fire at printing shop on Plantage Muidegracht

I'm helping organize AIED2005 this week. It's being interesting, and I'll talk about it later.

But anyway, on Friday, my first job was to pick up some conference posters at a printing shop close to my current lab and my old apartment. I just heard some firemen using a loudspeaker a few minutes ago, but didn't notice anything. Just now, I looked to my left, and saw the graphic shop completely destroyed! I'll have to watch the news for more.

The apartment next to my old apartment was consumed in flames 15 months ago, only 5 houses away from today's fire (all in a continuous wall). Could it be something about the way these houses are built?

I hope they're ok. < friends-only > I almost ordered some business cards for myself.< /friends-only >

UPDATE: Here's the news from the fire department's website.

carbon-dating individual human cells

thread at tdj's about carbon-dating individual human cells (it's a very clever idea):

In discussing the required experimental precision / error, I proposed:

Here's a causation network:

A: atmospheric levels of C14 at time of cell's birth
B: initial amount of C14 in cell's DNA (i.e. at birth)
C: time passed since cell's birth
D: amount of C14 in the cell's DNA
E: "measured" amount of C14 in the cell's DNA (this is actually an estimation based on a measurement of radiation emitted by the cell)

A
 \ 
  B   C
   \ /
    D
    |
    E

In order to infer C, we need to know B and D (this inference step is pretty much dead-on if you have enough C14 atoms (by the law of large numbers)). We estimate D as E (noisy, experimental measurement), and B from A (also noisy, say due to non-uniform C14 levels + random variation in the cell birth process (?); one estimation for each point in history, although this "estimation" may be analytic, not statistical).

How many carbons atoms are there in DNA?
...discussion continues...

I really love making models like this.

I'm sure I've linked to CMU's Tetrad Project / Causality Lab before. But it never hurts to give them another plug.