Two items not related to Open Access (at least in a scientific sense) today that I think you’ll enjoy.

One of the largest “social media” sites (an my personal favorite), Reddit, today announced that they would make about 95% of their code open source, including the algorithm which determines the stories that make the front page.  They’ve got a Trac site set up at code.reddit.com interfaced with a Git version control system.  The code appears to be largely built on Python.  I could definitely see this being leveraged to create some interesting science-related applications.

The second item is completely for fun, although xenobiologists might enjoy it as well.  Spore is an upcoming game from Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, and it looks like it’s going to be great.  The player starts out as a single-celled organism in a pool and has to evolve up to a spacefaring civilization.  The game has been in development for a long time, to the point that some people thought it might end up as Vaporware.  Now, however, it has a release date for September.  Even though the full game isn’t out yet, the Creature Creator portion was released yesterday, both as a free trial and (soon?) a $10 full version.  At first I thought it was weird to release the character creation part of a game as a standalone product, until I got to play with it.  It’s really amazing, but also hard to describe.

When you create a new creature, you start with a randomly shaped blob, which is the creature’s body.  You can move it and reshape it, then start adding parts to make your critter.  The parts you add and the conformations you place them in all influence how the creature acts and moves.  I’m really shocked at how seamless and simple it is.  Once you’re happy with your creation, you can easily upload it to the Sporepedia, a conglomeration of everyone’s aliens.  You can also make a video and send it to YouTube with a few clicks.  The quality of the YouTube videos could be better; I feel like there is a compression issue to work out. Nevertheless, here is one I made:

I can’t really describe how much fun it is to play, so you’ll just have to check it out yourself. If you make any creature videos, link them up in the comments :)

The Baker lab at the University of Washington has been influential in the development of computational tools to model protein folding.  They are most well known for the ROSETTA package, which does a fantastic job in many cases of predicting a protein fold based on fragments of other known structures.

They have now developed a protein folding game, of all things, called FoldIt!.  The user registers for an account on the website and downloads a program which runs the game locally.  As of now they only have Windows and Mac clients, but I got the game running under Wine no problem.

FoldIt! presents the player with “puzzles” which involve resolving steric clashes in the proteins.  The easy tutorial levels teach you how to play the game (which mostly involves clicking and dragging on different parts of the protein), and you’re guided by a funny cartoon version of Dr. Baker himself.  You get points based on how “good” your solution to the puzzle is, and complete a given puzzle when you cross a certain threshold score.

It’s sort of fiendishly fun to play, although maybe that’s just because I’m a biochemist.  It also seems like it would make a GREAT learning tool for use in biochemistry courses.  You can form groups as well, so it might be fun to make a group out of your class and see how highly they can place.

The Science RSS feed this week contained an interesting entry entitled “Scientists, we need your swords“.  Curiosity piqued, I clicked through to check it out.

It turns out that they are organizing a scientific conference in the game World of Warcraft.  To participate, you just need a character on the proper server (Earthen Ring US) and to join the “Science” guild.  The conference takes place May 9-11, and as you might expect is going to focus on virtual worlds research.

If you’re interested, check out the preliminary program.  I recommend creating a character soon… The information states that they plan on raiding an enemy city, and I can promise you that you’ll spend most of that time dead unless you start grinding boars now.

Most of my posts lately have been Internet: Serious Business(tm).  Lest my reader think that all I do is sit in my darkened spire all day contemplating biochemistry and Open Access, I wanted to mix it up a bit and talk about a couple of hobbies I was able to enjoy this weekend: drinking wine and playing computer games.

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