Monthly Archives: August 2007

Quick brown eyes

When I was a kid, we used to play this game where we’d load up our NERF guns, shut off the lights and block the windows, and basically play a meatspace version of Counter-Strike.

I often seemed to have a competitive advantage against my friend. My eyes would adjust to the darkness more quickly than his. I had heard that eyes with brown irises (I have brown eyes, he has blue) adjust to changes in light levels more quickly, but it was one of those things — who knew whether it was actually true?

Well, guess what? It’s true.

Science. It works, bitches.

Cardiac Vulnerability to electric shocks during phase 1A of acute global ischemia

Per the SHERPA RoMEO project, it is permitted to self-publish or archive scientific articles from the Heart Rhythm Journal.

As such, I have completed the layout of the only HR article on which I am an author, and published it here. The final version of the article as laid out by Heart Rhythm is available here, if you happen to have access.

Internetting Tidbits

Like my Linkblog post from Monday, this post incorporates several small items that I’ve been meaning to write about, but that don’t really warrant their own posts.

  • Update on my e-mail diet: I’m definitely suffering from fewer interruptions due to my abandonment of automatic email checking and notifications. However, I still check my manually too often. Need to work on it.
  • Everything2: is pretty cool. It’s like a free-form Wikipedia, and includes all manner of fiction and non-fiction. In addition, rather than one coherent article on a given topic, there may be any number of entries from different perspectives. I believe it has also been around for much longer than Wikipedia. (I have contributed to E2 in the past, but not recently). There’s also a search plugin for Firefox et al. It’s handy for Search Brainstorming.
  • Tab Mix Plus: is another great Firefox add-on. Key features that I use from it (though many more are available) are double-clicking to close tabs and opening bookmarks, searches, and typed-in addresses in new tabs.
  • Using Firefox bookmark keywords: You can set keywords for your Firefox bookmarks. For example, my keyword for this blog is “vs”. If I type “vs” in the address bar, it takes me here. “Shortcuts” would be a better name, or “aliases”. Anyway, it’s great to set a bunch of aliases, but not always easy to remember. I took a hint from various operating system menu systems and started putting the keywords in the bookmark titles so that they show up in the bookmark bar menu for the internet. For instance, my bookmark for this blog is listed as “Virtually Shocking (vs)”. Thus, I am reminded when looking at the menu that the keyword is “vs”, and hopefully this will help me remember to use it next time.
  • VirtualBox: is a neat and (mostly) free virtualization package to let you run various guest operating systems on top of others. Similar to Parallels, QEMU, and VMWare. It should be sufficient for most people’s virtualization needs.
  • Rules for adopting a scientific arch-nemesis: Rules include things like “Your archnemesis cannot be your junior, You cannot have more than one archnemesis,” etc, with explanations. I have yet to pick one.

That’s it for now.