Santa knew EXACTLY what this clean eater needed and he HOOKED me up!  Thanks Santa, you’re the best!

If you read this blog you know what a fan I am of the Nicer Dicer!  (BTW, this fabulous product is available from QVC in AWESOME colors now, around $40, and it also now has a third chopping size-COOL!  I paid $20 for the white one before it was a QVC favorite and you can still find it on ebay for $20 and under. Video demo of Nicer Dicer can be seen if you click above the product photo on the video tab, at QVC).

In looking for a few Nicer Dicers to give as gifts I discovered another fabulous product they make called the Genius Snap N Slice 5 Piece Food Wedger and Multi Slicer!  Umm, hello…how did I NOT KNOW about this?  So I asked and Santa delivered.  (ebay again, can get them for under $10, or around $20 on Amazon)

This is perfect for:  cucumber slices, mushroom slices, lemon wedges, strawberries, egg slices, radishes, beets, tomato wedges, zucchini’s so forth.  For me this is perfect for when a recipe calls for just a handful of wedges, slices, or chunks.  Not for heavy dicing.  Also perfect for throwing together a salad super-quickly that looks like you spent hours preparing as far as the dicing and prep goes!  Pretty!

I also come across recipes almost weekly that call for veggies to have been prepped via a mandolin.  Now I don’t care how much you might like to slice, there is really no way to get pieces all as thin an in uniform sizes (so they cook evenly) as a mandolin will.  The down-side of mandolin’s… they are another item to store, and they are not cheap (if you get a good one).  Well Santa brought me the Adjustable Kyocera slicer/mandolin with a ceramic blade (which means I do not need to replace it or swap it out) and come to find it is only $25!  I have used it twice (yes twice since yesterday) and I love it!  The slice size is easy to adjust and it is super simple, with cleanup being a snap!

Again, if you only want one thing to assist you in prep work, get the Nicer Dicer!

RNAi is an arrestingly interesting little mechanism for protecting the health of cells. The “i” stands for interference, and with good reason. RNAi is made up of a series of molecules which work to detect and destroy possible viruses and RNA which could be viruses.

It was first detected in 1986 when an attempt was made to make a really, really purple flower. The reason was purely for aesthetics, but it would prove to be far more important.

Knowing the gene which coded for purple pigmentation in petunias, geneticists made the logical conclusion and figured adding a bunch of those genes to the flowers would increase the depth of purple coloring in them. But as it turned out, they were wrong. In fact, they were remarkably wrong. Instead of deep purple flowers, they produced white flowers. Not a hint of purple anywhere.

No one had an answer to why would be. It took 12 years until researchers came up with the answer (and another 8 until they were awarded a Nobel Prize).

When viruses invade a cell, they ’seek’ to make copies of themselves by utilizing the available DNA source. Post-transcription, this comes out with a funny shape due to the RNA making a mirror image of itself. The RNAi then recognizes this strange shape and destroys it with dicers. But it doesn’t stop there. Any sequence which comes out of the nucleus thereafter is also destroyed. This prevents any of the viruses (hopefully) from being translated and replicating (thus exploding out of the cell and infecting other cells).

Something similar happened when the geneticists tried making the super purple flowers. There wasn’t a mirror-image RNA sequence, but there was a funny sort of shape created by all the extra purple pigmentation genes. The RNAi recognized this as a potential virus and began destroying it. All of it. This meant there were no genes for purple getting translated into proteins.

Example petunia plants in which genes for pigmentation are silenced by RNAi. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rnai)

So far this is pretty exciting stuff. It’s a post-transcriptional defense mechanism against viruses no one ever knew existed. But it has so much more potential than just as a passing curiosity.

Think about it. If RNAi can essentially turn off genes by destroying them through a sort of sequence-detection, then what stops it from curing diseases? This discovery has the serious potential to cure all the major ailments facing the world today: AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer’s. There has already been success in treating macular degeneration. This is a disease where too many blood vessels are growing in the eye. It damages the retina over time and makes vision majorly cloudy and blurry. There are simply too many genes for blood vessels being produced. But one way to stop this disease is to stop that blood vessel growth. To achieve this, a patient is given an injection which contains a copy of the gene with its mirror image (two mirror strands of DNA). The RNAi detects this misshape and destroys it. It then destroys all other likewise sequences. The same principle could be applied to any number of diseases.

There is an excellent NOVA video on RNAi which can be viewed here. It’s certainly worth watching (and only 15 minutes long).

Website now live for Dicer! download. Have fun and please add any comments and suggestions here.

Download Dicer!

http://www.coralquest.com/dicer/

Can you beat my high score of 286??

Incidentally – have added a temporary icon from wikipedia (search for dice). It’s on a share and share alike license, so consider this my attribution. Thx.

The original dice graphics were done in less than 2 minutes. I spent a little longer to get them lined up properly and added a little specular highlight to imply a little depth. Also surrounded the chosen dice in a little box, makes the results much easier to read. Also fixed a bug where previous scores were reset to zero (visible in the previous post’s screenshot on Four of a kind which should read 26/30) – problem was an uninitialised array.

Well Snow Leopard has put my gas at a peep a little bit. My Pendulum Sync software works quite well until I’m forced to think about different versions of OSX, especially when there have been serious changes under the hood. I’ll still continue with Pendulum Sync though, it’s a good idea that needs doing. I can use online sync services (like dropbox for example) to share my files, but for those mysterious repositories hidden within applications (like delicious library for example), pendulum sync will be the way to do it.

Anyway, the title of this post is diversion. I’m currently reading O’Reilly’s head first Object Oriented Analysis & Design. I’m rather enjoying the Head First approach with all the little doodles etc. The Head First book challenged me to think about my last major project with an eye to improving the architectural decisions therein. Now most of my work is paper based with forrays into database design and report writing, so I didn’t really have a project to be working with (the design of P.Sync is very classical, so it didn’t suit the requirements for OO analysis and design).

I needed a project to work through to become a perfect example of OO design. I was also stuck on an aeroplane for 13 hours with (crap) movies that I’d already watched on the road out. My (very retro) mobile phone has one redeeming feature – yahtzee! so I decided to write a Yahtzee! implementation for OSX. I’m guessing that Yahtzee! is a trademark, so I’ll use the name Dicer!

After the flight was finished, here is the result. Features straight Yahtzee! scoring (no bonus), ‘n’ players and crucially uses an AppController -> Players -> Player -> Dice -> Die object model. Now I’m sure that the AppController knows way too much about how dice work etc. but I think I’ve got a good model to build upon.

Side branch is teaching the computer to play against me, my mobile phone can do it, so how hard can it be!