P.C. Shannon

Caroline was out of town for a baby shower last weekend, and that gave me the chance to catch up on my shows, including Lost (although I still haven’t seen this week’s episode yet). My constant fear—and debate topic with other fans of the show—is that the producers and the network, in an effort to milk a successful show for every last ounce of profit, will drag it out way past its prime, much like The X-Files. If the recent episodes are any indication, the writers are already starting to run out of gas.

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By default, WordPress displays the name of your blog first in the HTML “title” element. That’s not good for search engines or TrackBacks because it obfuscates the title of your post or page, which is what people (and Google) are really interested. There are at least two existing plugins that address this—SEO Title Tag and Optimal Title—but it’s really not that hard to do yourself, provided you’re not afraid of a little PHP.

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An organism’s metabolome is all of its metabolites and metabolic processes—in other words, all of the chemicals that come out of it (like urea, carbon dioxide, and progesterone) and all of the biochemical reactions that produce those compounds. It’s one of those words that scientists concocted out of thin air because they fancy themselves clever lexicographers. But it’s a powerful concept and one of the keys to the future of personalized medicine.

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I’m fascinated by movies that are structurally more like literature than cinema. SLC Punk is a good example: it’s highly non-linear yet easy to follow, and it reveals the protagonist’s inner thoughts (not with an annoying voiceover, but by cleverly breaking the fourth wall). Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine similarly feels like a work of literature rather than one of film.

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I was going to write today about how I’ve improved on my previous solution for manipulating the category URIs in WordPress, but then I came across the Top Level Categories plugin that does exactly what I’ve been trying to accomplish without all of my half-assed hackery. Moreover, it’s compatible with the Permalink Redirect plugin, which my approaches weren’t. A big thanks to the authors of these two plugins for making my life that much easier.

Popular Mechanics gave a “Breakthrough Award” to MIT researchers who reprogrammed a virus to instead form a tiny, tiny battery anode. The researchers, lead by Dr. Angela Belcher, used the bacteriophage M13, which is a workhorse of molecular biology to incorporate cobalt oxide and gold, forming a nanowire. M13 grows in a tight cylindrical spiral, and I suspect that the scientists exploited this property in convincing the virus to grow a nanowire. As Popular Mechanics recognized with their award, this is a very interesting development.

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