Author Archives: Brock Tice

It all begins when the gates open.

Maria has an excellent little vignette about nerve firing (which is very very similar to cardiac cells firing) over at intueri. Here is an excerpt (whose prose is typical of her excellent writing):

Sodium ions flood into the single brain cell through the gates of channels linking the exterior and interior of the neuron. Other channels along the length of the cell follow suit, opening more gates to allow more sodium ions in. A deluge of positively-charged atoms overtakes the single cell.

Other channels follow the precedence, though they selectively permit calcium, not sodium, ions to join the influx. The excess positive charge soon beckons the potassium channels to open and, with gusto, potassium ions flee from the interior of the cell.

Using your phone as an e-Book reader

There has been a lot of buzz lately about the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader — new electronic-paper-based e-book readers that have a variety of features and advantages. Great. However, they’re both expensive. More annoyingly in my mind, they are also an additional device to lug around and keep charged. They will let you read all kinds of the latest and greatest stuff, I must admit.

However, what if you already had a good device for reading e-books? What if you wanted to read some classics or books released under Creative Commons licenses on it? Then you would be in luck!

A couple of months ago, Molly sent me a link to a new book released under a Creative Commons license, called Postsingular. A link from the book’s page led me to Books In My Phone. This site takes Creative Commons books and those out of copyright, loads them into a simple and effective e-Book reader that runs on J2ME, and makes it possible to download them directly on to your phone. I have so far read Postsingular, Walden, and part of Moby Dick on my phone, and am happy to report that it was a pleasant and engaging experience.

The reader is fairly well written, except for one thing. If you hit the back key when you have just opened the book, it loses your place and goes back to the beginning. This is not so awful as it sounds, for it is easy to skip from chapter to chapter and from page to page. Aside from that glitch, it’s easy to change the font size, page up and down, and (as mentioned) skip around the book. The reader is entirely self-contained (J2ME aside), and (with a few quirks) remembers your place when you exit!. This last item is overlooked in many readers and prevented me in the past from using my Treo devices to read e-Books.

Therefore, if you enjoy reading while waiting, commuting, or even in a bed or a chair, I recommend that you try reading something from Books In My Phone. If you like sci-fi, Postsingular is not a bad place to start.

Also, let me know if you find any books there that you’d like to recommend!

Using UNIX (and Linux) for Research in silicio

There is a rank list of the most powerful computers on the planet: Top500.org. (It looks like they’ve recently done a site redesign for the better.) Statistics on these computers are available here. Of the top 500 most powerful computers on the planet, a measly 1.20% run a non-UNIX operating system (OS). 76.20% run an unspecified Linux (compared with, say a certain version of Red Hat or SuSE linux). According to the overall family rankings here, a total of 85.20% run some variant of Linux. The remaining operating systems on the list are all various UNIXes, including BSD and Mac OS X.
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Request for Critiques

I would like to improve my blog writing. As far as I know, my English is generally correct. While I welcome grammatical and spelling corrections, I am seeking critiques of my writing style specifically. I’ve read a few books on how to improve one’s writing style, and I have subscribed to some blogs that espouse ways of improving one’s writing, but what really matters is how my readers feel about my writing.

After discussing this with my wife (my first critiquing recruit), what I’m specifically looking for are answers to these questions:

  • What percentage of the posts on this site do you read in their entirety? Rough estimates (say, to the nearest 25%) are fine.
  • Why do you skip or just skim some posts?
  • If you are reading a post and suddenly lose interest, do you know why? Too much jargon? Train of thought too hard to follow? If you are so generous as to volunteer some critiques, please pay special attention to this in the future, and comment on the relevant post when it happens.

What have you noticed?