Whee P S
(Tried to post this late last night, but the hotel internet cut out. Which might explain the incoherence ;-)
Oops, I mean BPS.
I'm off at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. Just like last year, there's sort of a weird mixture of intimidation and coolness about being here; it's fun to see all the work people are doing, but there's just so much of it.
Unfortunately I had to miss what looked like the coolest non-technical part of the day because of the scheduling of my poster presentation; they had an open meeting to discuss how scientists can constructively contribute to discussions about evolution, particularly with regards to public policy on teaching. Apparently they had some pretty good resources; I'll have to get someone else's notes for it.
Speaking of evolution, they also had some really nifty presentations on directed evolution of ribozymes to catalyze RNA polymerase reactions. Things are getting closer to articial RNA systems that can bootstrap themselves; sort of a break-even point for artificial self-replicating biological systems. I guess that's my random cool note for the day.
Other randon not-quite-as-cool note, we've been playing around with CUDA in the lab lately to test out having some of our code run on GPUs. It has only been on fairly simple (and easily parallelizable) applications so far, but we are getting some impressive speedups, and we should be able to use similar techniques to put some work from our production software on GPUs.
Oops, I mean BPS.
I'm off at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting. Just like last year, there's sort of a weird mixture of intimidation and coolness about being here; it's fun to see all the work people are doing, but there's just so much of it.
Unfortunately I had to miss what looked like the coolest non-technical part of the day because of the scheduling of my poster presentation; they had an open meeting to discuss how scientists can constructively contribute to discussions about evolution, particularly with regards to public policy on teaching. Apparently they had some pretty good resources; I'll have to get someone else's notes for it.
Speaking of evolution, they also had some really nifty presentations on directed evolution of ribozymes to catalyze RNA polymerase reactions. Things are getting closer to articial RNA systems that can bootstrap themselves; sort of a break-even point for artificial self-replicating biological systems. I guess that's my random cool note for the day.
Other randon not-quite-as-cool note, we've been playing around with CUDA in the lab lately to test out having some of our code run on GPUs. It has only been on fairly simple (and easily parallelizable) applications so far, but we are getting some impressive speedups, and we should be able to use similar techniques to put some work from our production software on GPUs.