Road Trips, Manual Labour, Strange Attractors and DNAegis

Road Trips Well, me and Lauren are heading down to Cincinnati on a road-trip. Yay! Lauren's got family there and I'm headed for my internship - should be fun! Better yet, some of my very good friends (Mubash & Srik) from undergrad are also coming down to Cincinnati from up North. Ironic that some friendships that you didn't think would endure do, while some that you value don't. Ah, well. Such is life, I suppose. Manual Labour Oh God. For the past few days, me and Lorenzo have been moving stuff - and we've done enough manual labour the past week to have earned us a couple of thousands of dollars. So much furniture, so much stuff. And boy, driving trucks to take these things around is a pain up the wrong orifice. Why oh why are most drivers DUMB? Especially those soccer-moms and Porsche/SUV-driving yuppies who somehow think that they are God's gift to the rest of us mere mortals? Those damn trucks have so much momentum that they take a good 5-10 seconds to come to a complete stop - and when a jackass cuts you across, you're edgy trying not to run over that bloke. The right lane is for turning, and if you overtake me on the right trying to go straight when am going right, I'll run you over. Strange Attractors Sorry, no hot chicks here -- just a few geeky Strange Attractors that I'd come up with. Click to enlarge (ew!).

The first three are simple Lorenz Attractors, and the next three are Julia Attractors. The last one is a demonstration of chaotic systems used for symmetry, which was first demonstrated by Field & Golubitsky. I call them Chaos-Symmetry Attractors. =)

DNAegis At the moment, the DNAegis Processor uses Generalized Pair Hidden Markov Model to predict closely related gene pairs using approximate alignment methodologies. Does anybody know of any better methods to optimize the alignment mechanism? Any inputs are appreciated -- you could either post them here or mail me at metlin-at-gmail-dot-com.