Name that Ware, October 2012

The Ware for October 2012 is shown below.

I’ll set aside the collection of stumper retro-wares from my childhood basement for a bit and give you this modern ware to ponder. This one should be guessable, especially since I left all the telltale connectors in the photo.

Sorry about the infrequent posts this past couple of months, but I’ve been spending a good chunk of my time as an intern at a local infectious disease research lab. I’ve been hacking the E. coli chromosome, swapping out genes and observing its impact on various regulatory pathways. It’s been very interesting, and has really helped calibrate my intuition on many aspects of biology that I’ve read about, but until now had not reduced to practice. I did a genomic DNA extraction protocol the other day and it was pretty magical seeing DNA precipitate out of solution into wispy white strands (the E. coli chromosome is about 5 million base pairs in size, and these huge molecules quickly glob together into strands visible with the naked eye). It’s also been fun writing simple bioinformatic analysis tools to help sort through various genetic motifs. DNA is way more structured than I had previously thought — feels almost as structured as raw binary machine code — and short snippets of DNA (a few hundred bits worth) can implement proteins with surprisingly sophisticated functions.

So many things to learn…!

12 Responses to “Name that Ware, October 2012”

  1. Julien Lefort says:

    Black magic design H.264 Pro Recorder?

  2. ubergeek85 says:

    Just pulling this out of thin air, but some sort of logic analyzer? Or possibly some sort of capture device intended for security cameras?

  3. Tim Bates says:

    I think it’s a USB oscilloscope – 3x BNCs on the front as inputs, one on the back for an external trigger; analogue front end, an ARM and an FPGA; USB and serial on the back.
    Looks awfully close to one of these: http://www.hantek.com/english/produce_list.asp?unid=153
    I just can’t work out what the large connectors at the bottom right are – banana plugs? A quick Google doesn’t show up anything with connectors like that.

    • Fake Name says:

      The’re 1/4″ TRS plugs. Whatever the device is, it’s almost positively an AV device of some sort.

  4. I think it is an motherboard from some old ancient computer

  5. Dear Bunny,

    long time not heard! But I understand hacking genomics can be more interesting that posting on a blog!

    Can you do something about these spams, there are many wordpress plugins for that!

    Regards

  6. Glad to hear your comments on DNA. Do you believe Intelligent Design theorists may have a case? Have you read Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell? Highly recommend it. Peering into Biology from the computer world is indeed eye opening, dare I say life changing.

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