Ghosts and Goblins

With Hallowe'en fast approaching, I thought it appropriate to point my readers towards this preprint. The authors "examine certain features of popular myths regarding ghosts, vampires and zombies as they appear in film and folklore" and "use physics to illuminate inconsistencies associated with these myths and to give practical explanation to certain aspects".

Review of my second book

Natasha Jonoska has reviewed my second book, Theoretical and Experimental DNA Computation, in the latest issue of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.

Update: I've been informed that a subscription is required to read the full review, and am still waiting for permission to host a copy. A short excerpt is quoted on the book's web page; the full review is generally of the same tone, but is very in-depth, and serves as a nice history of DNA computing in its own right. Watch this space.

Molecular tic-tac-toe

I was asked yesterday by the New Scientist to comment on a recent paper describing a molecular automaton to play tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses). My remarks appear in the resulting news article (I'm not sure if it will make it into the printed edition). Readers familiar with the area will know that this work builds on earlier work on a molecular machine, built by a subset of the group responsible for this latest construction.

Degrees of separation

I like to keep a log of how many people visit this blog, along with information on whether or not they are return visitors, and so on (this is purely for my own use, and all logs are anonymous). It's also interesting to see which sites led visitors to my own, the main two being Richard Jones' Soft Machines and Doug Natelson's nanoscale views.

It's also possible to see the search engine keyword combinations that led visitors to my blog, and this is where the data throw up...wierd stuff. The top few combinations are completely understandable:

17.39% erich kofmel
13.04% martyn amos
8.70% dreamlines

The first refers to my recent post on Erich Kofmel and his shenanigans, the second - obviously - is me, and the third keyword refers to a post I made ages ago on Dreamlines, a nice little image generation website.

However, further down the list we find the following:

4.35% daughter vs mother armwrestling

How?!

Thankfully, the Google pointer originates from a "spam comment" on an earlier post, and not from anything that I posted myself...