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Hello



Howdy, my name is Anson Parker, I am the director of the RAD Lab, located at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.

Apologies

- I'd apologize for my ignorance, but it'd take all night, I wouldn't know where to start and when to stop, and we've all got work to do.

I've been watchin you guys for a few days now and your enthusiasm and work ethic is inspiring. Finally I became so inspired that I ventured from my proteomics / bioinformatics lab and went down to the Arabic Studies department (this morning) and told them about you guys. I said "You wanna know what REAL Arabs are doing about the war? They're fighting it with real knowledge and real solutions, they're making databases and dictionaries." The Arabic department was impressed too. I have been working on creating tutorials on 3D protein modeling for the last couple months, I am using XTAL and Pymol (both open source) for most of the work, and some other freeware, it's actually a pretty long list... but that's not the point - I want to put the Arabic Department here to work translating as many of these tools as possible.

This is my humble effort at saying
1) thank you all for your incredible work
2) The tools I use for proteomics are incredibly powerful, my focus is protein-protein, and protein-ligand binding prediction. This is work that anyone can do -- with the right tools.
3) These tools are mathematically rigorous. Therefore these tools make a perfect alloy for the union of minds. Let us remember why we call them Arabic Numerals, why it's called Algebra. This is already the language of the world.
4) Our goal at the RAD Lab was (a week ago) to provide tutorials / tech support for the University community to use these tools, however having seen you guys in action the RAD Lab has expanded its goals (and its admittedly shabby website) to providing these tools to the Arab / world community.
5) our website is currently located at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~adp6j - The website shows translations that experimented with at ajeeb.com, again, please accept our apologies, we're newbies, but we are dedicated.
6) Are any of arabeyes.org actually in Iraq now? How can we communicate with people there? There is so much apathy here, people need to understand how close we all are.
7) I want to start importing data in an arabic font into mysql - has anyone done this? This database began this afternoon after meeting with the arabic department. It was suggested that perhaps the students could do their homework by putting english in one side and arabic in on the other online... it isn't running yet, but it should be by tomorrow... we sincerely would appreciate your input on this end... hopefully you guys have a better idea.


http://www.people.virginia.edu/~adp6j/form_dict.htm

Sincerely,

Anson Parker,
Director of the RAD Lab


I will be in and out of the lab most of the night, feel free to respond with any questions or comments