Bioinformatics
These important bioinformatics sites are often overlooked by
practitioners of the field.
Ignore them at your own risk.
Update: sadly many of these turn out to be examples of the volatility
of the web, where important stuff is lost with time...
Paper is so much better!
RFC 1149: CPIP
RCF 1149 specifies a protocol for IP over avian carriers, called CPIP:
Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol.
History was made April 28, 2001, when a ping session using CPIP
successfully transferred four packets (an additional five were lost).
See RFC 1149 on Linux
for details and pictures.
A brute force approach tried in Israel in 2004 achieved a datarate of
2.27 Mb/s by sending 3 pigeons each carrying about 20 memory chips of
64Mb each.
This is better than a T1 line!
The
news story is in Hebrew.
And just in case you think this is all theory, it turns out that
pigeons (albeit not using IP)
can have high-tech uses.
RFC 2795: IMPS
Many people expect that, given an infinite number of monkeys and
typewriters, the complete works of Shakespeare will emerge (isn't it
easier to go to any bookstore?).
Be that as it may, work has finally started on testing this
hypothesis, with the proposal of the
Infinite Monkey
Protocol Suite.
A less refined
experiment
has tested this by placing several monkeys in a cage with a computer.
Shakespeare it was not...
The alternative is to use
simulation.
Rodent Performance Evaluation
The use of mice is said to be beneficial in the context of Graphical
User Interfaces, and leads to improved performance.
But other rodents also have their place.
For example,
squirrel
fishing has been practiced at Harvard University.
Frog Levitation
While not strictly related to bioinformatics, other scientific fields
have also had their unique interactions with biology.
Thus work on magnetic levitation culminated in early 1997 with some
dutch physicists
levitating
a live frog.
This seminal work received much more recognition than the others
featured here; even Dave Barry reported about it.