📺 Kinesin protein walking on microtubule | YouTube

Watched Kinesin protein walking on microtubule from YouTube

Extracted from The Inner Life of a Cell by Cellular Visions and Harvard (http://www.studiodaily.com/2006/07/cellular-visions-the-inner-life-of-a-cell/)

hat tip to reference in note 21 on page 221 of The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies.

I’m pretty certain that I’ve seen this or something very similar to it in another setting. (Television perhaps?)

The bookmarking service CiteULike is shutting down on March 30, 2019 after a 15 year run. While some may turn to yet-another-silo or walled garden I highly recommend going IndieWeb and owning all of your own bookmarks on your own website.

I’ve been doing this for several years now and it gives me a lot more control over how much meta data I can add, change, or modify as I see fit. Let me know if I can help you do something similar.

📑 ‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | John Naughton | The Guardian

Annotated 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (the Guardian)

Historians call it the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration.  

📖 Read pages 27-54 of 251 of The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies

📖 Read pages 27-54 of 251 of The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life by Paul Davies

Photo of the book The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies sitting on a wooden table. The cover is primarily the title in a large font superimposed on a wireframe of a bird in which the wireframe is meant to look like nodes in a newtowrk

👓 Differential privacy, an easy case | accuracyandprivacy.substack.com

Read Differential privacy, an easy case (accuracyandprivacy.substack.com)
By law, the Census Bureau is required to keep our responses to its questionnaires confidential. And so, over decades, it has applied several “disclosure avoidance” techniques when it publishes data — these have been meticulously catalogued by Laura McKenna
I could envision some interesting use cases for differential privacy like this within an IndieWeb framework for aggregated data potentially used for web discovery.

📖 Read pages 1-26 of 251 of The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies

📖 Read pages 1-26 of 251 of The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life by Paul Davies

He seems to have a reasonable opening history here. He references several researchers I’m familiar with and trust at least.

Photo of the book The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies sitting on a wooden table. The cover is primarily the title in a large font superimposed on a wireframe of a bird in which the wireframe is meant to look like nodes in a newtowrk

Acquired The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life by Paul Davies

Acquired The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life by Paul DaviesPaul Davies (Allen Lane)

How does life create order from chaos? And just what is life, anyway? Leading physicist Paul Davies argues that to find the answers, we must first answer a deeper question: 'What is information?' To understand the origins and nature of life, Davies proposes a radical vision of biology which sees the underpinnings of life as similar to circuits and electronics, arguing that life as we know it should really be considered a phenomenon of information storage. In an extraordinary deep dive into the real mechanics of what we take for granted, Davies reveals how biological processes, from photosynthesis to birds' navigation abilities, rely on quantum mechanics, and explores whether quantum physics could prove to be the secret key of all life on Earth. Lively and accessible, Demons in the Machine boils down intricate interdisciplinary developments to take readers on an eye-opening journey towards the ultimate goal of science: unifying all theories of the living and the non-living, so that humanity can at last understand its place in the universe.

book cover The Demon in the Machine

Ordered from Amazon on February 4th and had it shipped from the UK because I wasn’t sure when the book was going to finally be released in the US.

👓 Data Transparency and Civil Engineers | The Scholarly Kitchen

Read Data Transparency and Civil Engineers by Angela Cochran (The Scholarly Kitchen)
Civil Engineers rely partly on data provided by others to do their research. This post describes the challenges of getting, keeping, and maintaining the data.
There’s some interesting material here to think about with respect to data journalism, data retention, and sharing.

👓 Falling asleep in your genes: biology | Economist Espresso

Read Falling asleep in your genes: biology (Economist Espresso)

Humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. But the molecular and genetic mechanisms that control sleepiness are mysteries. Now researchers have shown that a gene called nemuri could be one of the main drivers. In a study on fruit flies, neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that when they suppressed the activity of this gene, the flies woke up easily and had difficulty sleeping. Conversely, when they ramped up nemuri’s activity, the flies effortlessly entered the land of nod. Intriguingly nemuri, which encodes a small protein secreted by brain cells, was also shown to help the flies fight off bacterial infections. It seems as though sleep is a crucial part of the body’s immune response to infection or illness. Anyone sceptical of the recuperative powers of a good night’s rest now has evidence their doctors and mothers were right—sleep really does help. The results were published this week in Science.

This looks like some interesting sleep research to delve into further.

🔖 The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies | Allen Lane (2018)

Bookmarked The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies (Allen Lane)

How does life create order from chaos? And just what is life, anyway? Leading physicist Paul Davies argues that to find the answers, we must first answer a deeper question: 'What is information?' To understand the origins and nature of life, Davies proposes a radical vision of biology which sees the underpinnings of life as similar to circuits and electronics, arguing that life as we know it should really be considered a phenomenon of information storage. In an extraordinary deep dive into the real mechanics of what we take for granted, Davies reveals how biological processes, from photosynthesis to birds' navigation abilities, rely on quantum mechanics, and explores whether quantum physics could prove to be the secret key of all life on Earth. Lively and accessible, Demons in the Machine boils down intricate interdisciplinary developments to take readers on an eye-opening journey towards the ultimate goal of science: unifying all theories of the living and the non-living, so that humanity can at last understand its place in the universe.

book cover of The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies

Found via review.

👓 ‘I predict a great revolution’: inside the struggle to define life | the Guardian

Read 'I predict a great revolution': inside the struggle to define life by Ian Sample (the Guardian)
Paul Davies thinks combining physics and biology will reveal a pattern of information management
hat tip: Philip Ball

👓 Twins get some 'mystifying' results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test | CBC

Read Twins get some 'mystifying' results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test (CBC)
Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her identical twin sister, Carly, bought DNA ancestry kits from five of the most popular companies in the industry. Find out why some of the results they received left a team of computational biologists at Yale University baffled.
I would expect some reasonable variation between companies, but far, far less within a particular company. In all though, the article does a good job of explaining some of the basics of what is going on here.

📺 “Equus Story of the Horse: Origins” | Nature | PBS

Watched "Equus: Story of the Horse" | Nature from PBS
Join anthropologist Dr. Niobe Thompson and equine experts on a two-part adventure around the world and throughout time to discover the origins of the horse.
Passively watching television this evening and this popped up. Very interesting. Might be worth watching the other episodes in this sub-series.

🎧 “The Daily”: The Ethics of Genetically Editing Babies | New York Times

Listened to "The Daily": The Ethics of Genetically Editing Babies from New York Times

A scientist in China claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited human beings. How should the U.S. respond?