Category Archives: Tech

Tech

The Church of Google

This is sheer brilliance at work, people:

We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.

We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of “God”, as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner.

You really must read their 9 proofs that Google deserves the title of “God”, and also, their hate mail, prayers, and more at the site.

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.

Fixing Figures with OmniGraffle

Sometimes, someone sends you a figure or image of some kind that you need, but it doesn’t look good — the resolution is too low, the background was trimmed off poorly, whatever. You could ask them to fix it, but often they won’t know how, or it won’t be possible to obtain a higher-resolution version.

When this happens to me, I use OminiGraffle to fix it. OmniGraffle is the main thing that keeps me from going back to using only Linux. There’s nothing remotely comparable to OmniGraffle in either the Windows or Linux worlds. Now that I’ve gushed about it, here’s the general approach to fixing a figure with OmniGraffle (or an inferior vector illustration program).

  1. Load the original figure and lock it down, so that you can use it as an alignment and placement guide and draw on top of it.
  2. Load the original figure in an image editor and cut out anything useful, pasting it in over the background into the vector editor right where it was before.
  3. Draw in the rest of the figure. Often this includes coordinate axes, numbers, labels, whatever.
  4. Hide or delete the background layer and export your new, clean figure.

I also like to do fun things like snipping out sequential images and animating them to make a movie for presentations (with citations of course), but that requires different tools.

Going Paperless and the ADF

An ADF is an Auto Document Feeder. It’s the thing on top of most copy machines where you can put a stack of paper. I’ve wanted to go paperless for a long time, and I’m finally getting pretty close. The thing that closed the gap for me is the ADF.

After Katrina, I wasn’t sure whether my printer was salvageable (it was), and anyway I didn’t have one with me. I had to scan or fax and send a bunch of stuff, so I bought an HP OfficeJet. Modern OfficeJets can scan in one of two ways. They have a classic flat-bed scanner for complicated things, books, photos, etc. However, they also have an ADF on top of the flat-bed scanner. When you use it, the scan head moves over to the far end of the printer and remains stationary as the feeder pulls documents past it. This makes it possible to scan stacks of notes or whatever with the press of a single button. Having such a feeder makes a big difference — I would never scan that many pages manually.

Combined with some sort of optical character recognition (OCR), and the temporary use of paper for taking notes (which are then scanned and recycled), I’m now able to keep just about everything digital. A major advantage of this is that I can just keep all of my documents archived on a remote storage service, and access them from anywhere.

I’ve thought about buying a used Tablet PC on eBay, but I really don’t want to have to maintain a Windows XP machine.