Dr. Claus Volko

The last 30 years have brought new technologies to biomedical research, such as the computer simulation of biological systems and machine learning. Despite that, the pharmaceutical industry is in a crisis; only rarely are new "blockbuster" drugs being discovered. This makes me seriously wonder whether the new technologies are overhyped, and it also makes me pose myself the question whether it is a good idea to keep focused on computational systems biology or whether I should invest my sparetime in some other pursuit. I currently maintain the Web Portal on Computational Biology and I have read quite a lot of papers on the subject already, yet perhaps the whole field is not that promising at all.

When I tried to set up a new ASP.NET MVC project with Entity Framework Core 6, I ran into some problems until I got the database to work. When I finally had success, I decided that I would share my code. "Api_Entities" is the name of the class that defines the database context. "User" is the name of a table in the database.     public partial class Api_Entities : DbContext     {         public string sqlConnectionString = <your connection string>;         public Api_Entities(DbContextOptions<Api_Entities> options) : base(options)         { }         protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder optionsBuilder)         {             if (optionsBuilder.IsConfigured)             {                 optionsBuilder.UseSqlServer(sqlConnectionString, builder => builder.EnableRetryOnFailure());             }         } In Startup.cs:         // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.         publi

The human species is consuming resources and producing waste. Ultimately, this will cause a crash. The time until this crash is a function of the number of human beings that have lived. I do not want to accelerate the crash, therefore I will not procreate.

This probably isn't new, but it is an idea I've had now. When I was younger I wondered why computer programs can compute assignments but are unable to solve equations in which the variable that was to be assigned was not explicit. In fact it is quite easy to program a computer so that it is able to solve equations. The easiest way is to use a binary tree to represent an equation. A binary tree has an operator as its root, e.g. equality, and the operands as its right and left children. It is basically similar to a linked list and can be represented in prefix notation. For instance, the equation "(3 x + 5) * 4 = 44" would be "= * + * 3 x 5 4 44" in prefix notation. Now the computer only needs to know some rules such as that "= + a b c" is equal to "= - c b a". Then the computer can systematically use these rules to consecutively move the variable (e.g. x) to a higher position inside the binary tree than where it initially is, until it reach

While doing research for my job I bumped into the site https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games where old computer games written in Basic are ported to modern languages. I am very fond of this project and I've already contributed a port myself, namely a port of Acey Ducey to Kotlin.

A colleague of mine has suggested solving Project Euler #3 as a challenge. I noticed that his code was working fine but very inefficient. In fact the specification of this task is misleading because it suggests that it is necessary to check if a solution is prime. But it is possible to formulate the solution without checking for primality. Here is my implementation in Kotlin. fun euler3(n: Long, i: Long = 2): Long =     if (i >= n) n     else if (n % i == 0L) euler3(n / i, i)     else euler3(n, i + 1) fun main(args: Array<String>) {     var numcur = euler3(600851475143)     print("$numcur") } The trick is to quit the loop when i exceeds n.

Es gibt nicht nur die physische Welt, die wir mit unseren fünf Sinnen wahrnehmen können, sondern auch eine Welt der Ideen. Alles Denkbare existiert in dieser Welt. Der kreative Prozess besteht darin, Ideen in der physischen Welt umzusetzen.