#non-coding

Skritter is really nice, but very expensive.This one looks like it may be ok.There are others here and here too.ReadTheKanji.com helps me with reading (it has a $5/month charge above N5 level), as does doing the tadoku contest when it runs.WaniKani is also really solid for kanji and vocab practise, but isn’t free.

Has anyone tried to use Memrise like this with Japanese input? If so, then you could practise writing kanji and vocab using Memrise that way.

  Origins of genomic dark matter discovered.

The Non-Coding Genome – 9 – 12 October 2013.

So remember in every single powerpoint slide and every single book figure that you've seen about DNA transcription, there's always that one strand on the top that polymerases work off of.  That strand is the shit, the big guy who always gets the final say.  That other strand is just it's complementary bitch that stabilizes it and gets no love, except during cell division… and then it gets all those Okazaki fragments, gross.

So when you hear the words "coding strand", what strand do you immediately think of?  I'll tell you what I think of, and that's the definitive, authoritative strand that RNA polymerases work off of while the bitch strand hangs there.  Except it's not.

The coding strand is the bottom strand because it's sequence is identical to the messenger RNA strand sequence (with the substitute of uracil for thymine of course).  

This may seem easy to remember as a concept, but when you're looking at a shit ton of AAATAGCCGGGCCTA's all over the screen and start to wonder hmm is this the strand that makes proteins or the other one? Should I reverse it?  Should I choose the complementary base pair sequence?  Should I reverse it AND choose the complementary base pair sequence??

Now that I’m on vacation, (yay!) I finally managed to read up on several blogs I didn‘t visit in a while. And like every time I catch up on my reading, I found interesting articles on Lukas Mathis’s excellent blog called “Ignore the Code”.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, he wrote a few posts about the never-ending debate of paging versus scrolling.

What’s not necessarily obvious is that I disagree with his general conclusion:

Pagination gets out of the way. Read a page. Push a button. Read the next page. Repeat. No needless interference with the actual text being read, no unnecessary interactions that could pull the reader out of the book’s world. — Scrolling vs. Pagination, Lukas Mathis

No, it doesn’t: On electronic devices, pagination interferes heavily because you have almost no control at all over how things are rendered!

You Don’t Know How to Break Paragraphs in Advance

This starts with the glaringly obvious things, such as a phone, and a tablet sporting vastly different screen sizes. (Because you probably don’t want your work published on iOS exclusively, feel free to add a gazillion of screen sizes, and display technologies for Android, Windows Phone, and all of the traditional—aka “Desktop”—operating systems.)

It continues with the not-quite-so-obvious fact, that each and any of the Desknot-devices features at least two screen sizes itself: one for portrait, and one for landscape orientations. (IIRC Windows RT apps have even more, because they feature this split window mode, that I’ve forgotten the name of, and can’t find right now.)

So what you’ll end up with, when your product is a book, are paragraphs that get cut into pieces at the page border, causing people to needlessly page hence and forth, when the topic at hand is not a trivial one.

This is not a genuine problem of electronic media—mind you: We’ve been trained to put up with this limitation in text-books for as long as there have been editions in print, and even well before Gutenberg invented moveable type. Whenever the choice of typeface, dimensions of medium, or even only the typographer changed, the breaking of lines, and paragraphs on typographical boundaries changed.

Maybe it’s because I get distracted easily, but short of a herd of elephants passing by my desk, there is very little I find more interfering with my flow of reading, than having to turn pages in the middle of a sentence.

Is scrolling ideal?

Of course not!

For all the reasons Lukas mentions, it is distracting labor. But with smart, paragraph-based scrolling, my hypothesis is, (and I’d bet a “Frachter” of Astra Rotlicht on that!) it is possible to measurably improve interacting with long form text over pagination. (Where by “measurably improve” I mean: reading comprehension tests with a significant sample of people, and texts show higher success rates per reading time for a system with smart scrolling, than for an arbitrarily paginated system when reading texts on comparably complex topics.)

Description of course:

One of the major goals of this course is to give an overview of potential impact of the non coding part of the genome during the cell life. This covers not only regulatory non-coding RNAs, but also unknown ncRNAs such as those emerging from repetitive sequences, both playing a crucial role in the expression and maintenance of the genomes.The course will describe the biogenesis pathways of different ncRNAs, as well as the mechanisms of gene regulation and genome defence implicating these RNAs. It will cover recent achievements in ncRNA detection, emerging findings of novel ncRNA species in the context of development, cellular differentiation and human diseases. Organizers: D. Bourc’his, E. Heard, M. Kwapisz, A. Londono, A. Morillon, M. Pinskaya, F. Toledo