Make without changing
List without counting
Work in the field without leaving the home;
Collect without having
Discern without knowing
Label the finds without reference to names;
Hike without striding
The golden path to the Zen badge.
Give it no space on the sash of your life.
Sew it without any thread.
Summary: almost all the GameScience dice I looked at passed chi-square testing fine, with one exception: the “D16 Transparent Ice Blue Gamescience Gem Die”, which failed miserably.
(With apologies to Aeschylus, Kafka, and YHVH.)
(What I was trying to do was find out if the code was familiar with ratios. I started with “Ratio of women to men in San Francisco”; it suggested, as a “Related inputs to try”, the phrase “women to men in San”. When I tried that, it then suggested “women to men”.)
Swine flu has been sequenced. More out of curiosity than anything else, I wrote code to translate a key gene into a piece of ambient music:
“Swine Flu Hemagglutinin” (MP3)
The algorithm I used is a bit complicated, but just in case you’re curious: since the gene is expressed as a surface protein antibodies can sense, it’s considered as a string of amino acids. Each beat corresponds to one amino acid, and the piece is in 3/4 time, so each six measures would correspond to five turns around the alpha structure. (I’m weaseling because I haven’t the foggiest idea how the protein actually gets folded.) Amino acids with side chains that are neither aromatic not aliphatic control the piano and organ: the nine non-hydrophobics the piano, and the four hydrophobics the organ. The three amino acids with aliphatic side chains control the low synthesizer, while the four with aromatics control the percussion.
ש
Update 2009-04-30: For folks coming in from the cnn.com article Making music out of swine flu and wondering about the line, “Zielinski saw it as a form of highly organized information that a human did not design.”: Yes, that phrasing raises the question of who or what I think DID design it. (God? Aliens?) In reality, self-organizing systems evince great complexity without need for a conscious designer. Swine flu was not designed at all– it evolved.
Strictly speaking, this is a version of swine flu hemagglutinin, FJ966952. The actual amino acid sequence:
MKAILVVMLYTFATANADTLCIGYHANNSTDTVDTVLEKNVTVTHSVNLLEDKHNGKLCK LRGVAPLHLGKCNIAGWILGNPECESLSTASSWSYIVETSSSDNGTCYPGDFIDYEELRE QLSSVSSFERFEIFPKTSSWPNHDSNKGVTAACPHAGAKSFYKNLIWLVKKGNSYPKLSK SYINDKGKEVLVLWGIHHPSTSADQQSLYQNADAYVFVGSSRYSKKFKPEIAIRPKVRDQ EGRMNYYWTLVEPGDKITFEATGNLVVPRYAFAMERNAGSGIIISDTPVHDCNTTCQTPK GAINTSLPFQNIHPITIGKCPKYVKSTKLRLATGLRNVPSIQSRGLFGAIAGFIEGGWTG MVDGWYGYHHQNEQGSGYAADLKSTQNAIDEITNKVNSVIEKMNTQFTAVGKEFNHLEKR IENLNKKVDDGFLDIWTYNAELLVLLENERTLDYHDSNVKNLYEKVRSQLKNNAKEIGNG CFEFYHKCDNTCMESVKNGTYDYPKYSEEAKLNREEIDGVKLESTRIYQILAIYSTVASS LVLVVSLGAISFWMCSNGSLQCRICI
Maggie Koerth-Baker’s excellent article from 2009 April 28, “Swine Flu Q&A”, is available here:
Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Swine Flu Q&A”, at boingboing.net
Having need of a few long (5-20 second) unambiguous alert sounds, I created some.
Two more elaborate ones: BB B4W
One strident one: PS
And one happy one: AC
Released under terms of
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
If you want to redistribute any of this stuff, please include the file “stephanZielinski_longAlerts_2009-02-23_README.txt” from the .zip below.
If you end up using any of this stuff for anything cool, I’d enjoy hearing about it.
Archive including everything:
All seven Stephan Zielinski Long Alerts 2009-02-23 mp3 files (.zip archive, 908K)
I’m trying to get some folks I know to write some fiction. Many of them are particularly good at puns– so just to make it hard, I’ve also included required lines that are to be followed by a play on words.
(Originally entitled “Design concept for electric cars: short range car, extend range with rented towed trailer only on days when it’s necessary.”)
I like my coffee the way I like my feminists: steaming and in my face.
(I hearby put the above sentence under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. If anyone ends up doing anything fun with it, please send me a link…)
ADDENDUM: Tory Hoke created these visualizations:
Feminist Coffee (from Victoria Hoke’s blog The Tory Party .)
Essay question: two phrasings. How do the meanings differ?