TI83+ Programming....

After today's WSJ article about the TI83+'s codes, I have a renewed interest in programming. I'd love to make my own Mathematics and/or Chemistry OS.... I'll keep you posted.

And I made pong on my calculator! Quite neat. Runs better on a TI84 than my TI83+, but still, the code's pretty short, and I'm happy with how it turned out. Perhaps I'll do a separate post with some screenshots. Gonna try PacMan next.

Drosophila Suzukii

Edit: This is in need of a rewrite and an update. It's on my list.
So I've kept kinda quiet about this up to now(at least on this blog if nowhere else), but I figure I might as well recount what's happened in the week or so leading up to this post. It's a long and convoluted story, so you might want to get comfortable.
This all starts with a rather simple lab in Sophomore year biology: paper cutouts of different colors were thrown on different patterned/colored backgrounds, the students had about half a minute to grab cutouts, then the cutouts were tallied, and replaced with more cutouts of equally proportioned colors, and the cycle was repeated. Pretty standard demonstration just to show how unconscious (and hence somewhat natural) selection can have huge effects on allele frequency. Simple enough. However, after reading Richard Dawkin's book, The Greatest Show On Earth, and learning Dr. Lenski's brilliant E. coli experiment (as wells as several others mentioned in the book), I wanted to try to take this a step further.

For once, a productive debate on Facebook!

I had quite an interesting debate last night, in Facebook of all places! It hasn't quite come to any sort of close yet, but I figured I would post it here anyway. It all started when I posted this XKCD cartoon on Facebook. A few minutes later Mike commented, saying that he disagreed with the premise of the cartoon. This led to the following impromptu debate.