puncturing matrices for convolutional encoding

deeply envious of the people who lined up the travel cost, video gear and bandwidth to travel across the north American continent to make the interview project. definitely would have been far more rewarding to make the interviews than it is to watch them

a superb excuse to talk to strangers, which is impossible without the right roles, which are absent in life

the form of the interview doesn't push these people beyond confession. to be fair, how else can you put it across to the subjects themselves? "i want you to confess." People understand that. That's the purpose of the camera, subjecting yourself to a judgment you can't see

I tried to get behind the words by cutting them up- Patterns outside of the content


all the old forms are dead...if there are no new forms, then life is not worth living. "perhaps the failing is in myself." you reply

perhaps the cameras in phones will save us- perhaps something more deserving of the name: reality television will make both reality and television somehow tolerable
----------------------------still from: horrors of malformed men

Setaria viridis: A Model for C4 Photosynthesis. Engineering the C4 photosynthetic pathway into C3 crops has the potential to dramatically increase the yields of major C3 crops.

 RECEPTOR
ENZYME
CHANNEL
PUMP
SCAFFOLD

OXIDOREDUCTASE
TRANSFERASE
HYDROLASE
LYASE
ISOMERASE
LIGASE

1886, Wohler found the signpost for the new highway: biochemical reactions offer sufficient explanation for every function of a living organism. 1997, I remember being really impressed with Changeux's Neuronal Man, I've not looked at it since then... don't know that it would retain the same intensity. The exciting edge of the field at that time: the biochemical components and reactions that sit underneath the functions of awareness were all being newly uncovered. Yet how these things can serve as explanations of awareness still requires some development.

2002 or so, I recall reading some review on the subunits of the ligand gated GABA receptor (costa ann rev 1998) and feeling overwhelmed- and more than a little disappointed. There are many different genes encoding different types of the receptor subunits. Many of them are transcribed to form differently constructed receptors in the same nerve cell. That being the case, determining the properties of any particular receptor depends upon not only which subunits it's composed of, but which subtypes of which subunits it's composed of. Instead of speaking of a single ligand gated GABA receptor, its more exact to speak of a combinatorically vast series of them. As a consequence, being able to deterministically state how a certain concentration of GABA will affect action potentials in a particular nerve cell becomes outstandingly difficult.
The problem of difficult to fathom complexity also arise in the G protein signal cascades that take place in many nerve cells. Unlike energy metabolism cascades, where inputs and outputs have been clearly retraced, the interactions of these networks really become a labyrinth of causes and effects.

Changeux is still publishing today. Medline tracks down 10 or so papers this year.. He's still the name to go to if you want to know what's new in the world of nicotinic acetylcholine gated ion channels. His web site has a bibliography to 2006. and a few links to the papers, which I'm looking at now. I also managed to grab an ann rev tox 2007 paper by Dani and Bertrand which overviews the what's known of the nicotinc systems as a whole, researchers trying to discern how they contribute to the complexity of the signally pathways in which they play part. Disease states that their alterations seem to contribute to. I did, however, feel a little more engaged by the Ach chapter in an online neurochemistry text. This book is ten years old, but I don't get the impression from the review article that there have been any really fundamental revelations since that time.


chronomops from Tina Frank on Vimeo.