Posts from — September 2006

… Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

This fundamental question, "what are you" is one where there can be many versions of true, all contradictory, all spot on.

I recently had read a ‘blurb’ written for a newsletter at one of my jobs.  I got interviewed, the editor went off, and out came one true picture of who I am:

[…] and a masters of science in statistics.  His current work involves modeling mortality ratios […] He is also employed at XXXX where he has been a sampling statistician for over a decade.  As an active divorced dad raising two blooming adolescents keeps XXX pretty busy.  In whatever time is left, XXX reads an eclectic mix of science text and junk novels, cooks, stays involved in the XXXXX community farm, and imagines he is a writer.  He is also active in community service, working with persons in recovery on a volunteer basis.  Traveling when he can, recent trips have included Costa Rica, San Francisco and the Grand Canyon.  He currently lives as caretaker, at the XXXX XXXX park in XXXX.

I looked this over and I though ‘This is a guy I might want to meet.  This sounds like a guy who has a good life, I thought when I read it.  Careear trajectory on track, traveling, kids, interesting … together.  I might even be jealous of him.   And, every word is true.

Now twist your head slightly, and squint a bit … blink a little to clear the smoke stinging your eyes, and you see …

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I am reading a fascinating paper, "Scale-free networks in cell biology", by Reka Albert at Penn State, and thought some might be interested in it.

Scale-free networks are a sub-type of "small world" networks, which show up in all kinds of biological and social systems, among other places. As it turns out, the metabolic network in a cell is a scale-free small world network (as are movie actors - see Kevin Bacon Number)

What makes this interesting (aside from being an intriguing glimpse into the details of what goes on in a cell) is that networks that have these characteristics tend to be ‘emergent’, that is, they develop naturally out of certain types of processes. Such processes tend to have very simple local rules that somehow generate complex global behaviors. And, one of the biggest open questions in the search for the origin of life is how something ascomplex as a metabolic network could have formed, for it seems that too many pieces would have to be in place all at once. So there may be a clue to that puzzle here.

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