The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression ‘moral achievement’, though perhaps that may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying.

On a whim, I wrote a little wiki type thing in Python that sits on top of an SVN repo. It's incredibly basic, and basically lets you browse a repo and edit files. Natively, it supports markdown as its default display mechanism, but it would be trivial to teach it the meaning of file extensions and have other view templates. The intended use was for a personal notebook type thing, which I decided to abandon. Basically, it's a lot like Jottit, except you actually have all your data, and can replicate it between locations. Yes, it also sounds like git-wiki,but I only found out about that after I've finished coding this version. Although I decided not to use it, someone else my find it useful, at least the codebase. I am offering it here with absolutely no warranty, and you can use it however you like, you can attribute or not, whatever. Since this was built for private use, i.e. no public access, I was going to integrate grep into it, and other such utils, leveraging unix text processing for search, mass editing, etc. So one may be interested in continuing that. I did not implement a facility for adding pages easily, though that's a trivial piece of coding. Code: svnwiki.tar.gz Change the base variable to reflect the location of your repo. Requirements:

• web.py
• pysvn (on debian this is the python-svn package rather than python-subversion)
• markdown

Yesterday I partook in the 2nd ever meeting of the diybio group in Cambridge, MA. The meeting was hosted at BetaHouse this time rather than the less experiment friendly Asgard "irish" pub. I got there early, but soon enough other diybionauts — there is no consensus yet around nomenclature, though biohacker seems to hold most sway — began to filter in. We started by chatting and discussing the proposed activity: the good old party trick of extracting DNA from various things (I posted a very similar protocol in this blog before). The demographics seems skewed pretty much exclusively towards tech professionals and young academics in their 20's. The majority don't have degrees in biology, but obviously, everyone is very much interested in the subject or they wouldn't be involved. A small transhumanist contingent was also to be found. When everyone had arrived, we proceeded with the experiment. We used oatmeal, apples, and humans as sources for DNA samples. I was one of the brave few who volunteered their precious genetic data, and I daresay our DNA ended up vastly superior. Either way, it was lots of fun, and in mere minutes we had actually done some biology in a kitchen. Modest beginning foretelling future greatness, perhaps? After we were finished we quickly covered the biological processes involved in our experiment, and sat down to considering the future of the organization. DIYBio aims to be a beacon of responsible and safe amateur involvement in biotech. A major part of its mission is to provide education and guidance on techniques and procedures. But while pursuing these lofty, and slightly nebulous goals, we will do lots of fun biological stuff, too! When a $100 Transformation was suggested (i.e. modifying an organism for $100) I replied that it may come closer to $200 in the end, One Transformation Per Child someone quipped in response. A lofty goal, but a worthy one! Another idea floated was to field an iGEM team not backed by an academic institution. A sort of "minutes" of the meeting can be found on this thread of the diybio google group. The picture on the left? That's me with the test tube of human DNA. The DNA is the milky white substance visible between the two layers of liquid in the tube. There is also some DNA attached to the toothpick I am intently examining :) Don't phage me, bro!