18 Jan
2005
18 Jan
'05
2:28 p.m.
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:49:35 -0600 (CST) From: James Propp <propp@math.wisc.edu>
While at the Joint Winter Meetings in Atlanta, I saw a rather curious object sitting on a table: a regular tetrahedron made of white cardboard, whose sides were labelled "A", "C", "G", and "T". (Does anyone know who created it, and why?)
A combination of bioinformatics with Dungeons & Dragons...? :-) More seriously, lots of sequence alignment algorithms start from a null hypothesis that parts of the sequence are randomly generated, and compute a p-value from there. You could imagine illustrating this to a freshman class by flipping the tetrahedron die a few times. -- Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> http://alum.mit.edu/www/sgr/ ICQ: 52-377-390