Great teaching technique where the professor states at the beginning of the semester that he will include a lie in every lecture of the semester. This causes the students to scrutinize and investigate every lecture (and pay attention) in hopes of being the first to catch the lie. Great way to focus attention and develop analytical skills.
Archive for December, 2006
Testing google docs. I am just testing to see if google docs will work well for adding posts to the blog….
Let us see…shall we?
Software Carpentry is a great guide for anyone who is new to scientific computing. It covers all the basics and is probably good for anyone who would like to be doing more programming and computing, but is overwhelmed with where to start. I highly recommend it and I refer to it now and again for brushing up in different areas. You can follow it through in sequence or jump around in it at your skill level. It has a lot to offer.
Another attempt at showcasing an interesting Debian package each day. They have already shown one of my favorites along with something I didn’t know was out there. python-scipy is great and has helped me produce the spectrogram I posted about a few weeks ago. And scribus looks like it will be an interesting application to explore further…heads off typing apt-get install scribus.
Overheard in New York is a great site to add to your feed list. You’ll laugh until your sides hurt at least once per day.
More LaTex fun. I realized I could create both a CV and a Resume using LaTex by separating out the sections (education, publications, work experience, awards) into individual files. LaTex has an \input{filename} function which is useful for splitting large documents up. It just inputs whatever text is in that file like you had typed it in the main file. Once I break up the parts, such as education, publications, work experience into different files I can create an uber document that references things appropriate for the CV, and another referencing only those appropriate for the resume. Then I only need to edit the appropriate section file and it updates both, yay LaTex.
Been using LaTex more lately for end of semester papers. I used it previously, using the beamer class to do a couple presentations in a couple of papers, but I am really learning to like it for paper writing, specifically in the IEEEtran format. It is paper writing for programmers in how you can refer to any object by an item description, but it is really powerful for long convoluted documents. In other words it will be great for the dissertation. As my lab-mate says, “it makes even crappy writing look quite good”.
Been eating these for breakfast for about a month now. I have lost about 20lbs. They fill me up and I am not hungry for most of the rest of the day. If you hate oatmeal, well try these, they’re completely different in texture. It is almost like eating a porridge-like brown rice with a really nice texture. They are great with some walnuts and some maple syrup. Would be good with whatever it is you like on your oatmeal, syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg etc.
Just got back from ISEI5 and relatively warm Santa Barbara. It was an interesting conference and I learned about an interesting project going on via NCEAS called Kepler. Kepler is somewhat like ArcGIS model builder for running arbitrary ecological models and drawing upon ecological data sets. It is heavily ontological and seeks to better capture ecological model runs in ways that analysis can be better repeated in the future. Overall it was a good conference, although some of the talks, as with any conference, were quite a bit unrelated to what I had interests in. Ate some good sushi…walked on the sandy beach and grabbed food at the Tri-County market every day. Other interesting projects I learned about were OBIS-Seamap and the various activities at ecoinformatics.org also related to NCEAS.
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