miscellaneous ...

i typed out the whole post in w.bloggar - and my machine crashed ... too bad w.bloggar doesnt have auto-save .... sucks! i cant believe i am typing the whole thing again ...

the redsox won ... all my predictions for doomsday ended as the boston red sox swept the hapless cardinals, who werent helped by some glaring blunders - including the horrrid base running in game 3 by suppan. thousands of boston fans lived their entire lives without getting to see their team win the world series, and then there are those who survived the 86 years of championship drought ... the curse of the bambino is finally over.

the final frontier was conquered ... the aussies get their first series win in india since bill lawry's squad won in 1969 (heck, if the red sox could win the world series, then an aussie win in india doesnt seem that bad eh ... ). thanks to a spineless batting display again, and some excellent facesaving rearguard action by the tail enders. there was no way tendulkar was going to be able to do anything coming in with no match practice for almost two months now (perhaps more, if someone can confirm ... ) and facing the best bowling attack in the world. everyone almost expected someone or the other to show up and do their bit in this test series, inspite of the fact that the indian team has been nothing short of pathetic in the few months leading up to the aussie series. well guess what ... sooner or later, the luck will run out ... and then you have to fend for yourself .. and this indian team just wasnt capable of doing that . the ghosts of calcutta have been finally laid to rest (some brownie points for india were earned when the aussies again refused to enforce the follow on ... but who cares about that). steve waugh, although disappointed not to be the captain who conquered the final frontier, must be smilng at the sweetness of this revenge. a well desrved win for gilchrist, mcgrath and co ... - redemption at last.

black tuesday - today is the 75th anniversary of the great stock market crash of 1929, when the dow jones index lost 31 points in a single day - one might say whats the big deal, considering the dow today is around the 10,000 mark. but that crash corresponded to nearly 12% ... and was the start of the great depression that followed. Marketplace has a feature on the anniversary. The marketplace morning report also carried a couple of stories today - The Class of 1929 and Remembering the Crash of 1929.

Sage - just started using Sage - an RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. i certainly liked it ... im sure there are other free aggregators available, but i loved this one since its an integral part of the browser. firefox rocks!!

a weekend of work - Vamsi Mootha, born in India, and now an Assistant Prof of Systems Biology (Harvard) and Medicine (Mass Gen), was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ($500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years) in recognition of his work related to identification of a gene underlying a rare but fatal pediatric disorder called Leigh syndrome, French-Canadian variant, or LSFC. Turns out he did it in a single weekend of work. perhaps this may be exaggerated ... but what was more attractive was the computational method for identifying patterns of gene activity in specific diseases. In the vast bulk of data that arises from microarray experiments and high throughput screening studies, pattern and motif identification has always been one of the challenges systems biology aims to overcome. Mootha's work has demonstrated powerful, adaptable computational algorithms for efficiently mining data to spot gene interactions that lead to a wide variety of diseases. Certainly, a great impetus for the field of in silico systems biology...