Consider Bookhling

This past Monday was the first meet-up date for the diy-bio nyc… I was thinking of writing a little post on the meet-up from the day one, but the papers kept rolling in and I had to put it off for a day or two. I won’t be naming any names in this post for fear of possibly breaching someone else’s privacy (my name’s Sung won Lim, by the way).

The plan for the meet-up was a little shaky at first. We were planning to use the American Museum of Natural History as the location of the first DIY-biology meetup in the history of the New York City (as far as I know). It would have been really epic if we could make it happen (I’m still really sorry that it didn’t happen). Alas, due to the policy change at the museum we were faced with last minute location change. I had to keep checking the mailing list on my phone’s web browser to get some updated info on the place and time for the meet-up, and for a moment there I thought the whole thing would be scrapped. Fortunately most of the people on the diybio-nyc mailing list came through and we met at a cafe on the 75th street which wasn’t very far away from the AMNH.

Out of the eight people on the diybio-nyc mailing list four people showed up, which really isn’t so bad when you think about it. I arrived at the cafe about 10 minutes from six, and found two members already seated and busy chatting away on some biotech topic. Bit of introduction ensued and we were soon joined by another, making it four.

The composition of the group showed some biotech bias as expected. One of the members is pursuing a degree in biochemistry with lab experience, and the other already went through the courseworks for advanced degrees and is currently working in a related field. I on the other hand, is a physics major whose biology education stopped at around high school, and the last person was a writer teaching at a local high school (with same degree of biology education as me). This was something of a relief for me since I was worried on the prospect of bunch of people with no lab bench experience sitting together trying to figure out what to do. And since we have a real writer amongst us, I won’t have to be the official blogger of the group

Since this was a first meeting we didn’t really discuss anything too technical. The meeting generally revolved around personal introduction, reasons for our interest in diy/synthetic biology and managerial issues. For people meeting each other for the first time in their lived with scarcely any introduction on or offline, the atmosphere was very friendly and amicable. It’s the kind of group that you can bring your friends to, and the diverse background of each individual members definitely helps to foster that certain mood.

We managed to set up some priorities. We listed a few issues that might get in the way of forming a fullscale diy-bio operation, and it inevitably boiled down to a few very specific things.

Workspace: Lab needs space. We might be able to manage with meeting up in a member’s home (which is what we’re thinking of doing for a while) but once we get to doing things with E.Coli that’s not really an option due to smells, possible contamination, distractions, and etc etc. We need a dedicated hackerspace like what the NYCresistor has with running water and fridge. Which leads us to the second issue…

Money: The real estate in and around NYC can get ridiculously expensive. Since we’ll be gathering at the lab in afterhours stocked with lab materials and equipments, we need to give a bit of consideration for environment as well. I’m not even going to begin with the actual cost of materials/utilities/fees that will be needed, all of which will only increase as the time goes on and we decide to do bigger things, like going on the iGEM. Since we already have two members somewhat connected to existing biotech establishments we have it a little better than some other groups in terms of obtaining lab materials. One solution at the moment is to collect bits of monthly fee from the members of the group ($10 per month as of this writing), but that won’t be able to make up for half of what we really need (the mailing list has 8 members). So right now, we need some sort of heavy weight backing that ranges from preferential tax breaks to lab equipment/materials support. Which leads to…

Mission Statement/Goal: It might sound silly (I’m still not entirely convinced it doesn’t), but we need it. With a proper mission statement and clear goal, we are thinking of possibly turning the diy-bio nyc into a full-pledged nonprofit organization for educational outreach and techno-evangelism (yeah, we need to work on how to write it better. Thank god we have a writer). Doing so will allow us some flexibility in obtaining labspace and materials since any organization/individual who contribute to the diy-bio nyc efforts can make it a tax write-off. Not to mention having a clearly defined goal helps people to focus their efforts instead of running around all over the place. I was also thinking of possibly working with one or more of the universities in the area (there’s a lot of them), but according to those in the know that can get dangerous. Lot of colleges treat IP like cashcows (which isn’t too far from the truth) which might get in the way of the opensource spirit of the diy group. We’ll need to do some planning on that front.

I think above three points apply equally well to any other possible diy-bio group, regardless of location. I am beginning to think that we need a reliable tutorial on how to set up a decent lab-worthy group that explains the whole thing in terms of laws and economics involved. I am also planning on using high school level biotechnology class syllabus to set up a mini courseware for introductory diy-bio stuff, so we don’t spend too much time explaining stuff during the real project sessions. If I can make it work, maybe diy-bio nyc can work in conjunction with local high schools which would sidestep the IP problem we might encounter in partnership with universities. I’ll see how it turns out.

All in all, it was a very meaningful meeting. I’m literally getting an adrenalin rush from all the excitement. I’ll report more as the group moves along.

If you have any questions regarding the membership or the meeting location of the group (we are actively recruiting!) feel free to email me or leave a comment.

I finally got through the American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. He’s a terrific writer. He’s not the best writer out there or anything (he won’t be winning any Nobel prizes anytime soon, but then does it really matter anymore?), but he’s certainly above the fray in bringing his ideas to life through words. His characters feel genuine and endearing, even the villains. None of the plot elements feel like a cop-out from a hairy situation of an author having to create unique situations for living, something I’ve seen a lot of writers succumb to.

Through the end of the book I was embroiled in some very mixed-up emotions. I wanted to see the story progress, but I didn’t want the story to end. I wanted to see the story between shadow and crow to its possible happy conclusions. I wanted to see shadow grow old and meet someone and I wanted to read what he would have been thinking at the moment. I wanted to see if he’d get to meet any other gods, and I wanted to know if it would be as humorous and wonderful as most of his other encounters with the gods of the world, past and future. As I read on to sate my curiosities, I couldn’t avoid finishing the book, and that’s the biggest gripe I have with the American Gods.

There are all sorts of heavy stuff that people trained in such arts can debate and write about all days and nights in American Gods. Some would like the feeling of America as a collection of old, used-up ideas and modern god like ideas struggling for control, afraid to be forgotten. Some would call it an old and washed out idea just like the gods of old, since it’s an archetypal picture of the American that journalists and novelists and anyone else who can write and has good enough eyes to see things around them had been writing for past half a century or so, maybe even longer. I don’t think it matters. Neil Gaiman didn’t write this novel so he can have grand disposition on the fate of the American ideas (if that were the case the future of America would lie in somewhere around Iceland, and that would be funny, not serious). He wrote this novel to write a good story with good people living in it and he did one heck of a job. I don’t think I’ll be forgetting about the three sisters, Mr. Wednesday, shadow, Laura, crow, and etc etc anytime soon. It would be great if I don’t forget about them for the rest of my life, but no one knows what will happen in the future, and hopefully I might be able to experience something even more intense.

I’d love to write about some elements in the story, but I don’t think I should. I made a blood oath never to write down spoilers when ‘reviewing’ a book in a public place. Let’s just say that I really enjoyed the book, and I never wanted it to end. I think I spent about four or five days reading this book. I would have finished earlier, but then I had sudden burst of workload on me this week so I had to pull a few late nights. I mostly read this book in the subways, and in the bed with the reading light on. I would frequently curse at myself for reading past three AM on a work day, just hoping that I would be fresh enough to not look like a zombie by the time I wake up a few hours later. I would actually anticipate the ride on the subways since it was pretty much the only time during the day that I could sit down and read for close to an hour or so. The crowd didn’t bother me but I might have bothered some nice old ladies for making weird faces while reading the book, from deadly seriousness to strange smile (the kind you get when you suppress an even bigger smile because it would be weird laughing out of the blue). But then I guess there were even weirder things on New York City subways at eleven in the night, so I probably didn’t stand out too much… Which reminds me, I’ve never seen people reading on subway who change their facial expressions before. Is it that everyone else is so well trained in managing their faces or are the books just really boring? I would say it’s the training issue, since I also become excited when I’m reading through particularly illuminating passages on a physics book, and most normal people probably don’t do that.

As I read through the American Gods, I was reminded of just how much I like reading, and sometimes even writing, creative stories. With my official status as a student I usually have to dig through a lot of journals and data, where they usually deal with diagrams and numbers without much creative license (I think I remember one of my teachers telling me that use of creative license in any scientific writing is a single ticket to ending your career. Or did I read it in a story somewhere? I can’t quite recall). Reading those dry, albeit enlightening, academic scripts seem to have taken its toll on me, and sometimes I feel like I’m a dry person myself. It’s like the case with Marge Simpson. I only think of crazy jokes or stories only after I leave the party and start my car. It drives me crazy.

That being the case, reading through the American Gods and some other fictional works before that was a cathartic experience for me. I wonder what kind of trait drives us to enjoy and seek out well-made stories involving fictional people and places? Was there some strange need for living organisms to be able to tell fantasies to each other in order to survive? The kind of fantasy where both the storyteller and the audience knows it’s fantasy but indulge in it anyway? That would be an interesting venue of research, something I sadly cannot seem to be able to find anywhere.

The American Gods also had me thinking about the archetype of stories. Whether we like it or not, elements of the ideas composing stories from various authors end up being similar to each other. Usually the difference is only made up through the skills of the writer/storyteller in masterful use of the language the story is transmitted to their audience. C.G. Jung built up a whole sub-discipline of psychology based on those archetypes found throughout human culture and even dreams, and it’s almost as if human beings are capable of only telling certain types of creative stories with varying degrees of proficiency. What would that imply in understanding human creativity? Maybe the trait of creativity isn’t as limitless as we tend to believe. Maybe creativity is just like most other mathematically derived abstract act, based off of some type of pattern that circles around itself. If that were the case, we would be able to make a machine capable of creating stories not by linking relevant words together but through linking relevant ideas together, into a preset pattern. An idea of conflict, an idea of resolution. The individual set of vocabulary and the storyline composing that single idea would be irrelevant as long as it can lead to the next part, and the transition won’t even have to be singular. It can be polyphonic like Bach’s composition, each event happening with  another in ceaseless pattern. However while I’m sure it would be interesting to create such a program/machine, I’m not sure how I would be able to handle the task of making a machine capable of creating a character. Will characters simply emerge out of the polyphonic storyline? Will their personalities simply emerge out of the series of events that the characters are subjected to, each of them simply beginning with a name?

The first thing I tend to do when I want a deeper understanding of a writer’s work is to look up information on the life of writer him/herself. The research can be illuminating in a lot of cases, which is funny when you think about it since most writers I know of make their living by creating stories that are considered very unique compared to the rest of the ‘writer population.’ Would that imply that the trait of creativity is inseparable from memories of the individual? And what should writers do when they are so prolific that they are faced with the possibility of patterns and familiar ideas appearing again and again within their works? Do they embrace the patterns and ideas and try to refine them? Or do they try to break free, staying away from such patterns and ideas appearing in their works altogether?

A quick post in the morning before going off to school/work. There’s nothing like a little freewrite-ish post in the morning to prepare the morning for a day of hard work ahead. I keep on meaning to do one of the more ’serious’ posts on this blog but for some reason my fingers stop typing whenever the topic gets a little too professional in any way. When I do a spur-of-the moment writing, however, I can write and write for hours on end, on all sorts of topics from personal to somewhat more academic themes, something that’s really beginning to piss me off. I can write when I want to but I can’t write when I should be writing.

Most of you have heard of twitter by now. I’ve been on it a lot lately jotting down little notes and thoughts via SMS and sometimes even having a small conversation on it time to time. The amount of theme-specific information I can get from twitter, from topics on android development to synthetic biology, is second only to the friendfeed except that twitter has the added benefit of being mobile and more active (I can’t remember the last time someone actually used the physicist room on friendfeed. What gives?). Most of all, twitter provides a tool to create a constant thought-stream from my brain to the net that can be indexed and searched later on by myself or others. Twitter is one of those things that doesn’t sound like much on paper but turns out to be really handy once you figure out how to use it properly. I’m willing to bet that if some sort of ubiquitous connection to the net is implemented in human beings sometime in the future (like the Clatter system imagined by Warren Ellis), it will be in form of twitter rather than IM protocols.

The real life examples of twitter being put into good use are too numerous to write here in its entirety. Lot of people heard about the Mumbai bombing the moment it happened from people standing in the actual ground zero, streaming messages to the net as the events came to pass. I’ve heard about the Russian/US satellite collision incident in the space faster than the local news through twitter. Now these examples are at best gonzo journalism that may or may not appeal to some people out there. How about this? It’s a PLoS article on the benefits of microblogging tool like the twitter in conference reporting. Twitter provides an access for enthusiastic public of scientific bent to gather insight into major academic events and the concise key points that might have been lost in bustle of person-to-person conference. I myself tried to do a little bit of microblogging during the synthetic biology 4.0 in Hong Kong, something I didn’t get to do much due to the difficulty I had with my laptop during the event (like trying to find a suitable power converter). My understanding was that lot of people were still very interested in the venue, both from the professional and hobbyist sector of the public. Twitter provides an efficient networking tool between fellow professionals so that they can share information and insight over the net and beyond.

All of this means nothing. The medium of twitter is new. The very nomenclature of microblogging is quite new to most of us and the bubble we are experiencing may someday die out, perhaps even with the twitter itself. However I do suspect that the very format of microblogging itself will only mature as the time goes on doing what it does best. Providing a human-to-network interface, where everyone becomes a broadcasting center with all their stream of thoughts encoded into digital information regardless of their physical location, accessible by the net as a whole. There will be set backs, and most of the content on the thought-streams will be useless. I mean, who really cares if someone in Brussels had pizza for lunch or not? We must keep in mind, however, that in any form of media any worthwhile content is a mere fraction of the total output of the said media (I think someone came up with a math for this, but can’t quite recall it in the morning rush). There are probably thousands of new books published per day. How many of them are actually worth reading? How many do you actually get to read during your lifetime? The same can be said for movies, or even, academic papers on printed journals.

People are still looking for ways to define what microblogging is and how to use it properly, in both its physical usage and integration of the results of microblogging into conventional infosphere. Like data mining for information within the thought-stream provided by people all over the place. This isn’t some random text cloud we are talking about. This is the kind of information already filtered once or more by living thinking human beings according to their interests. Google and other such information based corporations are probably eyeing the twitter-verse and other potential microblogging services as if they were goldmines.

The potential of twitter and twitter-like microblogging services as a sort of radio station of the future present is really interesting for me. The information people stream into twitter can be channeled through cellphone SMS providing ubiquitous access to information. Say you like works by Bruce Sterling and are interested in hearing more of his thoughts. You can set your twitter account so that you can receive his twitter updates via SMS, wherever you are. That’s basically a radio station isn’t it? It’s only that twitter isn’t censored or regulated by the conventional authority like it is the case with normal or pirate radio station. Twitter, it turns out, is the result of the abstraction of modern technology and infrastructure into simple little pieces that can be integrated into each other.

The question of how to best use twitter still remains a great unknown for me. I do admit that I am a moderate twitter user, doing everything from complaining about some daily event to jotting down notes or thoughts on artificial life and such when I am on the move. I even set my cellphone up so that I can receive updates from some of the more eccentric personalities across the globe on the convenience of my cellphone. What I can’t figure out at the moment is how to use all this ‘properly.’ Every time I use twitter I am surprised by its potential, and at the same time I am enveloped by certain uneasy feeling that I still do not understand twitter, and that there must be some way of using it properly. I feel as though there is some arcane method for twitter that escapes my notice every time I send or receive an SMS update on my cellphone to/from the twitter. And that empty feeling make it impossible for me to predict the future of twitter, and the future of the world with microblogging.

Microblogging is a natural evolution of blogging for people who don’t like to write much. Such statement might sound like a bad thing but it isn’t. Some people don’t want to write stories. They just want to write down ’something’ without spending a large portion of their life doing it. Not everyone can end up writing ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ Microblogging combined with ubiquitous communications technology give people an output for something to do whenever they feel like doing something. It plays on the basic human instinct to be doing something all the time instead of lying on their backs with dead fish eyes. And the result of the medium of ubiquitous microblogging is a continuous stream of thought posted on the net that numbers in the millions and counting. All of them mine-able for information, all of them capable of being broadcast into any cellphone and any machine with internet access, instantaneously. This makes nomenclatures of web 2.0 look old and grumpy. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of future this picture will evolve into, because I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t think anyone has a clear picture of what’s happening at this moment.
I guess I should tweet more for the time being.

I feel a little guilty about posting on Coraline when there are dozens of science write-ups sitting in the draft corner of the webpage, but I think I might as well place emphasis on the recent event. Of course, it also helps that I’m a hopeless fan of works by Neil Gaiman.

I saw the Coraline at the Ziegfeld last night, a late night sojourn that ended with me coming back home around 2:30 in the morning. The film was marvelous, and I’d suggest anyone who was on the fence to go ahead and give it a try. It’s very much like the Nightmare Before Christmas, basically dolls captured scene-byscene composed into a whole film. The film Coraline is based on the novel Coraline written by Neil Gaiman, though there were few differences that anyone who read the book should be able to pick out. You would be relieved to know that unlike most other Hollywood book-to-film adaptations, I got the feeling that certain elements of the story were edited in order to best fit the medium rather than some insane rating criteria, and on the whole it works very well. Neil Gaiman always had that fantastic flare to his writing that weren’t quite fantasy yet fantastic enough to be unreal, very much like how Stephen King had a knack for turning the usual into unreality and explored the changes in human psyche within the metamorphosis of the world (personally I consider Neil Gaiman to be a much better writer than the Stephen King, if only in terms of the ingenuity of the imagination t work behind both writers’ works). Coraline definitely has all the trappings of a fairy tale. A little girl lost in the woods, the haunted house, mysterious old woman, evil stepmother, and the circus of jumping mice. The film as a whole feels as if it was a modern juxtaposition of all the elements of the conventional fairytale throughout history, a mish-mash of all the archetypes that we all knew and loved regardless of the individual cultural background (which would also mean that the film will not appeal to you if you don’t have the taste for the fantastic, but if that’s the case what are you doing in the Coraline theater in the first place? Go watch ‘he’s just not that into you’ or something, not that there’s anything wrong with the movie). And surprisingly enough, it works well. For the duration of an hour and a half (was it longer or shorter? I lost my sense of time during the film, I still can’t figure out just how much time I spent in the theater) I was lost in the fantastic yet familiar world of the Coraline, sympathizing with the cute-as-a-button main character and being awed at the visual tour-de-force of all the dolls being lighted up and blooming into living breathing beings.

Now, you should take Coraline for what it is. If you are looking for the kind of ’seriousness’ present in the indie film like the Pi you will not find it here. There won’t be any philosophical discourses and debates on the divinity or the holy moment in crafting film (as it was in the case of the Waking Life, another indie film which I suggest anyone with even a remote interest in movies to find and watch immediately, it might be a life-changing experience… It was for me, and despite all the heavy philosophical discourses in the film I’d say that it was also another form of fairytale distilled to the modern tastes). What you will find, however, is a very honest treatment of a little girl living and sometimes getting lost in a world where good and horrible things can happen when you open a wrong door (or should it be the correct door? Since if she couldn’t find it the story would never have taken place) in an old house. The film Coraline never tries to be what it isn’t. It’s just good at being what it is, and what it was intended to be. And shouldn’t that be mark of a good film?

The version of Coraline I saw was formatted to be watched using a 3D glass, the kind you frequently see in the IMAX theaters with all the whales swimming around and weasels poking their nose into you face. Anyone with decent theater going experience should know what the whole deal is about. On the whole Coraline works well with the given medium. If you are looking for some sort of thrilling experience with hands and eyes popping into your face you are rather unlikely to find it, but if you are looking for a beautiful 2D experience with some added flavor the current version will do. I must add that the 3D versions of the film Coraline will not be in the theaters for the duration of its run, and whatever the theater that carries Coraline will revert back to normal 3D glass-less film in a week or two I think. I especially loved the garden scene in the movie. The 3D flowers lighting up and blooming into full shapes were very beautiful to watch and brought a smile to my face… A little side note on the matter of 3D glasses. Despite the message at the beginning of the film telling you to return the 3D glasses after the film, I think the Ziegfeld theater in Manhattan (about the only place that runs Coraline right now, oddly enough considering the hundreds of theaters in the city) actually gives you the glasses as a souvenir, which I found out only after returning the glasses and walked out of the theater.

Another thing to watch out for after the film. If you are patient enough to sit through to the very end of the credits, the film will display a very special message. It’s a password. You can enter that password into the Coraline movie website to enter into a random drawing of special hand-stitched Coraline sneakers, and they even have adult-male sizes! (so it’s not just for kids) I don’t think I should tell you what the message is, but if you can’t find the password page on the Coraline website (I spent close to ten minutes clicking on everything), the nice rock given by the ladies Ms. Forcible and Ms. Spink will help immensely in finally figuring out where to enter that password (which I promptly entered at around 3 am). Will I be able to win the shoes? I have my fingers crossed. I’m definitely in need of some new pair of shoes (though it’s very unlikely that I’d actually wear the Coraline shoes even should I win it).

Fairytale always fascinated me. Fairytales are what we end up with when the gods and heroes pass away with their myths, the fantasy of everyday lives. Unlike what some people seem to think, fairytales are rarely if ever childish, unless the the creators of the fairytales actively try to sanitize it. The one word to describe the essence of fairytale would be ’shadow.’ Exploration of the hidden motif beneath everyday events, an act that is inevitable as long as the humanity is capable of conscious thought and emotional response.

Fairytales are ever present within the very fabric of human society, because the essences of fairytales are far beyond the simple archetypes of old witches in forests, locked doors and scary things roaming in the dark. Fairytale is the last resting place of any idea that once lived in the light, that’s been aged and killed with the passage of time and lapse of civilizations. That aspect of fairytale as a graveyard of once widely held beliefs that had been relegated to the flow of time is most obvious in cultures that had been more or less taken over by the so called ‘western ideas’ in relatively recent years after the demise of their indigenous culture. Japanese and Mexican fairytales and the like are the most coted examples, but we needn’t even go that far in search of exotic locations. We can simply look beneath the stories of cross-studded stories of kings and knights in Europe to find the most unexpected beliefs sustaining their meager life as fairytales in minds of the populace.

Once that grace and grandeur of the original myths had been stripped away with time, the old stories remain with us in its cold and naked forms since nothing holds them upon distant pedestals anymore. It descends to our level and stares into our eyes, whispering things into our ears that we have been so far away to hear in the past. When myths become fairytales they be come feral. When myths speak of the giant monsters in the dark it speaks of the pantheons of gods and individual tidbits and family affairs of the whole clan complete with intrigues and jealousies. When the same myth becomes a fairytale it only speaks of the huge thing standing in the dark, it has no name, and it has no family. At that moment we realize that while we were busy counting the number of fights the gods went through in their shining armors during their heydays, the thing in the dark had been staring at us all along, silent and waiting. The moment of that realization is the moment that we realize the true depth and value of fairytales, and that is the moment we begin to understand ourselves as not just animals born a few decades ago, but human beings with thousands of years of history behind us, with hearts too deep to fathom.