Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, April 9, 2003

Three new book reviews -- Comment()
I wrote three more book reviews for the Tietoyhteys magazine (in Finnish). These will be slightly edited for the magazine, so the published versions may not be identical:

Grids see black holes powering supercomputers -- Comment()
This GridToday report is dated April 7th, not April 1st. I liked especially the description of quantum-mechanical spam filtering. Here follows the text just in case the web page is retracted:

GRIDS SEE BLACK HOLES POWERING SUPERCOMPUTERS
The existence of microscopic black hole networks, which puncture the universe, may eventually give supercomputers the power they need, along with the drive to fight against spam.
Using the newest technologies in grid and quantum computing, British researchers have proposed using microscopic black holes to form a grid of ultra high speed "write only" memory, with the state of each black hole representing a single bit of information.
Cosmic rays colliding with tiny particles in the Earth's atmosphere, travelling near the speed of light are believed to create these miniature black holes.
The new Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory in Argentina, which will go online next year, is expected to confirm the existence of these smaller black holes.
CERN's next-generation underground particle accelerator, under construction in Switzerland, will allow researchers to create artificial microscopic black holes and test their grid computing theories, says Professor Olaf Peterson of London's Supercomputing Methods Experimental Group.
Peterson proposes linking microscopic black holes in a grid using "superstring theory" which attempts to unite Albert Einstein's theory of gravity with the theory of quantum mechanics that explains the behaviour of atoms.
"Advances in grid computing have seen researchers harness the untapped power of the world's computers," says Peterson.
"Using these black holes will allow us to tap into the unharnessed power of nature itself. The real trick is keep your valuable data on this side of the event horizon."
One proposed application for such a sub-atomic network is a new generation of spam filtering, based on the research of Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrodinger.
"Just as Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive until you open the box, when your inbox is reduced to a sub-atomic level every email will be both spam and non-spam until it is opened," says Peterson.

Reviewing Bioinformatics for Dummies -- Comment()
I finally had the time to draft a review of the book Bioinformatics for Dummies (by Claverie and Notredame). I also experimented with the examples given in the book, and managed to find a (small) mistake.

According to the book, the Dotlet program doesn't work on a Mac. There are indeed problems if you are using Internet Explorer, but at least Mozilla (version 1.2 or later) works all right. (I have Mac OS X 10.2 and Java 1.4.1.)

Although the book has the words "Windows-friendly" on the cover, almost all of the examples work as such on Mac OS X. And some things are easier on Mac OS X. For example printing to the PDF format is possible just by pressing a button in the "Print..." dialog. Some things are of course different, such as making a screen capture (Command-Shift-4 on a Mac).

As a bonus, most of the Unix applications mentioned in the book work on Mac OS X. One such application is EMBOSS, which is also available through Fink.

When the review is ready, I'll post it here (in Finnish).