The Sleepy Rebel

Ahh... 3 am after a fairly successful day.

I should have gone to bed about, oh, 2 hours ago. But i don't care. An early Happy New Year's eve to everyone.

Today was fairly productive. I was able to see where in the algorithm I was getting tripped up for my protein folding project, and I was able to redesign my code so it was much more simplified. Then, I found a standard for writing research papers in LaTeX and went about converting my Bird Flu pandemic report into it.

I should probably explain the two projects I'm working on these next few weeks.

The protein folding project I'm working on is really interesting. Pretty much, I'm implementing a modified Genetic Algorithm first mentioned in a paper written by Unger and Moult in 1993. What it does is simulates a "protein" chain, composed of hydrophobic and hydrophillic amino acids, folding on a 2-d plane. Hopefully this implementation will be faster than that done by Unger and Moult... but hey, we'll have to see.

The second project relates to influenza. I'm sure you've all heard about H5N1. Well, my partner and I did a research project over last semester for our Bioinformatics class, and we have reason to believe that H5N1 has very high pandemic potential.. we have to perform a bit more sequence analysis before our paper becomes more publishable ( according to our professor). Heh. That's all I'm going to say though... Theo (my partner) and I are trying to keep as mum on this as possible, since we are really excited about what we've found. So today I transcribed our paper into LaTeX... good Lord, what a beautiful formatting tool! Our paper is even more gorgeous than before. Tomorrow most likely I'll import all the images in. If I get the feedback from my other professor that I'm waiting for, I'll also do some coding.

Ah. So New Year's eve... should I relax? or continue working? maybe I'll relax for a little while... or work for a little while.. maybe I'll decide in the morning ^-^

Have a good night. It's way past my bedtime.