First day of classes; Bioinformatics
Classes started today at the University of Maryland. Also coinciding with the first day of classes is a big home basketball game against Georgia Tech. Here at Maryland, athletics are more important than academics (seemingly), and most of the commuters can’t use their designated parking lots so that fans coming to the game have a place to park near the basketball center. They’re usually good about informing ahead of time that the parking lots are going to be off limits, but since this was the first day of classes, many people (me included) probably didn’t know, and so dozens, if not hundreds, of people got slapped with a $75 parking ticket on the first day of classes. Lame. I was only “lucky” enough not to get a parking ticket because my lot is far away and they had so many vehicles to ticket in the nearer lots that they didn’t even get to me before my class was over and I exited the lot.
I only had one class today, Bioinformatics. This is the first time at Maryland that it is being offered as an undergraduate course. Luckily, I have a good background in it, both from taking biology, genetics, and cellular biology in high school (much of which I still remember), and also from my activities with talk.origins. Unfortunately for them, a lot of people in the class don’t have such deep backgrounds, and so the first class was full of questions by people who don’t understand the Central Dogma of Biology, or even worse, don’t really know what genes, DNA, mRNA, codons, etc. are. I had just kind of assumed that computer science people would know this stuff because I have some sort of weird misconception that compsci people are smart in general about many topics, but you know what happens when you assume …
In hindsight, I don’t know why in the world I figured this gene stuff would be well-understood and that we could quickly move onto the sequencing algorithms and such.
