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Image Uploaded: Apr 2, 2006 | permalink | inquire
ID: 27516

Still not done yet. My final exam of my school life "should" be finished April 18th. After then, I will be working on a research project but as exams and papers will be done at that point, the images should return.

The last month has been quite impressive. A couple of papers, exams, work, some product shots, and an unending menagerie of "stuff-that-needs-to-be-done". At this point, I'm looking forward to the end and having a little bit of time to concentrate on anything since it feels like I'm currently going through a day obsessively channel-surfing as I switch mental gears from work to school to research while trying to maintain some form of composure without cracking and running off to corner blubbering. Mental stability, who needs that? It's a ficticious panacea that's peddled by mind trippers that want to help you, help them make a few bucks when the true secret to suriving is to go a little insane.

Does this make sense? I don't expect it does. It's 1am and I'm still coding. Something that will take a Nexus file that has multiple trees and prune user-specified taxa from them. One of the cooler things I've done is a visual representation of DNA base proportions at each position in an alignment. I should thank Will and Jan for asking me to create these scripts, most of my work in the lab is something completely different (and not so visually cool). Just finished a consensus sequence generator for fasta files which is kind of fun too but not really eyecandy. It incorporates the ambiguity terms that MrBayes supports.

In the process of doing some research on the evolution of mutualisms and mathematical theory for a paper, I came across a wicked cool system that created an artifical ecology and used genetic programming techniques to observe how individuals (programs) evolved and interacted. The only human creation to seed the life was a small program that could replicate itself. Then, through mutation and refinement, complex interactions started to form that would often be observed in nature. The Tierra photoessay has some pretty over the top images. In the end though perhaps the most interesting result is that the interactions we observe in nature evolved. Does that mean that we can use such systems as generalized models for study of community ecology? It would be great if we could since an in silico system would allow us to know all parameters and if snapshots of stages were taken, we could easily manipulate parameters to see how species assemblages and their interactions are affected, something we simply cannot do in realistic systems.

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