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August 29, 2003
Pesky parasites
Back Pain - Q Fever! - Medical Humor
"A 48 year old male is seen in general medical clinic for the chief complaint of back pain, which began 2 weeks ago during a trip to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.
The patient denies trauma or having lifted unusually heavy objects, and states the pain is concentrated in his mid-to-upper back bilaterally.
Symptoms are described as a "heaviness and a soreness," and are worst in the evening, but appear least noticeable when he lies flat on his stomach.
Of note, the patient is only able to lie prone or on his side; he is unable to lie on his back due to excessive discomfort."
Posted by daen at 11:04 AM
August 28, 2003
Rendering sequence data graphically with BioPerl
Abstract
"This HOWTO describes how to render sequence data graphically in a horizontal map. It applies to a variety of situations ranging from rendering the feature table of a GenBank entry, to graphing the positions and scores of a BLAST search, to rendering a clone map. It describes the programmatic interface to the Bio::Graphics module, and discusses how to create dynamic web pages using Bio::DB::GFF and the gbrowse package"
Thanks to Lincoln Stein for this
Posted by daen at 11:32 PM
Faster slithering
Contents
Profiling Code
Profile Module
Trace Module
Sorting
String concatenation
Loops
Avoiding dots...
Local Variables
Initializing Dictionary Elements
Import Statement Overhead
Using map with Dictionaries
Data Aggregation
Doing Stuff Less Often
Posted by daen at 11:06 PM
Reference Manager format specifications and Citation Manager link ...
"The complete specification for the RIS format is provided here for your convenience, as it is the most flexible format in which to change any references you wish to import into Reference Manager. All reference types supported by Reference Manager are supported by the Capture routines for the RIS format."
Posted by daen at 10:17 PM
If you can't go to MIT ...
MIT are making several hundred of their previous courses available online for free - complete with assignments, course notes and examination papers. It's still shaping up for going live in September, but it looks good.
For example, under "physics" ...
8.02 Electricity and Magnetism: TEAL:Studio Physics Project Fall 2002
8.05 Quantum Physics II Fall 2002
8.06 Quantum Physics III Spring 2003
8.08 Statistical Physics II Spring 2003
8.231 Physics of Solids I Fall 2002
8.251 String Theory for Undergraduates Spring 2003
8.324 Quantum Field Theory II Fall 2002
8.351J Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach Fall 2002
8.513 Many-Body Theory for Condensed Matter Systems Fall 2002
I'm not doing any Open University courses next year, so I might keep my hand in with some of these ...
Posted by daen at 10:13 PM
It's only a bit of hail ...
Posted by daen at 06:40 PM
August 21, 2003
Maxwell's House
Maxwell's equations - Wikipedia
Posted by daen at 11:35 PM
August 20, 2003
Lorem ipsum ...
I wrote about Cicero some time back.
The well known placeholder text:
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi"
is based, apparently, on a passage from de Finibus ...
"After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:
"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]
"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!" -- from this page.
You can also read about it here.
Posted by daen at 01:45 PM
Just ...
not in the mood to write a weblog right now. Sorry. Stay tuned. If you can be bothered.
Posted by daen at 12:04 PM