Michael Ang

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Archive for the 'Thesis' Category

Strange Attractor in NorCal

Posted by mang on July 2nd, 2007 filed in Biology, General, Thesis, Trip Report

I moved back to San Francisco (though currently in Vancouver en route to Alaska… see the next post). Had the chance to take Strange Attractor to a meadow full of wildflowers in Northern California. The meadow was filled with several species of butterflies. There were white butterflies (positive ident forthcoming) feeding on the minerals in [...]

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Strange Attractor Butterfly Release

Posted by mang on June 27th, 2007 filed in Biology, General, Thesis

Natalie Jeremijenko and I released two dozen butterflies in the OOZ garden. We helped them feed from some watermelon in the Strange Attractor artificial flowers then observed their behaviour. The Monarchs stayed at Strange Attractor longer and were more likely to leave, fly around the garden a bit and return to the flowers. The Painted [...]

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Strange Attractor

Posted by mang on May 6th, 2007 filed in School, Thesis

My thesis project presentation is online. Make sure you make it past the first few minutes of silent sparkles (the videos are archived automatically and the sparkles are when I was setting up).

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Bio-Art Conference Report

Posted by mang on April 17th, 2007 filed in Biology, Thesis, Trip Report

I took some pictures at the Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One? conference presented by the New York Academy of Science. I hadn’t realized that Theo Jasen had used a genetic algorithm to get the lengths for his beach animals. There are 11 sections in each leg that contribute of the shape of the [...]

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Interview on Talking To ITP

Posted by mang on February 26th, 2007 filed in Thesis, Video

I was interviewed about my thesis a little while ago for Jeffrey Leblanc‘s online video show Talking To ITP. Interview part one Interview part two

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Thesis Mindmap

Posted by mang on February 19th, 2007 filed in Thesis

I’ve done a lot of research and have started down a few different paths that could become the focus of my thesis or basis for future work. I wrote down the different areas/topics that I’m interested in on a bunch of postit notes and stuck them to the wall. They fall under the broad categories [...]

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DNA Computing Presentation

Posted by mang on February 19th, 2007 filed in Thesis

I gave a presentation this week on DNA computing to the ITP Artificial Intelligence and Biologically Inspired Computing discussion group. DNA computing is fascinating to me since it offers the potential of massive parallelization (trillions of copies in a drop of water), use of DNA as input and output, and tiny power consumption. The basic [...]

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Protein Synthesis: 2007 Flash Version

Posted by mang on February 11th, 2007 filed in Thesis

Dare to compare this Flash animation of RNA translation into protein with the 1970s interpretation I posted earlier this week.

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Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level

Posted by mang on February 7th, 2007 filed in Biology, Dance, Thesis

The brilliant (and twisted) Real Ben Brown sent me this fantastic video of a dance interpretation of protein synthesis carried out with hundreds of students on a football field in 1971. It’s narrated by Nobel laureate Paul Berg and check out that sound track! All kinds of awesome.

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