Over 23 years, we’ve done the holidays every which way. Boisterous parties, dinners for twelve, warm family gatherings, once with South Park on in the background and plates set aside for the newspaper late-shifters, once in a black velvet cocktail dress. This year we were in pajamas. Just Val and me in snuggly holiday bliss. It was a quiet and modest celebration, in keeping with the serious and sort anxious season the world — and so we — are in right now.

We spent the day cooking and playing Little Big Planet — this year’s selection for the Cohen Holiday Gaming Season — and at sunset we served up our Thanksgiving roast duck with acorn squash and figs, oyster dressing, Chinese broccoli sauteed with anchovies, sweet potato puree with labne and ginger. We broke out a bottle of the good stuff and gave great thanks for all the goodness in our lives.

NightNote readers, friends, family, wandering strangers, you are on our list! We are thankful for you and hope that your far-flung celebrations were as warm, wonderful and reassuring as our own. Happy Thanksgiving!

You are looking at M&M on my new iPhone, posted on the nightnote, viewed on MARK’s iPhone, posted on M&M, viewed on my smoking hot Samsung HDTV screen via the super-cool Playstation 3 internet browser, now posted for your enjoyment on the nightnote. Tech whore recursion at its finest! Watch the whiplash.

So, here is a picture of my dog and my Playstation patiently waiting for me to play. The Playstation is folding proteins, because that’s what it does when it’s not busy providing me with cutting edge game play. I don’t know what Ajax is working on, but you can bet it’s stinky. Ah well, back to work.

]]> http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/11/you-may-be-asking-yourself/feed/ 9 http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/07/we-fold-our-own/ http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/07/we-fold-our-own/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2007 08:01:51 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2007/12/07/we-fold-our-own/

Thanks to Mark and Michelle, the Cohens are now part of the largest distributed computing project in history! Among the many marvels of our new Playstation 3: the ease with which we are suddenly folding@home. Wikipedia will tell you that means we’re letting Stanford University use our playstation’s “downtime” to “perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics.”

Why simulate protein folding? Here’s what f@h says:

Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease…

With simulations, one can study aspects of folding and misfolding (and related disease) that one could never see with just experiment alone. Simulations won’t replace experiment, but can be a critically useful tool to go beyond what one could solely do in the lab. We are combining our simulation predictions with laboratory tests (either done in my lab or in collaborators). Working together, we can greatly push the boundary of what used to be considered to be impossible, even just a year or two ago.

Wee. And, it looks pretty. And, it has cool sound effects. The f@h client shows you your molecule (yes, look honey that’s our molecule!) as it calculates its myriad possible folding combinations. It is alive with calculations, pulsating with math. And it is rendered beautifully, you can zoom in and turn it around and change its style and treat it like your own little Tamagotchi for the seven hours it takes to complete its permutations. When it is complete, Stanford gets your data and sends you another job. Then you get another little molecule to call your own. We’ve folded 5 already. Also cool is the big globe that is in the background of your molecule simulation screen that shows all the computing nodes currently chewing on folding simulations. You can spin the globe and see the reach of the giant computing system. Hey, L.A., the East Coast, Britain and the Netherlands look pretty busy; the Sudan, Iran, North Korea, China not so much.

Here’s a nice — if blurry — little video that will give you the idea (2:33):

Want a molecule to call your own? There’s a client for every computer, even ones with far less computing muscle that our shiny new, perfectly wonderful, graciously gifted, Playstation 3.

You will note the new playstation category at the nitenote. It deserves one of its own.]]> http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/07/we-fold-our-own/feed/ 3 http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/05/there-is-a-santa-claus-but-im-too-tired-to-write-about-it/ http://thenitenote.com/2007/12/05/there-is-a-santa-claus-but-im-too-tired-to-write-about-it/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 07:28:39 +0000 kate http://www.thenitenote.com/blog/2007/12/05/there-is-a-santa-claus-but-im-too-tired-to-write-about-it/ I was exactly like a kid. The box came and I saw that I’d received the coolest possible holiday present — I squealed, I called my friends and I ran around the house until I bonked. Seriously. So, I have that weird exhaustion usually reserved for excited sugar-rushers on xmas morning, the kind where they fall asleep under the tree in a puddle of their own drool. So I am actually too tired to write tonight about my rockin’ new Playstation 3 and my crazy santa-like friends Mark and Michelle. I promise much more tomorrow. I had to post these two pictures though. In one Val displays the device. And, in the other, we browse over to M&M in the PS3’s web browser on the TV. That’s right, think YouTube, and all the interwebs on the TV. Comfy. More to come about the new platform and thanks, thanks, thanks.

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