100 Ideas

"One a year" - A pre-retrospective: 2008-2108
June 26th 2009
Tags: articles

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The Web Ecology Project pub 01

Over the last few weeks I've been putting my shoulder into ruby, twitter analytics, basic statistics, and visualization along with the fine young minds of the nascent Web Ecology Project. One of the first things we looked at was the trending terms on twitter; Specifically, for every day over the ...
May 12th 2009
Tags: articles, ebook reader

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70GB PDF library workflow on OSX

I have a 70GB library of textbooks and technical journal articles in (mostly) PDF format. I have been pleasantly surprised by the utility real-time full-text search provides for such a library - instead of browsing, I tend to access it the same way I access the web: by googling for ...
May 4th 2009
Tags: articles

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Spatiotemporal Programming 1

Michael Eisen is exasperated with the compound word "spatiotemporal".  "Can we invent or appropriate something better?", he asks.  Over the next several posts, I'll present an example of spatiotemporal gene regulation, techniques for analyzing and modeling it, and suggest a few metaphors that might lead to "nicer" words. Part 1: Spatiotemporal ...

Colophon

I'm Mac Cowell. I'm an amateur biologist. I'm a part of diybio.org. I'm interested in synthetic biology and refactoring and reengineering existing biological tools and techniques to be cheaper, easier, safer, and more accessible.

autobiography

Syndicate

February 26th 2010
Tags: DIYbio, good ideas No Comments

multitouch $50 microscope

Testing a multitouch interface to a 2-axis microscope stage powered by cheap servo motors, controlled by an arduino, processing, and TUIO events from an iPhone. My dream is to be able to put my fingers on giant microbes and swipe them around. Based on diybio.org/ucam. ucam development 25 Feb 2010 ...
January 15th 2010
Tags: DIYbio, bioluminescence, microbiology No Comments

Culturing bioluminescent microbes, part 1

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="1-second exposure overlayed with a 30-second (slightly warped to optimize registration) overlayed using photoshop's "lighten" blending mode at 100% opacity. More photos at flickr"][/caption] I've been fascinated by bioluminescence from the first time I saw pictures of deep-sea angler fish. Since then, I've seen dozens ...
August 19th 2009
Tags: Uncategorized No Comments

The Upshot of Diagnostic Kits

As part of the interview process, Carolina Rossini asked me to write a short report on "The Problems of Patents on Diagnostic Testing Kits" (pdf). Later that summer, I read Steven Levy's "Hackers: The Heros of the Computer Revolution." Now I've started to see an analogy between the tools used by nascent ...
June 26th 2009
Tags: articles No Comments

The Web Ecology Project pub 01

Over the last few weeks I've been putting my shoulder into ruby, twitter analytics, basic statistics, and visualization along with the fine young minds of the nascent Web Ecology Project. One of the first things we looked at was the trending terms on twitter; Specifically, for every day over the ...
May 27th 2009
Tags: DIYbio, Garage Metagenomics No Comments

Building an example BioWeatherMap dataset

I want to make an example "BioWeatherMap" based on existing metagenomic data, so I'm looking for a dataset of 16s ribosomal dna (rDNA) sampled from tens or hundreds of environmental locations. First I'd start by creating a simple map rom the basic data (sequences + location) - something like ...

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