Enzymind Labs

    "...we try to make predictions about Nature, to anticipate what we’ll see in places we have not yet looked. If additional observations corroborate our expectations, then we’re on the right track. Several skill sets are involved: one must know how to idealize the world, and then how to work with that idealization.

Euglena Academy's fall program is out, see below. I'm going to try to get to a couple of the Cozmic Pizza presentations.

Euglena Academy is an independent, college-level school for adults (18+) in Eugene, Oregon offers scientifically rigorous classes (beginning & advanced) and workshops about systems sciences (also known as complexity). 

Virus structure and mechanics information and references

General information about viruses

Virus and virion data sources

P22 virion

P22 overviews

P22 tail machine

P22 capsid

Other virions

Here are two videos of hard to believe helicopters, both pushing technological boundaries:

Insane RC helicopter flying

World's smallest personal helicopter

Engineering and constructing meso-scale redundant materials

How is it posssible to rationally design and make materials that have highly organized micro-structure?

Periodic and pseudo random structure occurs in many naturally formed materials, but not necessarily at the desired scale, or with a specific repeated unit or material. Non-periodic but deterministic structure is less common in non-living physical systems, but is the rule for living systems.

I've been reading a lot of material developed by Alan Kay (e.g. his writings), and others who have been influenced by Kay's vision of what operating systems and software should look like to create a revolution in the way people, in particular children, learn.

This ScienceDaily item touches on the relationship between mood/affect and creativity: 

Video Games Can Make Us Creative If Spark Is Right

David Brooks wrote a spot-on opinion column in the NY Times today, "The Alpha Geeks ". Brooks is an influential journalist, button-down political pundit, and cultural commentator.

Griffin, who attends the Programmers Anonymous meetings wrote a nice program to evaluate a series approximation of pi. He used the first n terms of the Wallis product:

Science 18 April 2008 Vol 320, Issue 5874 has a wonderful article about the geometry of music, how  "many musical terms can be understood as expressing symmetries of n-dimensional space, where each dimension represents a voice in the score. Identifying—gluing together—points related by these symmetries produces exotic mathematical spaces (orbifolds) that subsume a large number of geometric models previously proposed."