Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, November 4, 2002

Use of Universal Rule -- Comment()
I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of visits Universal Rule receives. This weblog averages currently about 100 page reads on weekdays, and about 50 page reads on weekends. The maximum has been about 900 page reads. This was when I posted a review of Matlab 6.5 on Mac OS X. When I posted a review of Mathematica 4.2, this generated about 600 page reads during the first day. A lot of the visits are generated by the referrals from Google and other search services. Typical searches are on Mathematica, Matlab, and assorted science topics. Sometimes really strange search terms refer visits to this weblog. And some visitors probably find something they were not expecting, for example my poem iSwitch to iMac.

Life's Complexity Pyramid -- Comment()
The new Science magazine (Vol. 298, Oct. 25, 2002) contains a perspective on system biology. The article is titled Life's Complexity Pyramid, and it is available in PDF. Here are two quotes from the article:

Cells and microorganisms have an impressive capacity for adjusting their intracellular machinery in response to changes in their environment, food availability, and developmental state. Add to this an amazing ability to correct internal errors - battling the effects of such mistakes as mutations or misfolded proteins - and we arrive at a major issue of contemporary cell biology: our need to comprehend the staggering complexity, versatility, and robustness of living systems.
...
As we seek further insights, we increasingly understand that our quest to capture the system-level laws governing cell biology in fact represents a search for the deeper patterns common to complex systems and networks in general. Therefore, cell biologists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and neuroscientists will need to equally contribute to this fantastic voyage.