Hello

[Anson David Parker <adp6j at cms dot mail dot virginia dot edu>]

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