PD: Day 108 - Networks, Networks, Networks

So I woke up this morning bright and early - 5:30 and went for my walk, jammed out some eclectic itunes playlist. Drank some coffee, watched some TV. Isn't MJ dead, can we stop talking about him and is it really important news that Paula Abdul left American Idol - so she can return to her dead carear. Also, the thing I don't understand is the exploitation of children by the Today show. Their whole life MJ tries to keep his children hidden from the public so they can have the semblenance of a normal existence and soon as he is gone, the media plaster their photo everywhere and show them off like $2 hookers - come on the kids dad just died - a little respect please. The other thing that got me was the 7 year old from Utah who stole his parents car and ran from police putting him on TV is not the best idea. God forbid we actually have an honest debate or report something that matters in the country or the world - starving people are so passe. Wow a good rant releases some tension in the morning.

So off to work, tomorrow I have a class on a new program called Pathway Studio - so most of my day is spend reading articles on Network Biology and Graph Theory. The best one of these is called Network Biology: Understandting the Cell's Functional Organization. The idea behind network systems in biology is that until now redunctionism has dominated biological research and theory. The only drawback is that biological systems are integrated and therefore by reducing are understanding to one particlular item they often ignore the forest for the tree. Biological Networks follow graph theory, which is a mathmatical concept that allows for connections to be calculated between interelated items. In population genetics, networks are slightly different than these networks, so Metabolic Networks, or Protein-Protien Interactions are used to determine the paths of particular transcripts of interest. Given the high throughput of today's labs that can producte mountains of data in weeks rather than years - these offer a decent way of visulazing complex data in enough dimensions so I our little 3D minds can understand them. I was also been invited to give a talk in Lawrence on Mennonites in March so looks I will be heading back up that way.

Headed home for beer and soup night. Watched SYTYCD finale and hope that Brandon wins but any of these folks are pretty good. Then took the kids up to bed. I''m now telling the boys stories. Tonights was about unicorns, rainbows, and flowers as Spencer's request. The basic gist is Noah builds an ark, the unicorns go to find a multicolored flower for him in the Himalyas as a gift, don't make it back in time, sends rainbows after it rains to remind us of unicorns and beauty. I then fell asleep.