Professor Chakraborty described some work identifying what is essentially an analog-to-digital circuit in the immune system. One thing he mentioned was the future use of renormalization group theory to study these systems.
Archive for December, 2006
RG in Biology
Thursday, December 14th, 2006Catch of the Day
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
The Cons of Introspection
Monday, December 11th, 2006I used to complain quite a bit about the lack of introspection in other people. More recently, another possibility has struck me – maybe it was I who was engaging in excessive introspection. Sorta like having a buggy Garbage Collector for cyclic structures.
Of Sex and Marriage – “…it seems to me that we are talking ourselves to death.”
The Pursuit of Happiness – “Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”
We’re all Big Babies – “The crucial difference is my grandfather’s lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is a hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchily on the edge of self-obsession, occasionally aware that the life that exists only to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life.”
Maturity
Monday, December 4th, 2006“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
– Wilheim Stekel
Pick your battles. Of the injustices I witness, I do not always speak out. I believe in the conscientious pursuit of goals with actions and words, not redundant exercises in vanity.
The naive believe themselves omnipotent, while the dying believe themselves impotent – they are the only ones exempt from thought in action.