc­tion, allow­ing the users to grow and develop their own thoughts inde­pen­dently, while shar­ing an experience.

  Finally, here are four exam­ples of the Tele­pathic Device in action:

  

  

  

  

  The Tele­pathic Device remains in beta test­ing.  But, we feel as though we have struck a major break­through for Friend­ships around the world.  We will con­tinue our work on per­fect­ing this impor­tant new discovery.

  XO

  J&N

  Published August 16th, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• Electric Beans

  

  Stock Photo: Hal­loween year pre­ced­ing death

  My best friend died and became immor­tal in the same afternoon.

  It was Water Day — the day in ele­men­tary school when instead of learn­ing you go out­side and wear swim­suits and play in hoses and do the whole slip’n slide thing.  Any­way, I was fat, but my best friend Beans, he was even fat­ter.  I’m not sure how much he weighed, but he was nine and if you put him next to a third-trimester-already-overweight-expecting mother, she looked rea­son­ably fit.  As one might imag­ine, we hated tak­ing off our shirts in pub­lic.  We hated it a lot.

  A week before Water Day Beans approached me with an idea.  Ever since last year’s Water Day when Beans got his nick­name for hav­ing breasts shaped like beans, he had been hatch­ing a plan to avoid dis­rob­ing in front of our class.  Know­ing we were more or less in the same boat, he assumed I’d be inter­ested.  And of course I was.  I didn’t need a food-based nick­name; what I needed was Beans’ plan.

  click here to con­tinue reading

  Published August 8th, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• Let’s Explore Making Art

  

  In this episode, Adi and Jimmy ask each other ques­tions about mak­ing art, pos­i­tive think­ing, two dimen­sions, and ghosts.

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

  Published July 16th, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• A Lighthearted War, Pre-Production Teaser

  One of my sum­mer projects is a short series called A Light­hearted War.  The movies doc­u­ment two rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies in love who are fight­ing against their oppres­sive, bour­geois col­o­niz­ers.  The col­o­niz­ers have, inci­den­tally, banned whim­si­cal romance.  If you like non-sequiturs, con­tra­dicted on-the-spot real­ism, and two kids just try­ing their best, then stay tuned!

  This prep list also might give you a decent feel for the movie’s look and aes­thetic.  Sort of, anyway:

  

  

  

  

  

  Published July 1st, 2010 by Jimmy Marble

• 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