What force is behind such fissure?

When I gaze into the night sky, I see the pulses of the Universe

Own work, see it live here: http://epigenomegateway.wustl.edu/browser/?genome=hg19&gftk=wgEncodeUw5CBjUw5cgeneMatrixRep1,trihm&coordinate=chr11:113982102-116705376 (must use Firefox or Chromium, but not IE)

On LibriVox

Creator of LibriVox should realize it is money and fame that people utterly care about. The people here, should refer to the participators in the free audiobook recording.

Certainly, LibriVox does not offer the first. And this awesome service lacks one essential feature to meet the second human desire: listener rating. However it would be disastrous to enable rating, as so many volunteer's recordings will be mercilessly commented, ridiculed, smashed. Which by their own quality they quite often deserve it. I never mean you can't find jewel on LibriVox. I enjoy Mark F. Smith's reading of The Mysterious Island so much, that I recommend it whenever I got a chance.

Where's that perfect piece of toast?

Am I constantly craving?
Hand reaches out
Eyes settle on that cup of amber liquid
Steam swirling
Leaves crumbled but not pickled
Perfectly tranquil and serene
What a funny name
As if it's with vicious fang, claw, leathery wings
With a well for dwelling

On Curiosity of Martians

Q: what if a Martian comes by and rip off a wire?
A: doesn't matter, it's got the laser gun for defense.

the Universe of 11 Dimensions can only be perceived by human as a two-dimensional process

own work, work in progress

what computer can do best, is to reproduce the wonder of nature

Own work, work in progress

Byebye commercial breads...

... now that I have a bread machine that *works*

Kelvin water dropper (electrostatic generator)

I just learned the remarkable Kelvin water dropper which builds electrostatic differential and potentially can be used to generate electricity. The device was invented 150 years ago!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper

I'm so intrigued by the simplicity of this design compared with electricity generator pushed by water currents. It only require simple immobile parts, except the liquid. No expensive generator, no gears whatsoever.

The electric power generated by this device comes from the altitudinal potential energy of the liquid. I'm wondering the efficiency of energy conversion here. What is more, if multiple water droppers are linked together in the form of a relay, the efficiency might be dramatically improved and more electrical power might be collected, to make it applicable at industrial scale?

The electrical power seems to be difficult to collect in a conventional way (put in the electricity grid), but it might be used to electrolyse water to get hydrogen. And hydrogen will be collected as final product. I imagine such a device should function autonomously and requires least human intervention and maintenance.

Skype on Ubuntu almost a bomb

On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS desktop 32-bit with Unity, the Skype software has been extremely unstable and this time it ate up all the RAM and half of swap, and then got killed. It nearly crashed my computer.

Gas mileage record on my car

I bought a new Hyundai Elantra at beginning this year and I've been keeping a record of its my gas mileage on the blank page of its manual. But I finally figured out why not just post it on my website? dumb...


https://sites.google.com/site/xzhou82/2012-elantra

Badminton game with a friend

I shot the game which I played with my friend and now have it on Vimeo. It's quite interesting.

I estimate the Kodak Zx5 (which was used for shooting) can only work for around 1hr of intensive recording. I was using 720p/60frame per second video resolution to capture players' fast movement.

And the sound recording is absolutely bad.

But generally Zx5 works fine for my purpose here, it's such a handy rugged gadget, I'm quite happy with it.

Ubuntu Unity

I'm sure the radically re-designed Ubuntu interface is brilliant, but it's just not at all quite ready yet.

It seems to work fine on my Lenovo X61 laptop, but I'm having LOTS of trouble on my 2-year-old Dell T1500 desktop PC.

=== newly added:

Surely the advanced graphical user interface is big trend these days. Apple has been digging the mine all over the years, and look at the blooming of new web design, fancy/elegant styles are all over the Internet... But we're talking about Linux! Does Linux have to minic and re-engineer that Mac UI to win to get users? Isn't Linux all about freedom, performance, and get-job-done?? Wouldn't it be bad if it resulted nothing but burned out developers and grumbling users?


=== added again:

Above complaints were about 12.04 beta.

Just re-re-re-re-installed 12.04 LTS 32-bit on the Dell desktop, and rather pleased that it seems to do fine.

Look forward to setting it up on my new Thinkpad X220.


$ uname -a
Linux subtleKnife 3.2.0-24-generic-pae #37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 10:47:59 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

B players

Steve Jobs' approach to B players is to drive them away, with a stick and loud humiliation.

Because he had A players under his charge.

Or he thought to be so, or they thought to be so.

And for me...

Photo album "Trip to San Francisco 12/26/2011"

DSC_5057, a photo by Xin Zhou on Flickr.

Click to view all photos taken during the two hours dwelling in San Francisco, chinatown

From Nokia 2330 to iPhone 4S

While I'm still looking at the Nokia 2330 in my palm, such a transition is likely to happen.

Or Google Nexus or whatever, not necessarily Apple stuff.

I would like to draw analogy between it and my software development project. From virtually a piece of crap, to one of those also-ran, to something thrilling and catchy like an iphone. Not there yet, but it's happening, a slow and steady morphing process.

feed, fight, flee, and fuck

So this is the 4-f rule of living organism, or animals with incisors, or claws, or beak, sting, whatever.

The rule was mentioned by a biologist on NPR as "the four F ... feed, fight, flee, and .... reproduce!"

Anyway, I just find myself obsessed with movies of dogfight scenes. And I have dug out quite a few of them on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFnnivSgH0Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llqoqei-k1Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4n4rRozpys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b79zgKgRDBk

Well, it's not about the violence, you know what I mean. For that I have made up my mind to become a sport pilot. Let's see how long it will take for me to get there.

automated online english editing

"The custom bigWig track can be used in every way a server-provided heatmap track could ever be used."


When I was struggling with this sentence for my book chapters writing, I turned to www in hope of finding some service that can do free and automated language editing. Not surprisingly, there wasn't any.


Then I started wondering. Now that Apple is equipped with technologies like enabling Siri to respond to question "I locked myself outside!!!" with answer "go get a locksmith", why don't they make themselves a little bit more useful to make an online version of that, with ability of english language editing?


And of course whatever Apple makes, it's never going to be free. So I turned my prayer to Google instead.

Let the Will be done

I'm reading Garth Nix' "Keys to the Kingdom" novels. Starting from a month ago, now I just finished book II, "The Grim Tuesday". But I'm already a captive of author's talented imagination. Only not until I finished book I did I realize these novels were written right after the "Sabriel" trilogy, which are also my favorite (I read the Sabriel for 3 times). I couldn't help but contrast the two fantasy series. They were so different apart that I could not draw any similarity in style of writing with my scant experience in English literature.

I'm also writing a book chapter on my little genome browser for Current Protocol in Bioinformatics, who doesn't even provide me a latex template. It's like reorganizing the user manual, but I have to get myself grilled by dealing with a hundred figures. Though there has already been a manual, it could not decrease my pain a tiny bit. I'm just such at writing. And thinking about another book chapter to write right after this one, I just felt beaten and again marvel at Garth Nix's amazing productiveness in writing. Maybe I should start worshiping him instead of programming nerds.

January 6, 2012, temperature is 70F at 3pm in St. Louis. Step outdoor, and greet the sun bear.

Album "trip to Newport"

DSC_4640, a photo by Xin Zhou on Flickr.

Click photo to view entire album of my trip to Newport, RI for BGI conference on June 6, 2011

Album "trip to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory"

DSC_4438, a photo by Xin Zhou on Flickr.

Click photo to view album of my trip to CSHL for Biology of Genomes meeting on May 10, 2011

Album "trip to Boston" on Flickr

DSC_3940, a photo by Xin Zhou on Flickr.

Click photo to view entire album on my trip to Boston on March 16, 2011 for VIZBI conference at Broad Institute