Conclave

Robert Harris' Conclave is a bit of a chameleon, its not necessarily what you expect when you pickup the book from the bookstore or library - at least it was not to me, especially because Robert Harris is being presented as one of the thriller authors of our time etc. 

This is  not at all to his or his book "conclave" discredit, its just that it may set some expectations that may not be fulfilled. I started to read this book with the expectation of a thriller, well it all depends on what each one us defines as a thriller, but if I tell you that this book is all about cardinals holding a conclave to elect a new pope in the Vatican - and thats pretty much it, I guess I will discourage lots of readers - unfairly!! Unfairly because this is a very well written story, the research done is exceptionally good and the result is definitely one of the best books I have read for a very long time - despite it is only about a bunch cardinals in gigantic segregated holy place called the Vatican... which would normally not catch my interest, but this story made me love the main characters, the secrecy and the close companionship between the men... and one or two women.. Given the context of the story one would need some surprises and cliff hangers to keep the interest. Robert Harris is not necessarily such a big cliff hanger master, but he does not need to because his story telling is an all cliff hanger story telling with just the right amount of surprises all the way till the last page... so, great book, great reading!!

Hybrid Cloud 2.0

Almost two years ago Gartner and other analysts and market research companies predicted that nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017 – that's just two years from now (and it did not happen - note of Sept 2020). 

Only a year ago, the interest of a hybrid cloud solution was still very high: 

So, will it happen? Well it all depends on how we define hybrid cloud. Installing a cloud orchestrator may very well account for a hybrid cloud deployment – for some, and in that perspective I am sure it will happen. But of course the concept of hybrid cloud is much more than implementing the cloud orchestrator and by the way, the current technology is still not mature and thus not able to do much more than provisioning a virtual server from a few well-defined providers – at the best!

Interesting is also that the hybrid cloud vision and target capabilities for such solutions are also changing. A year ago we focused on the APIs that is needed to integrate across a large number of heterogeneous providers and enterprises with a cloud orchestrator in order to achieve the flexibility of moving discrete workloads across different providers. Today we are still not able to this, at the best we can do something similar with one or two providers, but not at any large scale. So, what is happening? Are we not seeing the APIs emerging that enable heterogeneous providers and enterprises integrate? No we are not – and a good reason is the emerging and strong drive of OpenStack:

OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. OpenStack works with popular enterprise and open source technologies making it ideal for heterogeneous infrastructure.

Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and helping them move faster. OpenStack has a strong ecosystem, and users seeking commercial support can choose from different OpenStack-powered products and services in the Marketplace.

The software is built by a thriving community of developers, in collaboration with users, and is designed in the open at our Summits.

Only this last year basically all the major cloud providers have issued OpenStack compliance statements or announced a strategy to achieve such compliancy within a short time.

In parallel the hybrid cloud vision is also changing, its no longer a target to only integrate heterogeneous providers and enterprises, but indeed to establish the capability of provisioning arbitrary resources from any OpenStack-based provider, but the ultimate goal is; not only consume resources, but also contribute resources to “any” other consumer!!

This is pretty ambitious, but none the less very interesting. This means that any enterprise that has invested and built their private cloud also can contribute resources to the “world” of hybrid cloud consumers. There are of course “small” issues like ability to invoice for the consumed resources. OpenStack whom predicted this “World Wide Cloud” vision, has already started the billing discussion that might also include resources like applications - so maybe enterprises will have a new business opportunity as SaaS providers…

Ken Follett's Century Trilogy

Despite huge successes like the Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, I was a bit reluctant to start on Ken Follett's ambitious Century Trilogy as I expected something of a thriller style story telling, but that was not what I found opening Fall of Giants, the first book in the trilogy, on the contrary I found myself meeting a Welsh coal miner family and the 13 year old Dave who had his first day in the black and hot coal-mine far down below the ground… not much of a thriller, more like a socio-political story… but things changed rapidly and the author easily caught my attention as he quickly started to weave the socio-political day-to-day life of this small Welsh family into the big events of our European history.

This is where Ken Follett really is impressive and ingenious, he ambitiously tells us the history of Europe, Russia and North America by adding a second layer on top consisting of five families, two in the UK, one in each of Russia, Germany and North America.

In the beginning these families are just any families in each geography as the historical events takes all the readers attention as the author brings in so much details and insight into [unknown] persons and events that caused and orchestrated the big events like the first world war and the Russian revolution. But already in Winter of the World, the second book of the trilogy, you realise that the author has actually planned in details the way he is weaving each of these families into all of the historical events enabling him to tell the history from “inside” as opposed as a historian. This is very cleverly done and makes it easy to stay focused throughout all the almost 3000 pages. By the time you start on Edge of Eternity, the third and last book of the trilogy, you are equally interested to learn what happens to these families as to the development of the history itself – and this is again the cleverness of the author because most of us are much more up to date on our most recent history and thus to keep the attention of the reader the families and their destinies becomes the driving force… fascinating and very, very clever.

On more thing, in a recent TV interview Ken Follett told us about his admiration of his wife, who is obviously a strong feminist, and this possibly explains why all his female characters are so strong – yet another reason to read this amazing trilogy!

I am Pilgrim

Already at the front of the book it states that this is the only thriller that you need to read this year - to me you may very well read any other thrillers as well, but I am pretty sure none of them are going to be as great as I am Pilgrim.

This is the kind of book you are likely to get up in the middle of the night due to insomnia as you just have to read a few more pages to get some more answers.
This is the first novel by Terry Hayes and as such it is of course even more impressive, but as he has an extensive background as screenwriter he obviously knows the writer trade.

Another reason to read this thriller is that it is set in present time and actually make you reflect on some of the very serious and important political and religious challenges we have daily in our current global society.

To me, this is the best  thriller I have ever read !
#IamPilgrim

The life of Arve - or my caterpillar becomes a butterfly

 This is the short [life] story of one of my Painted Ladies raised in my flat in Oslo this summer and released from my balcony together with his four other cousins in August 2014:

This is Arve, my adult Painted Lady (Vanessa Cardui)

Here Arve is just about to "escape" his pupa (chrysalis) after his transformation from larva

Just about to pull himself out

Finally outside, pumping his wings

Almost there!!

Perfect - ready to fly out into the big world and possibly even to south Europe or Africa!

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt is an excellent storyteller and The Goldfinch is a "brick" of a book that draws you quickly into a present time with a small kid who experiences a terror attack and who grows up in very diverse environment and culture that forces you to think through your own life and choices that makes this book a book you would like to last for ever.

Donna Tartt is very thorough and "wordy" in her storytelling, but with very few exceptions I really love her writing and can easily understand why she got the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014.
From time to time, the story gets really exciting and is even close to a crime story, but what I really value the most is her warm description of some of the people the main character meets and gets close to - that even includes his best friend Boris who has a very "bad" influence on the main character, but has his way of showing love under his "bad" exterior that is fascinating and a bit scary.
Enjoy this excellent book it would take a while before you get across something as good as this - and if you have seen some of the great European art in any of the great museums in Amsterdam, the story gets even better :-)

Should I sequence my genome?

Over the last four-five years I have had the pleasure of giving talks about nano technology advances, specifically the very interesting research from IBM on the "DNA transistor"

The IBM DNA transistor

(ref article in NY Times from October 5, 2009) and its prediction of being able to sequence an individual persons genome for a cost of only $1000.
Just in case this does not sound too exciting for every reader, I need to take you back a very few steps to make sure you understand why this is actually is an important and exciting (?) message and technology and why you should be concerned and take a stand!

Every cell in a human body consists of 46 chromosomes that all contains strains of our DNA (thus all we need is a minuscule drop of saliva or even just a skin cell to read your DNA). As we all know the DNA is a double helix that appears like a twisted "ladder" with "steps", each of the steps consists of two different chemicals (base pairs) binded together and forming the "step" on the "ladder".
These two chemicals are either Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine or Guanine, shortened ATC and G. Interestingly is that Adenine (A) always binds to Thymine (T) and Cytosine (C) always to Guanine (G), thus if you "tear apart" the strands leaving behind only one side of the "ladder" and only one of the two chemicals building the "step" on the "ladder", you can actually discard the other side of the "ladder" without loosing any information because you only need to find out (identify) the single chemical as if that is an A we would know for certain that the discarded step of the "ladder" contained a T, and vice versa. The principle of the IBM DNA transistor is actually to read only one strand of the DNA by recognising the very faint electrical signal of each of the four chemicals and thus by reading all the strands in a sequence we will be able to sequence a complete genome which is a sequence of AATTGCATGGACTA....we are talking about an unique sequence of 5.3 billion steps (base pairs) that comprises your unique genome.

But hold your breath, out of your complete genome only about 2% is your genes, our exome. A human have about 20-25.000 genes that constitutes our exome, the rest is "junk" DNA (about 98%). Each gene consist of about 20-25.000 steps (base pairs), the longest is about 2 million base pairs long. These genes and their base pair sequence (ATCG) constitutes the recipe for a specific protein.

More fascinating metrics, all humans shares 99,8% of their genes and we share 90% with a banana! Also, the larva and the butterfly share 100% of the DNA, but recent research tells us that the human exome actually changes over its life cycle. As each cell in the human body is holding our entire genome and is being replicated over a periode of 7-10 years, its only "natural" to expect that during this process, from time to time, something goes wrong, this is what causes mutations. But also recent research (epigenetics) tells us that both environment and your lifestyle may introduce mutations, thus identical twins are not identical over the years as they typically are inclined to be exposed to different environments and lifestyle.

Now we are at the core of this story as we know that the genes are being inherited by our children, 50% from each parent and thus each one of us has 50% of the genes from our parents and what has the history told us about illness and traits we have inherited from our parents? Some are visible, like eye colours, but others are pretty serious:

• Huntington's disease (dominant mutation on chromosome 4)
• Cystic fibrosis (recessive mutation on chromosome 7) 
• A mutation on chromosomes 2 can provide colon cancer ...
• FTO gene on chromosomes 16 and increased risk of being overweight.
• BRCA1 can show weather a patient is predisposed for breast and ovarian cancer

My point is that some of our inherited mutations and defects are important to be aware in order to take preventive measures (like BRCA1), others are only dispositions and may not have an effect at all, but would you still like to know? Would you like to have your entire "book of life" printed so that you get a full view of all your traits and dispositions?

Even though the IBM prediction of sequencing your entire genome for $1000 has not yet come true, the cost being charged by multiple commercial labs are on a level that most people can afford, would it not be great to have all this information available for your doctor's insight into what can be expected in terms of future serious disease - is that what we want?

What about if your genome gets astray - that your  insurance company or even your employer gets information about a disposition that is not giving you the same life expectancy as the "common man"?
Does everyone have a clear opinion about the use of their genome - and what about the authorities - have they regulated who can use what? We know the police uses DNA to identify criminals, but that is, as of today, only part of the junk DNA that possibly cannot be used for any other purposes than unique identification.

If you sequence your DNA, would you share all the info with your children? They have, after all, inherited 50% and thus have inherited some of your potential dispositions for serious diseases. There are multiple ethical challenges and implications, for instance, if you give your genome to some "innocent" research project that anonymize all the samples (at least that is what they tell you) and the researcher finds out that your genome exposes a serious disease - should the researcher go back and warn you to make sure it does not kill you? After all, the fact that the genome has been anonymized does not prevent the researcher to find out it is you as one cannot anonymize something that is unique? If we have a database with genomes you will be able to search and compare and find the owner provided the owner is already in the genome database.

It is a bit of a surprise that we actually dont have much of a public debate on this very essential and important subject! There are lots of debates around cyber security and protection of your internet id's, but what about your unique genome - you cannot have a new genome just because someone has misused your genome and the information therein! We all need to make sure that the information we are disclosing when we let the hospital sequence our genome for the good purpose of pro-active medications and treatments of inherited disposition for serious diseases stays protected and is not being misused for other purposes!
We all want to make the gene-sequencing a success as it brings a lot of great opportunities to a better health for all of us, its just that we also need to have the process and access regulated to avoid misuse!

References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/science/06dna.html?_r=0 
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whole-genome-sequencing-predict-disease/ 
http://functionalbio.com/web/services-dna-sequencing.php?gclid=CMn9tsLjkb4CFQTbcgodJG4AXQ 
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jun/08/genome-sequenced