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