My journey to Lindau Nobel Laurate Meeting

Time flies by!

Last couple of months were kind of hectic for me with SwapnoJaatra! Its nice to have a break!

Four or five months back, I got this chain email from one of my subscribed group that the Lindau Council at Bangladesh asked for online application from interested individuals for Interdisciplinary Lindau Nobel Meeting 2010. I was hesitant initially. Fortunately, for me, Mustak bhaya insisted that I should apply. I had two days in my hand (the last date was knocking at the door :p). Collected all the documents and applied. There has been a number of steps, initially I was selected from Bangladesh, then I had to apply at the Lindau Committee.

I think it was sometime around May! I got this email from the Lindau Committee congratulating me for being selected! That's a WOW!

Time passed by, required documents started to come to us (Me and Tania apu). Then an email came asking for application from those individuals who are interested to attend EUROSCIENCE OPEN FORUM 2010 @ Torino, Italy meeting after Lindau Conference. I thought, why not? But I wasn't sure about this one, 40 to be selected out of 650! It was a pleasant surprise at the end, I was selected based on my write-up!

Two weeks of Europe tour: 1 week @ Lindau, Germany and 1 week at Torino, Italy.... the journey has just began!

My laptop is running out of its battery charge :( There is no option of plugging power cable at Dhaka Intl Airport, I guess I've to stop now!

Conscious learning at Vegetative state!

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, I'm not a fan of neuroscience per se, but I find deep interest in human psychology and cognition. Its only interest though, I've not yet done my home-works on these subjects!

I first read about the condition in New Scientist, its been a while... (may be I took that issue from Chittagong British Council which means it was at least 4 years back!) The article was patients who lost their motor function, yet have unaffected sensory perception. I wish I could do something for them. Being trapped inside the body and no communication with the world around you... its hard for me imagine how it feels! But we, the human being, survive.

The issue is closely intertwined with the patients in vegetative state, as declared by doctors. In a recent research, it was revealed that some of the patients in this state have their conscious learning part intact and their ability of conscious learning correlates with their prospect of recovering later on. This is an interesting result indeed. I would recommend reading the following link:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=learning-in-vegetative-state

After 19 days... Jackson still going strong in charts

I was checking out this week's last.fm chart, Micheal Jackson at the top: expected. But the way he was leading... most loved, top artist, top track, even in hyped track (some of the less famous tracks of Michael)... hyped artist included Jacksons and Michael's brother Jermaine!

10 Apple top album includes 3 Michael ones!

19 days and still leading all the charts, I don't buy the conspiracy theories, but at least Michael's sister La Toya Jackson is literally right, "He was worth more dead than alive."

Moving my 360 blog to wordpress

Yahoo 360. Once it was part and parcel of my life; Apart from serving as a diary which bears marks of the history of certain part of my life, I had 81 friends, a huge fan base and more than 22000 web visits. Unfortunately yahoo has decided to shut down its 360 service on 13th July 2009. Like most of the fans of this service, I'm utterly disappointed. But at the end, I'd no choice but migrate my blog to other platforms.

There were many options, at least according to Yahoo!

• Migrate to yahoo profile
• Migrate to wordpress, blogger or other platforms

Couple of google searches and I myself found following additional options:

• Import tool at My Opera
• Import tool at Multiply

Yahoo profile seems okay, the only problem is I couldn't find the comments! Besides no image, no html imports. Only texts being imported. Its disappointing. I tried with blogger, but failed due to absence of any sort of import option!

All of the rest three imported part of my blog!!!

• Wordpress imported without the images.
• My Opera imported only the comments.
• Multipy imported only the blogs, leaving the comments behind.

It felt like yahoo willingly ignored its 360 users! Considering all these facts, I opted for wordpress, manually added all the images (wasn't easy with 125 posts!) and tags. Now its in shape, at least to some extent.

The social networking face is missing from wordpress, but at least I've the blog!

I kept the weblink similar to my 360 one!

http://neelsky2000.wordpress.com/

How language shape our cognition

Apart from Molecular Biology, there are certain other subjects on which I've deep interest. Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience (unlike some of my peers who are quite enthusiastic about the subject, I'm not a fan of general Neuroscience) as well as Linguistics. While going through my google reader updates from wordorigins, I ended up in this page on How does our language shape the way we think?

This is quite an informative review on the interface between human cognition and linguistics! Clearly described and well reviewed. Some facts discussed are indeed worth pondering.

Anyone interested in human language development and its effect on shaping our thoughts and emotions should give a look!

I've already hyperlinked to the web-page, in case you couldn't find, the link is given below:
How does our language shape the way we think?

Nature, Science and Michael...

It has been a long day :p Slept a lot, the only productive part of it was going through the current issues of Nature (Volume 459 Number 7250 pp1033-1160) and Science (Volume 324 Number 5935 pp1603-1754).

If you're reading Nature or Science, definitely you're going to find something interesting, no matter what is your taste or interest. Anyway, to me, current issues of both of the journal lacked the usual glamour, generally I cant pick my clear favourate. One article in Science really caught my attention, the group assayed DNA-Protein interaction of ~100 mice Transcription Factor (TF) DNA Binding Domain (DBD); Vol 324 p 1720. Another paper on formation of functional centromere by synthetic heterochromatin was worth mentioning; Vol 324, p 1716.

Nature was slightly better, there were three articles on science journalsim which I thought worth reading; Vol 459, pp 1054-1057. The research article on membrane fusion (p 1091) and correlation between transcription and DNA replicatio fidelity (p 1150) was quite interesting. But I thought the paper on role of mechanical force generated by the first cardiac pump in embryonic haematopoesis is a masterpiece (p 1131).

Last but not least, I woke up this morning and my brother gave me this bad news: The King of Pop Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest. The news was really a saddening one, but we all have to die at some point of time.

Heal the world... Make it a better place... for you and for me and for the entire human race... RIP Michael.

Repairing XP Boot file

About an hour ago, my sister came to me complaining her XP doesn't start! It gives an error message which roughly says it can't find boot file at C:\Windows location. Right then I knew its a mess, definitely the boot.ini has been deleted. So I asked what happened? The initial story was, there was load shedding, when power supply resumed and the PC was tried to turn on, the message kept on appearing. Then she said, she wrote this code yesterday which deletes files and it deleted lots of files in C: drive and she thought its no big deal since the OS is installed in E: drive. By then I figured out whats wrong, I replied although the XP is installed in E: drive, the boot file is in C: drive and now the PC can't find the boot file, thus no start up.

Anyway, despite my initial thought this would be a tough task, it turned out to be an easy one! I used XP installation CD, selected repair option, then typed \help in the command prompt, there was help on command \bootcfg, I knew I was in the right place, I used the \rebuild command, I didn't understand some of the queries of the command, so googled and came up with this about.com article, a handy one, which solved my problem. Below is the link:

Repair or Replace boot.ini file in Windows XP

I thought I might share in case anyone faces similar problem.