Monthly Archives: September 2007

A Poem by Critias

I came upon this poem in “The Open Society and Its Enemies: Part 1” by Karl R. Popper. It is of course, much older than that work, its author, Critias, living from 460 to 403 BCE.

I think one could read much into this poem these days, and it bears several interpretations.

Then came, it seems, that wise and cunning man,
The first invetor of the fear of gods . . .
He framed a tale, a most alluring doctrine,
Concealing truth by veils of lying lore.
He told of the abode of awful gods,
Up in revolving vaults, whence thunder roars
And lightning’s fearful flashes blind the eye . . .
He thus encircled men by bonds of fear ;
Surrounding them by gods in their fair abodes,
He charmed them by his spells, and daunted them —
And lawlessness turned into law and order.

How would you interpret it?

Solvers for the Bidomain Equations

The thing that makes our research difficult, the main reason we need big, powerful computers, is a system of a equations known as the “Cardiac Bidomain Equations”. They are a way of representing both the insides and outsides of cells, as well as the membrane in-between, throughout a piece of tissue. A former member of our lab as well as a current one and their colleagues have just come out with a paper entitled, “Solvers for the cardiac bidomain equations”. It discusses why the system is computationally expensive, and tricks for solving it more efficiently, including multigrid methods.

PublicationsList.org

There’s a relatively new service available on the interwebs at PublicationsList.org. It’s basically Cite-U-Like specifically tailored for on person’s papers — your own.

You can import common bibliographic formats such as RefWorks and Bibtex, and for those in the medical field, directly search for and add papers from PubMed. It then appears (though I haven’t investigated thoroughly) that you can add various details including PDFs of or links to your papers. I already sort of do this on my publications page, but this has a slick interface and is independent of my web server.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to want you to embed the nice resulting list directly in your web page. I’m sure there are ways around this with some clever PHP, but that would probably violate the terms of use. They do give you a nice button though:


Publications list

Similar to .

Their business model seems to be based on getting whole organizations to subscribe to their service, but individual accounts are free. Might be worth looking into if you’ve been meaning to put your list of publications online, but have been too lazy or whatever to type them all out somewhere.

ADDENDUM 2007-09-29 @ 17:43 EDT: Apparently they allow embedding if you are a paid member.