Sepi K.'s Screen (or Tangle) of Silk on The Web

Sepi K.: As Smooth As Silk...

Name: Sepehr Khonsari
sepi at khonsari dot net
Major: Biological Sciences

[Anteater] Sepi K. as he would appear in his natural environment: either Physical Sciences Lecture Hall, or the Campuswide Honors Program Office.

Three Web Thrills à la Sepi:

  1. A Thousand Points of Sites: Well, almost a thousand points, and almost all of them work. This was a very valuable jumping off point for some of the other finds I made on the Web. Although not all of the sites work and the site does depend on visitors leaving interesting sites. This leaves some of the sites as opportunistic advertising rather than as a "fun" site.
  2. Lite Brite: A site for you to use to relieve the tensions of the day. You get to make the photons that come off the screen work for you rather than have them fatigue your eyes.
  3. Current Weather Maps and Movies :Whether you want to fly around the world or walk out of the Office of Academic Computing labs and stay dry, this is "Weather Central"!!! Beware though that the pictures are nice, but the large weather maps take a long, long, long time to get back to you.

The Formerly Unanswerable, Answered!!!
  1. Do You Have A Voice on The Web?
  2. What is a Transparent GIF???
  3. How Much Computing Power Does it Take to Analyze a Protein?
  4. Where can you get an Appendectomy on The Web?
  5. Where can one get good Irish Coffee, and Islamic Doughnuts?

  1. Do You Have A Voice on The Web?

     The simple answer is, yes!!! I decided to check the internet resources meta-index under the "Navigate" menu of Mosaic. The Meta-Index is a collection of Web resource directories and other indices. "Meta, " based on the Webster Dictionary (on ea, not the Web interface, which provided no answer), means "more comprehensive, transcending," and this index lives up to this definition. At the index, which I opened by accident, I went to the Cybersight, where you arrive into a world of optical illusions, and some sites to jump to. This is when I chose the option for polls. You find that you not only have a voice, but you arrive where you can voice an opinion on which voice you like the best. People can see what current feelings are on issues such as the O.J. Simpson trial. These polls allow one to give an opinion and see total results immediately. I thought, based on television and newspaper "polls", that many people think O.J. is innocent and that they feel that his status as a national "hero" would not earn him the death penalty. After responding to the poll, I found 54% of respondents believe that the death penalty is warranted, with 31% objecting not because of O.J., but because they are against capital punishment. The media may affect people's impressions, but the immediate feedback of the poll on the Web is much more convincing. One aspect to take into account though is the diversity, or lack thereof, of people responding to the poll. As yet, the Web is still a mystery to many people.

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  2. What is a Transparent GIF???

     When I decided to put the above Anteater in this document, I opened an unexpected can of worms. Steve Franklin, instructor of the ICS 1C course, wrote back to my query of how I could get the image to my home directories, and I realized that I had forgotten some fundamentals. Steve reminded me that I could use the URL (that I had discovered) to open the image with mosaic, which would open the "add on" viewer xv to view the image. But I saved the image to my home directories using xv, which made the image retain its white background. This means the image is not transparent. A transparent GIF is one where the background of the image blends with the background the browser has decided to use. The above photo of Sepi K. is an example of a transparent GIF.

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  3. How Much Computing Power Does it Take to Analyze a Protein?

     This was something I totally stumbled upon in a team quest to find a California home page. After seeing that South Dakota had a Web home page, we figured that California must have a home page. On my hotlist is a page of WWW Search Engines. We looked up California at the documentation level of this page, using the NCSA Docfinder slot, and instead of getting pages about California, we found 78 records associated with California. Based solely on the titles of the search results, I chose to look at a page named 1a.Highlights-BiologyA.html. At the bottom, a "button" pointed to the right, and I followed it to Distributing Molecular Dynamics Calculations. This page takes a look at using parallel linked supercomputers to compute the folding patterns of proteins. The limiting factors on computing, up to this point, have been modeling the effects of water molecules on protein folding. It is necessary to account for at least 5000 water molecules when considering these interactions, and this requires massive computing power. It seems that distributed computing allows different computers to work together by giving each computer the task best suited for it.

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  4. Where can you get an Appendectomy on The Web? [Hospital]

    Well, you may not want to do an appendectomy after reading this page (unless you have a strange inkling to use your "sterile" Swiss Army knife) but you can certainly learn how to conduct one in a sterile operating theatre by learning how to become a health professional. The Virtual Hospital of the University of Iowa maintains a page on the medical profession, and an extensive collection of medical journals about radiology, as it is the radiology department at the U of Iowa that maintains these web pages. Something I found of great interest, especially as a pre-med bio-major, is the information about the medical student curriculum. There was also an intersting page as an introduction to clinical medicine. It contained the transcribed notes of a medical student during the spring semester of 1992, and certainly taught me a little about the paranasal sinus disorder (sinus infection) that I had earlier this quarter. I found this site through the USGS biology server reference page which was a part of the internet resources meta-index

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  5. Where can one get good Irish Coffee and Islamic Doughnuts?

     The man to ask is named David (david@gdol.com), and his home page is amazing!!! He is LINKED!!! If you enjoy fine foods and lots of culture, you have found the man, and the web site to check out. This site caught my eye because it has FREE coffee and donuts!!! Coffee and Donuts, juxtaposed by a man that loves all things Irish and also has an interest in Islam and Morocco, where is wife is from. He keeps a neat, tidy, and updated web page, and he even has a region of the page which recognizes the client computer running your browser, and gives you, as a user, (user@rigel.oac.uci.edu) things you might be interested in. He doesn't get your login, but at least gets where you are visiting from. If David's coffee is not the roast that you are looking for you can always stop by the Trojan Room Coffee Machine. A camera is trained on a coffee pot in the Trojan Room of the University of Cambridge computer labs. When you click on the image of the pot, an up to date image of the pot is taken and sent to you in the JPEG graphics format. Keep these sites in mind when working late at night on HTML.

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