Monthly Archives: October 2005

Cite – U – Like — The revolution hits academia

Today, my heart skipped a beat. In seraching for other blogs on cardiac electrophysiology, I came upon a service called Cite-U-Like.

This is huge. HUGE. This is Del.icio.us for scientific papers. You can watch tags like, “electrophysiology” or “defibrillation.” You can watch authors. You can watch journals. You can add articles just by clicking a little “Add to Cite-U-Like” bookmarklet when you’re looking at the PubMed citation. It all has RSS feeds built in. You can import and export in EndNote and BibTeX formats. I imported our huge lab bibtex file, and the author/editor page is a who’s who of people that our lab has cited since… ever. Those we cite more are displayed in a larger font.

This is the human filter for the techno-literary deluge that is composed of all of the articles published every week in academic journals. In less than a year, I predict it will no longer be necessary to watch tables-of-contents as I do now with the major cardiac electrophysiology journals. It won’t be necessary to pore over so many abstracts, trying to figure out which papers to spend your valuable time reading. The community at large will do this collectively, resulting in less work for everyone. Those people most familiar with a particular lab, author, or subtopic will note the paper’s arrival, bookmark / read / tag it, and alert the rest of the world, or at least the part watching the subject on Cite-U-Like.

I’ve been wishing for something like this for a good six months or more. I can’t believe it already existed.

I’m planning on spending a significant portion of the rest of today figuring out how to use this thing to it’s ultimate ability. Well, what are you waiting for? Go tag your articles!

An Odd Night’s Sleep

For the last few days I have had a terrible, intermittent headache. I suspected that it was related to my allergies, but didn’t have the appropriate over-the-counter medication to treat it. For those of you not aware, I’m allergic to just about everything that lives, in one form or another. Thankfully as of yet, I have not developed any food allergies.

Anyhow.

Yesterday I ran some errands and bought some generic benadryl and sudafed (more on that later). Despite my knowledge of the, shall we say, sedative effects of benadryl, I wanted to clear out my head before I ended up with a sinus infection. So I took a full dose of benadryl. An hour later, I felt okay. Two hours later, I still felt okay, but was beginning to feel a bit drowsy. Three hours later (at around 20:00) I was ready for bed and drifting off to sleep.

At around 23:30 I was awakened by what I can only figure was a prank call, with the caller ID number blocked. I need to install a call filter on my phone that just hangs up on unidentified callers. I had trouble sleeping after that, partly because I was wondering who had called, and partly because I had gone to sleep a bit early, and wasn’t entirely tired. After about an hour of lying there, trying to sleep, I took another dose of benadryl (for I was finally due after more than four hours) and was shortly off in la-la land once more.

I woke up at 06:00, I feat which I used to achieve on a regular basis, but have not been able to do as of late. Somewhat coincidentally, I was reading an article on sleep earlier in the day yesterday, which you may find here. My reading was interrupted by my drowsiness, and so I finished reading the article just now.

ADDENDUM 2005-10-23 @ 08:10 CDT: I almost forgot, what I hinted at above regarding the Sudafed is that it is not actually pseudoephedrine HCl. Apparently people have been using sudafed to make methamphetabmine-based street drugs, so many retailers have been switching to phenylephrine HCl. Target calls this “suphedrine PE”, a misleading name if I’ve ever heard one. I heard a story on NPR shortly before Katrina hit about how phenylephrine is supposed to work as well as pseudoephedrine for 90% of the population, and that the other 10% would, in the future, require a prescription for this apparently-dangerous over-the-counter medication. Just as I was writing this I noticed a small warning box in the lower right-hand corner announcing “DOES NOT CONTAIN PSEUDOEPHEDRINE.” I estimate it’s about a 6-pt font, despite being in all-caps. I don’t have enough experience with it yet to say if it really works as well for me, but the reason that I noticed the difference was that I double-checked the dosage. Even though the package, the foil packs, and the pills look just like generic pseudoephedrine, the full dose is only one tablet, rather than two. This is dangerous! They ought to have split the dosage into two pills or made some more substantial note, because I thought at first this was regular sudafed. I could potentially have been overdosing for weeks or months without knowing. This has been a VirtuallyShocking public service announcement.

I’m an INTJ

I know that many people don’t trust the Briggs-Meyers classifications. However, Amanda recently sent me a link to a quick B-M classification quiz and I took it. I thought that I was INTJ from previous tests I’ve taken and I was correct.

What I wasn’t ready for was reading the explanation of INTJ from another page she sent me. It’s like I’ve fulfilled a prophecy since last time I read about it.

Test here, explanations, and specifically the INTJ description of which I spoke.

ADDENDUM 2005-10-22 @ 12:08 CDT : It occurred to me when discussing this with Amanda that the whole Hurricane Katrina debacle brought out a lot of the stuff in that INTJ description, stuff that I’d never had to confront directly before.

A Clockwork Post

Good day O my brothers. I only just this morning finished reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I’m quite radosty that it included all 21 chapters, my droogs, for the last chapter changes the like, entire tone of the novel.

I had previously viddied the movie, which I now desire to viddy once more, and it unfortunately, omitted like the last lomtick of the novel. Therefore, I recommend that if the movie, as is skazatted piques or piqued your interessovat, thou find a book and have a smot at it.

Now for your regularly scheduled post.

Things are pretty quiet around the domy today, with half of the lab out of town for odin reason or another. I’m ittying to do my weekly review (home version — rabbit was yesterday) and then probably run some errands.

I’ve had this strackful headache for the last tree days, and I can’t quite figure out why. It just occurred to me that it might be my new otchkies, which I’ve been wearing a lot since they arrived, but the prescription is (ignoring a focal-length change) the same as that of my contacts, which heretofore have given me no trouble.

Later in the day, I shall proof and tweak the methods section of my paper before handing it off to Natalia for another smot-over. Things are now ittying much better in the writing department, and I think that I have an improved grasp of how to write a coherent paper in a manner that is both followable and technically acceptable.

I have a lot of stuff bouncing around upstairs that I want to post about, “A lot of strands in the starry duder’s gulliver,” as a feller skazats, but I haven’t quite figured out how and in what soviet I should tolchock those lomticks your way.

Later. This will come later.

Farewell, O my brothers. It is the like, end of the post.