Protein Folding

I need to expand my thinking. As a person whose only experience with computer games has been a one-time event of sitting by my niece Ashlie while she played Sims, I, without question, have a limited view.  This week’s Science Times section of The New York Times (November 11, 2010) focused on “What’s Next,” and the column on computer games opened a new window in my mind. Until yesterday my sense of computer games was that they are all about wars and medieval machinations. To the contrary.  The scientist answering “What’s Next” about Game Design, Jane McGonigal, wrote this: “We’re going to see games tackling women’s rights.  We’re going to see games around climate change.  We’re going to see games around medical innovation, that doctors are going to play.” The column went on to discuss a scientific paper recently published on protein folding which had 56,000 authors. These authors were people who had played a game called Foldit in which they competed with each other to become championship folders of proteins, playing to see how to help nudge the molecules into their proper shape. People around the world spend three billion hours a week playing computer games. In 2011, Dr. McDonigal predicts, unconventional games with real world impact will become much more prominent. Clearly, my previously dismissive attitude about computer games is way out of date. This next year I am going to think differently.

Today I learned about an app for the iPhone called Poetry.

If you love poetry and/or just want to have fun with poetry (or would like to improve your memory by memorizing poetry), you can download the iPhone app Poetry which works like a jukebox of poems. You click spin; and the app shows you, say, three poems on the topic of Joy and Nature or Passion and Spirituality or Optimism and Commitment. (You can change the topics by scrolling left to right at the top of the screen.) You can also browse and find poems by mood (joy, boredom, contentment, etc.) or subject (aging, nature, work and play, etc.) Best of all, the app is free (The Android phone also has a flood of free or inexpensive poetry apps.)

But if you don’t have a smart phone, not to despair. Poetry abounds on the internet.

Imagine that you are sending an email to a friend who has made an agonizingly hard decision. In making this choice, your friend has come down on the side of taking a risk that will require courage and commitment in the months ahead. You think of a poem you studied in high school…something about a yellow wood. If you could only remember the poem, you think it would be perfect to send to your friend.

Ah, the gift of the internet.

You type in the words yellow wood poem. In 0.32 seconds Google gives you 269,000 results. The first entry on the list of results gives you the complete poem, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. You copy and paste, and off goes the poem to your friend.

Don’t you love surprise language construction that you have never heard before in your entire life?

Here’s the story.

It seems that two young ones in the US State Department while working in Syria the other day sent off a couple of tweets. One tweet was about a place near a university in Damascus where one could find good coffee; and one tweet was about challenging a Syrian official to a cake-eating contest.

These messages “raised hackles” back in Washington, according to The New York Times, because the tweets were considered “too breezy.”

Now, here’s that wonderful new language construction:

The young men were “rapped on the knuckles for generating what the State Department officials called ‘stray voltage.’”

Generating stray voltage?

Have you generated any stray voltage lately??

Dana Jennings is a New York Times editor who for many months wrote a Times column about his experience of having prostrate cancer. (Jennings has written a wonderful book about the power of music: Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music.) In one column he provided a playlist of songs “to have cancer by.” Jennings said that each time he played one of these songs, he did so “in optimism and healing.” Here are his suggestions:

On a whim, I decided to take a photograph every day this year and post it on a website called Shuttercal.com. The unexpected consequences of this quick decision have been positive and completely unexpected.  For one thing, I now have a much clearer distinction between looking and seeing. I’ve looked at things in my house for years, for instance.  Not until I set a parameter one month that every photograph I made during those thirty-one days had to be an interior shot did I really see things in my house.  Where did that tiny yellow bird come from in the folk art painting on a little enamel stamp box that has sat right in front of my eyes on my desk for years?  Who had ever seen the lake-like depth of color—green, blue, purple, black—in the hand-thrown glass marbles that my aunt and I use to play a board game when we are visiting?  And what to account for so much beauty that exists in the speckles of the granite counter in our kitchen, pray tell?