Author: jnalanko

I think we can all agree that nuclear war would be bad. Annie Jacobsen’s new book lays out a fictional worst, worst case scenario in terrifying detail. A bolt-out-of-the-blue nuclear missile strike on the US, escalating into an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the US. The book gives a minute-by-minute timeline of how the […]

My Oura ring arrived in the mail today. In this post I write about my first impressions with the ring. For those unfamiliar with Oura, it’s a piece of wearable electronics that costs about 300 euros and tracks things like your heart rate, body temperature and steps walked. You can view your statistics by using […]

The quadratic function $f(n) = n^2$ is a common growth rate in computer science. How does it grow, intuitively? I’ve found it useful to think about the function in terms of what happens when you double the size of the input $n$. In the case of the quadratic function, doubling the input size always multiples […]

In this post I model the reference sequence U00096.3 of Escherichia coli strain K-12 using Markov models and simple neural networks. The goal is to try predict to the nucleotide in some position of the genome, given some number of preceding nucleotides as a context. Let’s start with some basic statistics. There are 4.6 million […]

Let us start with a brief recap of the biology of gene expression. A genome is a string of nucleotides A, C, G and T. This string is the source code for proteins that the cell can produce. Proteins are strings of amino-acids, where the amino-acids are selected from a set of 20 naturally occurring […]