Aug 14
Paper and Lignin-based RFID tags. Silk electronic metamaterials.
Seems like we are not far away from having processing power embedded in damn near everything. Not lots of processing power, but enough to do identification and limited sensing. Interesting times.
Reardon abused me (not really) for still using Matlab and goaded me to look into the ImageJ world. So I am learning. Seems like I need to get smart on
Other stuff to learn? I’ll have to pick up an editor and source management tool as well. The benefit of all this? Any code I write should be faster, more easily redistributable, and there is a large support community. The disadvantage? I have to assemble all these piece-parts to get something equivalent to MatLab, so more time d&*king around with software which is time taken away from research focus. And the Matlab universe has a pretty good support community too, so not clear I am trading up there. Certainly the ImageJ/Jython/NumPy path is “cooler” along a certain dimension, but do I care?
Jan 11
No time to blog, fall quarter starting, and travelling too. Dump of stuff that is interesting:
Standardized network diagrams for biology — SBGN.Org. Cool, I have a hard time imagining electrical engineering without a standardized circuit diagram language.
Oriented Assembly of Metamaterials — Stebe et al. 325 5937: 159 — Science — good article.
“Such metamaterials may, for example, be used to create cloaking devices or light-based circuits based on manipulations of local optical electric fields rather than on the flow of electrons.”
“The challenge now is to move from hit-or-miss assemblies of academic interest to the creation of technologically relevant devices that combine particle and patterned assembly via large-scale processes.”
It is this latter challenge I find most interesting.
Reardon recommends Computational Science and Engineering. OCW links.
FT.com / Reportage – A library of the world’s most unusual compounds — would love to visit this library/museum.
A couple of good primers out on the net:
Somehow I did not ever learn about index notation in my past educational life. Time to learn.
nanoHUB – Simulation, Education, and Community for Nanotechnology. – hub for nano educational materials and software. interested in learning more about nano TCAD, pointed to by this article
Quantum computers could excel in modeling chemical reactions | Science Blog. — from the department of tautology. A quantum system can be best modelled by a quantum system.
Scientists Store and Retrieve Data Inside an Atom | Science Blog. – Kind of mind-bending. Love this stuff.
Nearby Solar System Looks Like Our Own at Time Life Formed | Wired Science from Wired.com. — 10.5 light years is remarkably close!
Sep 21
…we will develop new computer science principles for programming information-bearing molecules like DNA and RNA to create artificial biomolecular programs of similar complexity. …computing and decision-making will carried out by chemical processes themselves. Through the creation of molecular programming languages, theory for analyzing them, and experiments for validating them, our long-term vision is to establish “molecular programming” as a subdiscipline of computer scienceOverview presentation here.
Fascinating stuff.
‘Naked-eye’ gamma-ray burst was aimed squarely at Earth | Science Blog — ok they claim it came from a source 7.5 billion light years away, but it sure seems strangely coincidental that it was pointed straight at us. Maybe they are pissed about the hadron collider.
