Hump humbug

Choice? Bah! Humbug!

Control not at initiation? Bah, humbug!

Initiation is often assumed to be rate-limiting for protein synthesis, but the presence of rare codons nonetheless can influence protein levels. In this issue of The EMBO Journal, Chu et al report that when rare codons are positioned near the start of the coding region, 'liberation' of the initiation codon for loading of the next 40S subunit may be rate‐limiting for initiation and therefore ove...

On shunting over a hump

We consider the situation of rearranging freight trains in a shunting yard with a hump and several tracks. Here, an elementary shunting operation is to push a all cars of one track over the hump. On the way back to the tracks the cars can be guided individually to an arbitrary track. The goal is to create one or several trains that have their cars in a particular order. We measure the efficienc...

Two ’ s company : “ The humbug of many logical values ”

The Polish logician Roman Suszko has extensively pleaded in the 1970s for a restatement of the notion of many-valuedness. According to him, as he would often repeat, “there are but two logical values, true and false.” As a matter of fact, a result by Wójcicki-Lindenbaum shows that any tarskian logic has a many-valued semantics, and results by Suszko-da Costa-Scott show that any many-valued sema...

The mid-level hump at 2 kHza)

Shortening the duration of a Gaussian-shaped 2-kHz tone-pip causes the intensity-difference limen !DL" to depart from the ‘‘near-miss to Weber’s law’’ and swell into a mid-level hump #Nizami et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110, 2505–2515 !2001"$. For some subjects the size of this hump approaches or exceeds the size reported for longer tones under forward masking, suggesting that forward masking mi...