When we recall classic movies of the 1970s I know that everyone immediately thinks of … “The Doberman Gang.” What, you thought I was going to say “Star Wars?” For shame. No, in this gem of American cinematography we have a pack of dogs being trained to rob a bank (and later trained to rip off a corrupt politician in “The Amazing Dobermans” before finally turning away from their lives of crime and working for The Man in “The Daring Dobermans;” Spielberg ain’t the only one who can do sequels poorly). I can barely remember watching this and at the time thinking “What a cool idea!” And I still think it’s a cool idea, although not a particularly practical one. In reality, the dogs sans handler would presumably be confused by the inevitable chaos, start biting people, and get shot. (more…)
Archive for November, 2010
On dogs
Thursday, November 18th, 2010On steganography
Saturday, November 13th, 2010Isn’t that a cool word? It makes you think of dinosaurs doing dictation, or something. I first came across this word a few years ago when Bancroft and co-workers published a short letter in Nature, “Hiding messages in DNA microdots” (Nature, 399:533 (1999)). But steganography is actually a cryptography method in which you hide a signal amidst a great deal of noise or a great deal of other signal. For example, it is possible to hide messages within digital image files by having some subset of pixels actually encode a letter. (more…)
On history
Monday, November 8th, 2010The weird thing about history is that you don’t appreciate it until it’s over. But of course each of us is living history, every moment. And if we are paying attention, we perhaps see the arc of history, and have some understanding of how we got from there to here, and will get from here to beyond. (more…)
On molecular computation
Saturday, November 6th, 2010Like many folks, I was fascinated with Len Adleman’s adaptation of DNA to serve as a computational entity (Adleman (1994), Science 261:1021). This was just really cool, especially in that it both encoded a problem in a nucleic acid, and then asked the nucleic acid to solve that problem based on what I like to think of as ‘hybridization logic.’ This idea quickly permeated the community, leading some to speculate that massively parallel DNA computers would be able to crack the data encryption standard that keeps our money (amongst other things) safe (Adleman et al. (1999), J Comp Biol 6:53). DNA computers (actually, RNA, to be completely wonkish) even surged to the forefront of cultural memes by being included in the Intrepid Class Starship Voyager. (more…)