O'Really?

June 12, 2006

Bend it like Bezier?

Filed under: book review,sport — Duncan Hull @ 11:12 pm
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Football informatics, theory and practice: Germany 2006

Bayern BallThe frenchman Pierre Bézier knew a thing or two about curves. But as World Cup fever tightens its grip around the globe, it is the footballers in Germany who are showing us just how much they know about the practical science of curving and bending the ball into the goal. Is there any essential curve-theory for World Cup stars like Beckham, Ronaldinho and Thierry Henry to read and brush-up on in their German hotels this summer?

Sports scientist Dr Ken Bray from the University of Bath in the UK hopes that sportsmen and spectators alike will be reading his new book How to Score – Science and the Beautiful Game. This is another popular science book that tries to make fluid dynamics accessible to the layman. In publicising his new book, Ken points out that the new Adidas Teamgeist™ football will unsettle goalkeepers at the World Cup, because the balls move more in the air than traditional ones. This smells of marketing-hype, both for the ball and the book, but it is interesting and topical nonetheless.

Mathematicians and numerical analysts have known for years, the really essential reading for footballers this summer is the famous curves index. These wonderful web pages, free online and completely devoid of hype, describe all the equations for putting the ball in the back of the net in great style. After reading these pages, perhaps World Cup footballers will be able to curve the unpredictable Teamgeist™ ball even more lavishly than before. Just imagine the confusion of a goalkeeper facing a free-kick, when the ball follows a right strophoid curve: y2 = x2(a – x)/(a + x)! This would certainly be more entertaining than the all too predictable and common straight line: y = mx + c that soars over the bar and into row Z of the spectators behind the goal…

Whether scientists, footballers or spectators, we can all enjoy the science of curving at the World Cup in Germany this summer. Bis Bald Berlin!

References

  1. Bend it Like Beckham: The curve ball free-kick (France 1998)
  2. Bénd it Like Bézier: The Bézier Curve
  3. Bend it like Brazil: A perfect example of a free-kick by Roberto Carlos
  4. Bend it like Euclid: Is a straight line a curve?
  5. Computer Graphics: Curves and Surfaces, Bézier representations
  6. From the beautiful game to the computiful game: Nature catches football fever
  7. Goal fever at the World Cup: Why the first strike counts
  8. This post was originally published on nodalpoint with comments

May 26, 2006

BioGrids: From Tim Bray to Jim Gray (via Seymour Cray)

Filed under: biotech — Duncan Hull @ 11:30 pm
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Recycle or Globus Toolkit?Grid Computing already plays an important role in the life sciences, and will probably continue doing so for the forseeable future. BioGrid (Japan), myGrid (UK) and CoreGrid (Europe) are just three current examples, there are many more Grid and Super Duper Computer projects in the life sciences. So, is there an accessible Hitch Hikers Guide to the Grid for newbies, especially bioinformaticians?

Unfortunately much of the literature of Grid Computing is esoteric and inaccessible, liberally sprinkled with abstract and wooly concepts like “Virtual Organisations” with a large side-order of acronym soup. This makes it difficult or impossible for the everyday bioinformatican to understand or care about. Thankfully, Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems has a written an accessible review of the area, “Grids for dummies”, if you like. Its worth a read if you’re a bioinformatician with a need for more heavyweight distributed computing than the web currently provides, but you find Grid-speak is usually impenetrable nonsense.

One of the things Tims discusses in his review is Microsoftie Jim Gray, who is partly responsible for the 2020 computing initiative mentioned on nodalpoint earlier. Tim describes Jim’s article Distributed Computing Economics. In this, Jim uses wide variety of examples to illustrate the current economics of grids, from “Megaservices” like Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail to the bioinformaticians favourites, BLAST and FASTA. So how might Grids affect the average bioinformatician? There are many different applications of Grid computing, but two areas spring to mind:

  1. Running your in silico experiments (genome annotation, sequence analysis, protein interactions etc), using someone elses memory, disk space, processors on the Grid. This could mean you will be able to do your experiments more quickly and reliably than you can using the plain ol’ Web.
  2. Executing high-throughput and long-running experiments, e.g. you’ve got a ton of microarray data and it takes hours or possibly days to analyse computationally.

So if you deal with microarray data daily, you probably know all this stuff already, but Tims overview and Jims commentary are both accessible pieces to pass on to your colleagues in the lab. If this kind of stuff pushes your button, you might also be interested in the eProtein Scientific Meeting and Workshop Proceedings.

[This post was originally published on nodalpoint with comments.]

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