Gong Cheng's Blog

The scientific problem that I am running toward is the in silico chemical genetics. In short, I am trying to build a program that can predict the location of the small molecule in the proteom, eventually the whole organism.Given a small molecule and phenotype, using my program, we can identify which gene will this small molecule bind. This will be of great scientific interest if success because traditionally, people needs to do very complex biochemistry to identify the cognate partner for ligand.

Data will occupy all the disk space……

Program will grow out of the control of the programmer’s ability

Computer will be too slow to run your program ……

 

 

All these laws start to apply on my program right now……

原来以为爬山可以减肥。。。

We climbed Mount Si the past Sunday.

 

Mount Si is the most often climbed mountain in the USA. The top reason for the popularity is the easy accessibility from Seattle. It is only 30 minutes drive from I-5. Besides that, the height and the difficulty of Mount Si is suitable for people of different level. The majority of the trail is very well maintained and could be just walk up, the top 1 % of the Mount Si is very steep which provides enough incentive for people who are  hungry for andrenalin.

 

I was planning to carry a water melon with me to eat at the top of the mountain, but fabian said he was planning to carry a tent to intensify the training. So, he replaced his tent with the water melon to help us.

 

The gas price is high, so we went to Noble Court Restaurant for dim sum on our way to the trail head to save some money. 

 

We arrived at trail head at about 1:30. The weather is perfect, the parking lot is full, there are cars park on the road everywhere. This is the second time that Eureka comes, she remembers a lot of fun moments she came there last time. There are not only people but dogs along the way. Some people were volunteering to repair the trail, I value their deeds highly. I think I will try to volunteer someday.

 

Eventually, we reached the top of the mountain. We couldn’t wait to eat the water melon carried by fabian. We were actually thirst and hungry at that time. Eating a water melon at the peak of Mount Si made a high point of this trip. Finished that water melon, we walked uphill, there is still a peak waiting for us. Although not big in size, it is quite steep. It is called haystack scramble. Only that part of the trip was real climbing, other part are just hiking. On the peak, we can see scenic views. On north, east, and south side, there are many similar size mountains. Among them, Mountain Rainer on the south side is most obvious. It will be cool to climb that. After a short breat, we climbed down. On the west side, we could see the North Bend city. Distance creates beauty, it is really beautiful.

 

Another amazing phenomena is that there are considerable amount of snow covering the top of the Mount Si. The temperature is way above zero C, I am still confused about why the snow could be there without melting. 

 

 

Today I took the siwmming class in the IMA. I was a little bit late of the class because I was busy searching the driving direction for tomorrow’s hiking. The coaches are extremely nice to me by tutoring me in person. I do learned a lot about swimming.

 

As I have always noticed, I have some difficulty of the free style swimming. But I couldn’t figure out what it is exactly and how to correct it. Today, the coach helped me figure out that my problem is that I do not turn my body enough when I switch hands. This does sound make sense to me.

 

The other thing is that the teacher recommend us to register for a sprint triathlon for example seafair just for fun.

Went to the dealership to have an oil change for my car. It took me 40$ and 1 hour. Afterwards, the "customer advisor" told me that the valve cover gasket has small leaking problem, I should repace the upper part of engine soon with $225.0. That sounds a lot of trouble. Later on, I checked online, some people say almost any car over 30,000 miles could have the engine oil seepage problem, you don’t have to repair it if it is not serious enough. I think I will probably wait and see what happens… It is just annoying…

 

In the afternoon, I send a email back to the car insurance company to get rid of an item I do not want to lower the payment. I call them a little bit later and made the payment.

 

Half day, 500$ is gone.

 

Anyway, I am still working on my program, it seems it will work very soon, after that I can start writing papers! Yeah!!! Tons of paper!!!!!

Today, I biked to my office and biked back later on. The total length is 13 miles, it is fun…

Today, I swimmed 800M, more than  half of them are in freestyle… I am still a kind of confused about how to breath in freestyle swimming.

Maybe I should go somewhere next weekend if the weather is still this good ….

Today, I went to the triathlon class which is the second time of the series. Only 8 people showed up. I got the time trial for the biking. In 6 minutes, I biked 2.2 miles and my heart rate reached 170. From the Internet, women’s world record for 3 k is 3.30 minutes. What I am doing is a kind of slow in terms of racing.

 

 

From the calculation, my maximum heart rate should be 194, my resting heart rate is 70. So 170 is about 80% HRM. That is a good time trial.

 

What the teacher taught us about the cycling is a sort of intersting because this lets me notice something that I have never noticed for years. For example, when we make left turn, the left leg should be up, when we make right turn, the right leg should be up. This way, the center of mass will be balanced when we make the turns. Well, I have been riding bicycle for almost 15 years, but this is the first time I noticed that. You see, it is so important to learn from other people’s experience.