"...bunte Blätter fallen, graue Neben wallen, kühler weht der Wind..."

…und trotzdem ist es ein wunderbarer Herbst. Fast jeden Tag scheint die Sonne in voller Pracht. Doch abgekühlt hat es sich merklich, sodass ich wieder angefangen haben Mütze und Schal zu tragen.
Am Sonntag waren wir auf der Insel Djurga°rden in Skansen, dem “Kulturreservat” Stockholms. Hier findet man alte Häuser und Handwerksschmieden aus dem vorigen Jahrhundert und “Handwerker”, die hier (zumindest zu den Öffnungszeiten) manuellen Buchdruck nach Gutenberg betrieben, mit purer Muskelkraft Gold schmieden oder Kanelbuller backen. Auch Elche, Bären, Luxe und Seeotter gibt es hier zu sehen.

At Work
I had an exciting week. First of all I found some really interesting property of the BP Algorithm in a one-loop network. I will study this behaviour more thoroughly. Erik meant, that this could gain some attention. Until Friday this week I will create a study-plan for defining the most important questions and tasks to do as well as the time frame for this project. In parallel I will go on with the actual project (Study of BP in a gaussian, dynamical network).
Furthermore in the last week I joined the first two lectures of this years “What is life?” series. This lecture series takes place in the third year, since in the last two years it has become really famous. It is organized by Ingemar Ernberg, professor at Karolinska Institute, the famous Stockholm “life science” Institute which assigns the Nobel price in Medicine and Physiology.
The first lecture on Wednesday last week was by Stuart Kaufmann from University of Calgary, a really famous theoretical biologist, who did a lot of research and inspired a lot of work in biology as well as dynamical systems theory. He more or less introduced the ideas covered in his new book “Reinventing the sacred”- a ode against reductionism. It is a “philosophical” book, arguing against the modern way of atheism and reductionism, e.g. represented by Richard Dawkins. He introduces a so called “natural creativity”, the x-factor of life, arguing that we will never be able (by some reasons he pointed out) to have a “Theory of Everything”. After the talk a student discussion took place.
The second lecture was by Jeremy K. Nicholson, a biochemist from Imperial College London and world leader in metabolism top-down system biology. He talked about Metabonomics as a way to personalized health care and the humans microbacterial flora as well as its incredible influence on the metabolism of this superorganizm and so its health. E.g. there is serious medical evidence that Autism is (in a causality chain) mostly due to a modified micro flora and not a (just) genetic defect!