Fibre Optics in 5 Minutes

Technology

“How shall we cross the river?” asked Dorothy.

“That is easily done,” replied the Scarecrow. “The Tin Woodman must build us a raft, so we can float to the other side.”

So the Woodman took his axe and began to chop down small trees to make a raft, and while he was busy at this the Scarecrow found on the riverbank a tree full of fine fruit. This pleased Dorothy, who had eaten nothing but nuts all day, and she made a hearty meal of the ripe fruit.

But it takes time to make a raft, even when one is as industrious and untiring as the Tin Woodman, and when night came the work was not done. So they found a cozy place under the trees where they slept well until the morning; and Dorothy dreamed of the Emerald City, and of the good Wizard Oz, who would soon send her back to her own home again.

Our little party of travelers awakened the next morning refreshed and full of hope, and Dorothy breakfasted like a princess off peaches and plums from the trees beside the river. Behind them was the dark forest they had passed safely through, although they had suffered many discouragements; but before them was a lovely, sunny country that seemed to beckon them on to the Emerald City.

To be sure, the broad river now cut them off from this beautiful land. But the raft was nearly done, and after the Tin Woodman had cut a few more logs and fastened them together with wooden pins, they were ready to start. Dorothy sat down in the middle of the raft and held Toto in her arms. When the Cowardly Lion stepped upon the raft it tipped badly, for he was big and heavy; but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman stood upon the other end to steady it, and they had long poles in their hands to push the raft through the water.

They got along quite well at first, but when they reached the middle of the river the swift current swept the raft downstream, farther and farther away from the road of yellow brick. And the water grew so deep that the long poles would not touch the bottom.

“This is bad,” said the Tin Woodman, “for if we cannot get to the land we shall be carried into the country of the Wicked Witch of the West, and she will enchant us and make us her slaves.”

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Onions and the Dark Web

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Productivity

The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than in any other part.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.

*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.

For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.

“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.

“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Politics

 

It’s a beautiful life

Tuning Rigidity of Tissue Scaffolds

Biology

Using scaffoldings to improve tissue regeneration has been a staple of medicine for thousands of years, with the Egyptians and Romans using splints to aid recovery of bone fractures. Bringing this technology into the 21st century, next-generation internal scaffoldings are being developed using polypeptide amphiphile (PA) based nanofiber gel matrices. These scaffoldings can be non-invasively injected, and can provide both a platform for tissue regeneration, and a delivery mechanism for cell therapy or bioactive signalling. Following studies showing the dependence of cell biology on gel stiffness, Pashuk and colleagues endeavoured to tailor the mechanical properties of the gel matrix by altering the molecular structure of constituent PAs, and in doing so reach for a key target in regenerative medicine.

Fig. 1: Typical polypeptide amphiphile structure investigated in the paper. This example has formula C16H31O- (Val)3-(Ala)3-(Glu)3. The hydrophobic alkyl chain, β-sheet forming peptide and bioactive residues are labelled.

The stiffness of the gel matrix was tailored by adjusting the chemical structure of the β-sheet forming region of the PAs. This method was chosen because in self-assembly, the PAs first aggregate by hydrophobic collapse, then form the nanofibers as a result of the secondary structure caused by the alignment of β-sheets. The outer peptide is tailored for biological signalling and for control over self-assembly by ionisation of side-chains. The β-sheets are the main regulator of the fibre structure, and forces between sheets dictate the rigidity of the fibre. Valine highly favours β-sheet formation, and alanine favours α-helix formation. By varying the sequencing and length of the valine/alanine peptide, the β-sheets are distorted and hydrogen bonding between layers is affected, altering the stiffness of the entire gel matrix. 

Fig. 2: Representation of the twisted geometry in polypeptide amphiphile nanofibers due to β-sheet distortions.

Circular dichroism was used to confirm distortion to the β-sheets by observing a red-shift relative to the expected signal. The distortions lead to an angling of sheets relative to one another, which results in the PAs forming a twisted geometry around the central axis of the fibre as illustrated in figure 2. A combination of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and rheological analysis indicated PAs which form stiffer gels tend to have their internal hydrogen bonds aligned with the fibre axis, which is consistent with distortions to the β-sheets decreasing fibre stiffness. It is also possible that the twisted geometry may have affected the fibre length and entanglement, however this was not able to be studied in this paper due to technical limitations. The paper found that all factors tested, including β-sheet length, valine-alanine ratio, and sequencing of the amino acids, affected the gel stiffness to varying degrees. Combining these was shown to be a highly effective method of tuning gel stiffness, and a step towards improved tissue scaffoldings for regenerative medicine.

References

Pashuck, E. T., Cui, H., & Stupp, S. I. (2010). Tuning Supramolecular Rigidity of Peptide Fibers through Molecular Structure. J. Am. Chem. Soc. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 132(17), 6041-6046. doi:10.1021/ja908560n

Hello world!

Uncategorized

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

This Website’s Not Bad, Hey

Technology

So What’s The Big Deal?

The big deal is that it actually works! How cool is that!!

  1. Very Cool
  2. Super Cool

I might even quote myself on that:

This is very cool

Yarp. H2O

I Made This Post In WordPress Dynamically

Politics

Isn’t it fab??

Here’s a post!

Environment

And here’s the content!

Hello world!

Politics

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

 

 

It’s this easy to make a new article!

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Headings

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Header three

Header four

Header five
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Blockquotes

Single line blockquote:

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Multi line blockquote with a cite reference:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Steve Jobs – Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference, 1997

Tables

Employee Salary
John Doe $1 Because that’s all Steve Jobs needed for a salary.
Jane Doe $100K For all the blogging she does.
Fred Bloggs $100M Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? So Jane x 1,000.
Jane Bloggs $100B With hair like that?! Enough said…

Definition Lists

Definition List Title
Definition list division.
Startup
A startup company or startup is a company or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
#dowork
Coined by Rob Dyrdek and his personal body guard Christopher “Big Black” Boykins, “Do Work” works as a self motivator, to motivating your friends.
Do It Live
I’ll let Bill O’Reilly will explain this one.

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1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
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Acronym Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

The acronym ftw stands for “for the win”.

Big Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

These tests are a big deal, but this tag is no longer supported in HTML5.

Cite Tag

“Code is poetry.” —Automattic

Code Tag

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}

Quote Tag

Developers, developers, developers… –Steve Ballmer

Strike Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

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Strong Tag

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Subscript Tag

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Superscript Tag

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Variable Tag

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Welcome to image alignment! The best way to demonstrate the ebb and flow of the various image positioning options is to nestle them snuggly among an ocean of words. Grab a paddle and let’s get started.

On the topic of alignment, it should be noted that users can choose from the options of NoneLeftRight, and Center. In addition, they also get the options of ThumbnailMediumLarge & Fullsize.

Image Alignment 580x300

The image above happens to be centered.

Image Alignment 150x150The rest of this paragraph is filler for the sake of seeing the text wrap around the 150×150 image, which is left aligned.

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And now for a massively large image. It also has no alignment.

Image Alignment 1200x400

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Image Alignment 300x200

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In just a bit here, you should see the text start to wrap below the right aligned image and settle in nicely. There should still be plenty of room and everything should be sitting pretty. Yeah… Just like that. It never felt so good to be right.

And just when you thought we were done, we’re going to do them all over again with captions!

Image Alignment 580x300
Look at 580×300 getting some caption love.

The image above happens to be centered. The caption also has a link in it, just to see if it does anything funky.

Image Alignment 150x150
Itty-bitty caption.

The rest of this paragraph is filler for the sake of seeing the text wrap around the 150×150 image, which is left aligned.

As you can see the should be some space above, below, and to the right of the image. The text should not be creeping on the image. Creeping is just not right. Images need breathing room too. Let them speak like you words. Let them do their jobs without any hassle from the text. In about one more sentence here, we’ll see that the text moves from the right of the image down below the image in seamless transition. Again, letting the do it’s thang. Mission accomplished!

And now for a massively large image. It also has no alignment.

Image Alignment 1200x400
Massive image comment for your eyeballs.

The image above, though 1200px wide, should not overflow the content area. It should remain contained with no visible disruption to the flow of content.

Image Alignment 300x200
Feels good to be right all the time.

And now we’re going to shift things to the right align. Again, there should be plenty of room above, below, and to the left of the image. Just look at him there… Hey guy! Way to rock that right side. I don’t care what the left aligned image says, you look great. Don’t let anyone else tell you differently.

In just a bit here, you should see the text start to wrap below the right aligned image and settle in nicely. There should still be plenty of room and everything should be sitting pretty. Yeah… Just like that. It never felt so good to be right.

And that’s a wrap, yo! You survived the tumultuous waters of alignment. Image alignment achievement unlocked!

Markup: Text Alignment

Markup

Default

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Left Align

This is a paragraph. It is left aligned. Because of this, it is a bit more liberal in it’s views. It’s favorite color is green. Left align tends to be more eco-friendly, but it provides no concrete evidence that it really is. Even though it likes share the wealth evenly, it leaves the equal distribution up to justified alignment.

Center Align

This is a paragraph. It is center aligned. Center is, but nature, a fence sitter. A flip flopper. It has a difficult time making up its mind. It wants to pick a side. Really, it does. It has the best intentions, but it tends to complicate matters more than help. The best you can do is try to win it over and hope for the best. I hear center align does take bribes.

Right Align

This is a paragraph. It is right aligned. It is a bit more conservative in it’s views. It’s prefers to not be told what to do or how to do it. Right align totally owns a slew of guns and loves to head to the range for some practice. Which is cool and all. I mean, it’s a pretty good shot from at least four or five football fields away. Dead on. So boss.

Justify Align

This is a paragraph. It is justify aligned. It gets really mad when people associate it with Justin Timberlake. Typically, justified is pretty straight laced. It likes everything to be in it’s place and not all cattywampus like the rest of the aligns. I am not saying that makes it better than the rest of the aligns, but it does tend to put off more of an elitist attitude.

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Technology

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

(more…)

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Bell on Wharf
Bell on wharf in San Francisco

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chunk of resinous blackboy husk
Chunk of resinous blackboy husk, Clarkson, Western Australia. This burns like a spinifex log.

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“I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, ’cause what you’re there for is to please the people.”

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Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
Mark Twain

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Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names.

Costello: Funny names?

Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third–

Costello: That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.

Abbott: I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third–

Costello: You know the fellows’ names?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Well, then who’s playing first?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow’s name on first base.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The fellow playin’ first base.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy on first base.

Abbott: Who is on first.

Costello: Well, what are you askin’ me for?

Abbott: I’m not asking you–I’m telling you. Who is on first.

Costello: I’m asking you–who’s on first?

Abbott: That’s the man’s name.

Costello: That’s who’s name?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: When you pay off the first baseman every month, who gets the money?

Abbott: Every dollar of it. And why not, the man’s entitled to it.

Costello: Who is?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: So who gets it?

Abbott: Why shouldn’t he? Sometimes his wife comes down and collects it.

Costello: Who’s wife?

Abbott: Yes. After all, the man earns it.

Costello: Who does?

Abbott: Absolutely.

Costello: Well, all I’m trying to find out is what’s the guy’s name on first base?

Abbott: Oh, no, no. What is on second base.

Costello: I’m not asking you who’s on second.

Abbott: Who’s on first!

Costello: St. Louis has a good outfield?

Abbott: Oh, absolutely.

Costello: The left fielder’s name?

Abbott: Why.

Costello: I don’t know, I just thought I’d ask.

Abbott: Well, I just thought I’d tell you.

Costello: Then tell me who’s playing left field?

Abbott: Who’s playing first.

Costello: Stay out of the infield! The left fielder’s name?

Abbott: Why.

Costello: Because.

Abbott: Oh, he’s center field.

Costello: Wait a minute. You got a pitcher on this team?

Abbott: Wouldn’t this be a fine team without a pitcher?

Costello: Tell me the pitcher’s name.

Abbott: Tomorrow.

Costello: Now, when the guy at bat bunts the ball–me being a good catcher–I want to throw the guy out at first base, so I pick up the ball and throw it to who?

Abbott: Now, that’s he first thing you’ve said right.

Costello: I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!

Abbott: Don’t get excited. Take it easy.

Costello: I throw the ball to first base, whoever it is grabs the ball, so the guy runs to second. Who picks up the ball and throws it to what. What throws it to I don’t know. I don’t know throws it back to tomorrow–a triple play.

Abbott: Yeah, it could be.

Costello: Another guy gets up and it’s a long ball to center.

Abbott: Because.

Costello: Why? I don’t know. And I don’t care.

Abbott: What was that?

Costello: I said, I DON’T CARE!

Abbott: Oh, that’s our shortstop!

Antidisestablishmentarianism

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