Slashdot Mirror

Well, you'd better grab the data quickly, then:

UCSC Genome Browser

SNP data for any given locus can be accessed by clicking on "Tables" in the blue navbar, then setting the "group" select box to "Variation and Repeats" and the "track" select box to "SNPs."

The sequence for the human genome is ~3GB. I'm not sure how much space the SNP annotation takes up, I can't imagine it's that much.

The link I quickly googled examines the hardware side of your project and provides a little insight into the complexity of reliable, large-scale storage solutions. (http://ssrc.cse.ucsc.edu/Papers/hospodor-mss04.pd f) This could probably make a nice research project for a college or university if you have a large grant, but if you are talking about a business solution - I'd go with a commercial vendor with a proven track record and a verifiable list of satisfied customers. You don't want YOU to be the single point of failure if a petabyte of valuable data is lost, compromised, or even unavailable for any length of time. Downtime for a large database spells the loss of big bucks for most businesses and/or short employment for the responsible IT personnel.

Relpying to my own comment here, and having RTFA...

Wow. This *IS* MRAM.
From the MRAM site:

MRAM is a memory (RAM) technology that uses electron spin to store information. MRAM has been called "the ideal memory" - potentially combining the density of DRAM with the speed of SRAM and non-volatility of FLASH memory or hard disk, and all this while consuming a very low amount of power. MRAM can resist high radiation, and can operate in extreme temperature conditions. It is likely that we'll see the first MRAM in applications that need such properties.


MRAM is being researched by the SSRC at UCSC. From my understanding of what they are doing they are using the non-volatile MRAM as sort of a L3 cache between the RAM and the processor. This stuff is wicked fast, so the response time from RAM to the processor is taken down something like an order of magnitude. If the OS could prefetch things from RAM to MRAM in some intelligent way they could get the system memory access time down, and speed up things overall that use lots of memory accesses.... things like Booting, and opening Acrobat....

This could be quite neet if they release it....

GO SLUGS!

Not having RTFA, I wonder if this is somehow related to MRAM? Linky

I know the ssrc (which I am sort of affiliated with) has been doing some research into it, and I think Intel may be involved with it...

Just a thought...

Yes, EXACTLY! I've had this same silly argument with a ton of physics majors (At UCSC, which has a top rated Physics program) about this same thing.

I was never a Einsteinien physics expert, but too often it seemed like my physics friends kept trying to cram 'light' into a model that only supported "Wave" or "Particle". Since light exhibits traits of both a wave and a particle, perhaps a dual-model is flawed?

Not that light's wave/particle duality is a simple question or anything.

/*
  * Mempointer far null

  * Size T chunksize lots,
  * far allocated size.
  */
memptr far = NULL;
size_t chunksize = LOTS;
far = malloc(chunksize);

Fatal error. All data
have disappeared. Screen. Mind.
Both are blank.

A few years ago, I went to the first annual Workshop for Algorithmic Computer Music ( http://summer.ucsc.edu/wacm/ ) where there was a rather fascinating lecture about sonifying Wolfram's ideas. Certain cellular automata sound truly stunning. I recommend the workshop to any who are interested in learning more about Algorithmic Music.

• Harmony is very mathematical
  Yes, that public belief is true. In order to understand harmony, you must be able to count to twelve. You can perform a scientific experiment at home to determine whether you have the necessary mathematical ability. Just look at a clock or a wrist watch. Can you tell what time it is? If not, then wait for the sequel to this book: How To Tell Time From A Clock and Wristwatch.

Melody is guided by harmonic relationships based on the harmonic series. But a much stronger element is how our short-term memory is limited to being able to only a handful of elements.

Most music (especially pop) plays into this, creating very symetric call and response style phrases based on repeating patterns that make it very easy to code into familiar structures and ideas.

The beauty of this (from an algorithmic composition perspective) is that as long at there's an underlying beat and a hint of periodicity, we'll find "meaningful" patterns in even the most mediocre of music - including computer generated music.

Mathematical approaches are a fun diversion, but pretty much a dead end. Check out the work of David Cope for pattern-based computer composition that actually sounds like music.

It's still under development I guess.
http://people.ucsc.edu/~maxka/fhp/

Beat me to it. Here are some MP3s of Cope's work: http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm

Here isa mirror of the files, it on a university so you can *try* to slashdot it:

http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/portable1.swf
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/bureau1.swf
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/jeune1.swf

Here isa mirror of the files, it on a university so you can *try* to slashdot it:

http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/portable1.swf
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/bureau1.swf
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/jeune1.swf

Here isa mirror of the files, it on a university so you can *try* to slashdot it:

http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/portable1.swf
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/bureau1.swf
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jhagen/jeune1.swf

Found it. Donald Coyne of UCSC gave a talk on the Ultimate Fate of Small Black Holes. Be sure to check the Milagro link on his facutly page.

Damn, this was not a good speech. it was inspirational in the sense that I could have given a better one!

The whole first half is "I made billions of dollars, it's really pretty easy, in fact all us silicon valley types are just waiting to give it all away... we just can't find enough smart people!"

And a direct quote:

"The best way to change the world is to be in a position of power."

Wow, thanks Larry.

I hope whoever gives the graduation address in June (who the hell graduates in April, BTW?) at UCSC will be a much better speaker.

Do you mean Jim Kent?

Though I don't have enough time to really read up on this, it's still DAMN cool.

Though I don't have enough time to really read up on this, it's still DAMN cool.

The basic reason why Classical requires better reproduction comes down to one thing. Dynamic Range. This is realted to distortion. In Classical, you want to record the original sound, completely free of distortion. You keep overhead available in your system so that the highs don't get distorted during amplification and recording. In most modern pop/rock/rap, distortion is used (on purpose) in the amplification to add to the effect in the sound.

Here is a link on Dynamic Range

Basic summary, the dynamic range is the ration between the loudest and quietest sounds. Rock/pop/rap is normally consistently loud, and hence a low dynamic range. Classical has very low lows and highs and as such has a very high dynamic range. That is what it comes down to. Here is another link on dynamic range Handel's "The Messiah Hallelujah Chorus" is one example of a classical piece that uses a high dynamic range. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" 9th Sympthony is a very good example of one as it goes from quiet to loud (possibly the best example I can give). Jazz is the one other kind that typically uses this (that I know of off the top of my head). Look around for pieces of music that audiophiles use to brag about thier systems "Because it makes their system sound good".

I hope this clears it up somewhat.

were they high on magic mushrooms?

Oh, this is the University of California, Santa Cruz, it's not impossible. ;-)

Thib ;-)

Yes, I learned about Hamming codes in school. I'm proud to say that I was flunked out the encoding class by David Huffman himself!

The story (probably exagerrated) is probably referring to one of the early performances of music composed by the computer program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence written by David Cope. Click the links for more info; it's a great starting point if you're interested in computer composition.

The story (probably exagerrated) is probably referring to one of the early performances of music composed by the computer program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence written by David Cope. Click the links for more info; it's a great starting point if you're interested in computer composition.

Global income inequality is probably greater than it has ever been in human history. There is some debate about whether it is getting worse or getting better. Currently, the richest 1% of people in the world receives as much as the bottom 57%. The ratio between the average income of the top 5% in the world to the bottom 5% increased from 78 to 1 in 1988 to 114 to 1 in 1993 (Milanovic 1999).

Massonetal01_ESR.pdf

in general, once the waves hit the open ocean, it IS a straight line path. Islands will tend to absorb waves, "creating shadow patterns". There is an excellent analysis here:

GRL- Cumbre Vieja Volcano -- Potential collapse and tsunami at La Palma, Canary Islands (PDF)

complete with illustrations that demonstrate that the Bahamas protect Miami, if not much else.

See following link for a 2001 scientific paper from a Univ. California and Univ. College London geologists regarding La Palma collapse and resulting tsunami: http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df

I'd say that's by far the most sensational article I could find on the subject, and the exaggeration in that article is exceeded only by the 'devastation reeked' by the author's command of grammar.

Even a non-technical journalist should be expected to do better than reporting outcomes involving waves several times higher than the worst-case scenario considered in the relevant research.

Admittedly, the prospect of the worst-case 20m tsunami hitting most of the East Coast is rather fearsome, but it also relies on a currently-inactive volcano triggering a ~500 cubic kilometer landslide.

The estimate of the potential size of the landslide is based on very limited information. I'd say they're trolling for grant money, and it's certainly not something that most people should be worried about at this point.

Are all the Christmas songs they analyzed ambient beat-free mush ? It might be nice to listen to when your nerves need calming.

But don't most Christmas songs have a beat and a melody? They aren't getting that back out of their statistical approach.

And another vote for the David Cope stuff.. well worth a listen !

But the stuff posed in this article will give you a headache.

Instead, check out David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence. You can download mp3s of some great pieces modeled after great composers. And the computer science behind it is also cool: Cope's approach involved developing a grammar for music, such that the generated pieces followed this grammar. Much easier on the ears :)

But the stuff posed in this article will give you a headache.

Instead, check out David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence. You can download mp3s of some great pieces modeled after great composers. And the computer science behind it is also cool: Cope's approach involved developing a grammar for music, such that the generated pieces followed this grammar. Much easier on the ears :)

No "deep linking"? That's not exactly "evil", but offering a "web services" model, while "stealing" everyone's contributed Usenet content for fun and profit, then stopping people from linking back into that public content, is kinda evil. Google's execs have clearly chosen the standard Web vulture model: you are required to watch the commercials. Hopes for an enlightened "TV Guide" search for TiVing are now dashed.

"There comes a redeemer
and he slowly too fades away
There follows a wagon behind him
that's loaded with clay
and the seeds that were silent
all burst into bloom and decay
The night comes so quiet
and it's close on the heels of the day"
- Grateful Dead: "Eyes of the World"

link

My provider is soon to disable my site until 12:01 AM tomorrow (Friday) morning due to my exceeding bandwidth restrictions. I've torrented the files, but if my site is suspended, there goes my tracker. I've mirrored the files themselves here. This is where I'll post updates.

My provider is soon to disable my site until 12:01 AM tomorrow (Friday) morning due to my exceeding bandwidth restrictions. I've torrented the files, but if my site is suspended, there goes my tracker. I've mirrored the files themselves here. This is where I'll post updates.

Luckily there are things my school is doing to try to limit any damage the Patriot Act could cause to foreign students (or any students) on campus. Here is a resolution that passed the academic senate unanimously at UCSC that instructs the chancellor to implement various policies to limit the damage Patriot Act requests can do. For example, it asks that library records be destroyed as soon as possible so they cannot be obtained by silent Patriot Act requests. If you are a student, ask what your school is doing about academic freedom and the Patriot Act. If the answer is "nothing", help make something happen. Join a committee as a student representative, or write letters to your chancellor or president.

The UCSC browser is not completely in the public domain: a license is required for commercial downloads/installations. The Ensembl project is completely free to all as they use an apache-like-license.

For an open source site, Y=you really should have references UCSC's annotated genome browser and tools and the genome browser. Incredible array of annotations, and completely in the public domain.

Yes, I'm that old. This was around 1986 or so.

Anyway, one night there was a food run declared for midnight at the Lyons restaurant in Capitola. One hundred and ten students descended all at once on the otherwise empty restaurant, and all ordered coffee, some ice cream, and at the end asked for separate checks, each of which ranged from maybe one to five dollars.

There were only a couple employees on staff when we arrived. It took a long time to get served because they had to call off-duty employees on the phone, waking them out of bed to come work for the hour or two we were there.

As we prepared to depart, the restaurant manager sternly said "Don't ever do that again".

According to these numbers the above statement is wrong - although GDP is pretty much tied. Given that the unemployment rate is so much higher and the number of vacation days almost double this does however mean that the productivity per worker per hour of labor must be higher in Germany than in the US. I.e. German workers get much more done in one work hour so that they can afford more holidays as well as subsidize such a high unemployment rate.

Having worked both in Germany as well as the US I can attest that this difference is not theoretical at all. The German business climate is more focused with much less small talk in the office and meetings tend to be more productive and shorter.

(What worries me much more comparing Germany to the US is that the infant mortality is so much higher in the latter. In that category even Cuba outperforms the number one superpower of the world.)

According to these numbers the above statement is wrong - although GDP is pretty much tied. Given that the unemployment rate is so much higher and the number of vacation days almost double this does however mean that the productivity per worker per hour of labor must be higher in Germany than in the US. I.e. German workers get much more done in one work hour so that they can afford more holidays as well as subsidize such a high unemployment rate.

Having worked both in Germany as well as the US I can attest that this difference is not theoretical at all. The German business climate is more focused with much less small talk in the office and meetings tend to be more productive and shorter.

(What worries me much more comparing Germany to the US is that the infant mortality is so much higher in the latter. In that category even Cuba outperforms the number one superpower of the world.)

According to these numbers the above statement is wrong - although GDP is pretty much tied. Given that the unemployment rate is so much higher and the number of vacation days almost double this does however mean that the productivity per worker per hour of labor must be higher in Germany than in the US. I.e. German workers get much more done in one work hour so that they can afford more holidays as well as subsidize such a high unemployment rate.

Having worked both in Germany as well as the US I can attest that this difference is not theoretical at all. The German business climate is more focused with much less small talk in the office and meetings tend to be more productive and shorter.

(What worries me much more comparing Germany to the US is that the infant mortality is so much higher in the latter. In that category even Cuba outperforms the number one superpower of the world.)

The difference between "explosive" eruptions and those that are quieter is due to the composition of the magma. Quiet eruptions, such as occur in Hawaii (where there have also been tsunami-causing landslides, by the way) are of magma that's more basaltic, explosive eruptions are of more granitic rock, that contains volatiles that boil off on release of pressure -- the comparison that's always made is to soda water, erupting in bubbles when the top comes off and the pressure is released.
On a related point, the Mt. St. Helens eruption became so damaging because a landslide similar to that predicted for the Canarys relieved the pressure on a much greater volume of magma than would have been released through previously existing vents, and moreover had the effect of directing its force laterally, rather than straight up, as the vents would have done. But a Canary Islands tsunami wouldn't result from such an explosion, it would be caused by the rockslide, as others have explained here. Soberingly, the volume of the Mt. St. Helens rockslide-debris avalance seems to have been on the order of 2.5 cubic kilometers, as described in http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Projects/Glicken/framewo rk.html much less than the minimum 150 cubic kilometers that Ward and Day predict in their PDF http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df.
And, as to the drilling question, there have been exploration holes drilled into magma bodies close to the surface, but the amount of pressure relief is miniscule.

Hmm. You're probably right. I happened to be reading about this several days ago, and found a paper by Steven Ward and Simon Day, where they used the rolling/convecting scenario to model the effects of a collapse. I got the implication from somewhere that a single splash would have a significantly lesser effect. I can't find the page in Mozilla's History though, so maybe I made it up. An asteroid would be a completely different calculation, but I see your point.

Anyway, the PDF file has great graphics of the modelled dispersion.

http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df

And, btw.. regarding my previous post...the waters on the west side of La Palma are 1000m deep. That would be a heck of a breakwater. And it would probably need to be at least as thick as it was high (to the ocean floor). That's a lotta concrete. :-)

http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df

This rock is HUGE.

The BBC article linked to gives the size as that of "a small island", this other BBC news article gives it as "the size of the Isle of Man". According to the CIA World Factbook, that is 572 sq m., or "three times the size of Washington, DC. It also metnions that the rock is already in motion.

Actually, this PDF (Google HTML version) gives it as between 150 and 500 cubic km of rock. That is obviously far too large to get rid of. If it slides into the sea at 100 m/s (as in a volcanical eruption), it could cause waves of up to 25m high in the Americas (well, it's 10 to 25 for the biggest rock size).

(Excuse me if some of the above links are actually in the story, I had read a bit about it already so didn't look closely at the given links)

I succeded in transfering the filesystem to the USB drive from windows but my comp seems to be unwilling to boot from the USB device. Try what I did and maybe your comp will react better.

This is what I did...

1 Get the dd utility from here. Unzip it and put it into your c:\winnt directory (unless you want to mess with env. variables [PATH]).

2. Get the boot.img.gz image from here. For some unexplainable reason Windows unpacked it for me to its real size (ca 123 Mb). Maybe because I have winrar installed? Maybe not. Winrar should be able to unpack it anyway.

3. Get the bootbf2_4-xfs_iso.zip and read this to be able to unpack it. I like this ISO because it the kernel has XFS support. Choose any other you prefer.

4. Start a cmd.exe and use "dd --list" to see your devices so that dd can use them. (dd is used to copy raw data). My usb device was I: and in the listin I could read:

\\.\Volume{45e7b0b0-e981-11d8-be69-00a0c9ca4794}\
Mounted on i:\

5. After finding your USB device in the list dd the boot.img to the device:

dd boot.img.gz \\.\Volume{45e7b0b0-e981-11d8-be69-00a0c9ca4794}\

6. If that worked copy the unpacked bootbf2.4-xfs.iso file to your USBs root directory.

7. Reboot the comp and enter the BIOS setup. Set it to boot from your USB (or USB-ZIP) device.

The filesystem on my friends USB drive is fine and I can mount it from windows and Linux. The filesystem si 128Mb big and the device is 256 so it seemd to have worked fine (since the iso was supposed to have a 128Mb fs). I have one comp that is supposed to be bootable from USB but the USB device (mp3-player) itself seems to not react untill the OS is up. maybe that's why it won't boot? I hope. Hope you have better luck!.. :)

Cheers...

Another related item is the ARC algorithm from IBM, which is an adaptive cache for block buffers.

We're getting off-topic here, but does anyone have recommendations for backup tools in this case?

A good explanation related to the parent post can be found at: this URL.

for a quick definition of sound pressure level: http://arts.ucsc.edu/EMS/Music/tech_background/TE- 06/teces_06.html

That was a good link--I wish other posters would have a tighter knowledge about stuff before spoutin off. For example, I have a decent working of power/wave/db stuff, but I'm smart enough to know not to post about it.

With the 1GB, you can download the est.fa.gz file which is all the sequences of all human ESTs in Genbank deposited as of 4 Nov, 2003. (Now you can carry your own copy of DNA with you). Only a whopping 958MB.