DST will come a few weeks earlier this year, and this could screw up some computers.

Microsoft has put together a site to explain what you need to do to make sure your computer is up to date:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

This picture is really cool!

This individual took a picture of the Sun at the same time of day and this is the resulting overlap:

Very neat!

I am writing a paper for where I am supposed to defend the claim that Whole Genome Shotgun Sequencing was successful at mapping the human genome.

In the research I have done, I have come across a bunch of papers from the late 90s from people on both sides (e.g. Venter/Myers PRO, Green
AGAINST).

It seem then after the release of the human genome, there again a number of papers looking at the results, kind of doing a post mortem on the whole debate.

However, these articles seem to indicate that WGS would NOT have worked in the human genome, where such a large portion of the genome is a duplicate, if not for the IHGP teams work.  Some papers seemed to suggest that this hybrid method would be the standard way to sequence genes.

I have not found much on the subject from recent months.  Almost all
my references are from 2002 or earlier.

I tried posting to some newsgroups for some opinions and got back nada.

I must not be looking in the right spots, but it sure is frustrating.

UPDATE: After more research, it appears that the reason I was finding so many articles complaining about the WGS method was due to the massive egos that were seeing their Nobel prize dreams going up in smoke.  Venter and Myers successfully used WGS on the mouse genome, and then later applied it again to human, without any data from GenBank, validating the results, and the technique.

For my most recent project at U of C, I had to write some script to find places where DNA and RNA might bind.

DNA (and RNA) will bind when 2 strands have a complementary sequence.  A binds with T, T bind with A, G binds with C and C binds with G. 

Basically the same thing happens with RNA.

Here are 2 functions that will quickly find the complementary sequence for DNA and RNA:

Public Function FlipRnaCode(ByVal sEnd As String) As String
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "U", "a", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "A", "u", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "G", "c", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "C", "g", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = UCase(sEnd)
    Return sEnd
End Function

Public Function FlipDnaCode(ByVal sEnd As String) As String
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "T", "a", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "A", "t", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "G", "c", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = Replace(sEnd, "C", "g", 1, -1, CompareMethod.Binary)
    sEnd = UCase(sEnd)
    Return sEnd
End Function

I was online trying to buy some baseball tickets the other day and I started poking around looking for some sites that offer presale info.

Here are some of the sites I found:

http://www.presalenow.com/how.asp

http://www.snaggem.com/

http://www.presalecodes.com/

http://presalepassword.net/

http://eventexperts.presalepassword.net/

http://presale-codes-passwords.blogspot.com/index.html

Here is the article that talks about how to do it.

They suggest you use these 3 submissions pages:

http://www.onlywire.com/

http://www.scratchlist.com/

http://www.mohamadlatiff.com/social-power/bookmarks.php

This site has a pretty cool application.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

You type in a word, and it will show you simliar words, along with definitions and pronounciations.  You view them in an unrooted tree format, showing their relationships.  You can then navigate this tree by clicking on a word, which expands the nodes around that word.

Pretty cool.

About time!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Chris+May

Here is an article that shows how you can enable outlook to let you get some of those “unsafe” attachments, like a .vb file.

This is pretty cool.

It shows how you can use some software to create a giant picture made up of many pieces of paper.