QOTD:Thich Nhat Hanh

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.”

Some advice from Dr. Bob

Check it out.

NIMBY Vela Supernova

Oh sure, it’s all fun and games until the bloody sun blows up.

This image shows the devastation wrought when a star explodes. The Vela Supernova Remnant formed when a massive star 800 light years away blew up 11,000 years ago. Expanding at a ferocious velocity, it is now 8 degrees across in the sky — 16 times the apparent width of the Moon, and about the size of your outstretched fist! David’s mosaic shows a stunning amount of detail, tracing the variety of shapes and patterns the expanding gas makes as it slams into the interstellar junk floating around it.

From the always excellent Bad Astronomy Blog.

GtDA poll:What would you do if you had 10 million dollars?

When I was a grad student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the state of Arizona came up with the $1 dollar lottery ticket, promising the chance at the big money.

I admit to buying a few of those tickets (I recall our annual stipend was a whopping $8K, and that was in Reagan dollars). I would fantasize about what I would do when I won–start an ecological institute, and hire the coolest post docs to do cool stuff, and meet once a week to talk about the cool stuff they were doing.

Funny thing, my answer would be pretty much the same today. I think. (I would like to perform the experiment). Of course, I would throw in lots of travel to experience unique things near and dear to my heart. I would love, for example, to hear great orchestras play the Beethoven Symphonies.

It’s not a bad question, really. Since you can’t have more time, what would you do with more money? If you’re in grad school, and your answer has little to do with “finding things out”, or “teaching”, then…fer cryin’ out loud, get yerself on a path that get’s you closer to what you want to be.

Regardless, what would you with your life if you suddenly to didn’t have to worry about the next paycheck?

R.I.P. George Carlin

We’ve lost a good one folks. Academics talk a lot about teaching critical thinking.

I only wish every campus would celebrate, randomly, once a year, George Carlin Day. A day which the lecturer would leave the stage, the assigned PowerPoint presentation would be deferred until–oh, I don’t know, never–and the class would be allowed to listen to an hour of George Carlin. With a Carl Sagan chaser.

Maybe the world would edge a wee bit closer to this side of sanity.

Toward that end, one of Carlin’s better’uns, from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

The Secret News
Good Evening ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the secret news.
Sshh.
Here’s the secret news:
All people are afraid.
No one knows what they’re doing.
Everything is getting worse.
Some people deserve to die.
Your money is worthless.
No one is properly dressed.
At least one of your children will disappoint you.
The system is rigged.
Your house will never be completely clean.
All teachers are incompetent.
There are people who really dislike you.
Nothing is as good as it seems.
Things don’t last.
No one is paying attention.
The country is dying.
God doesn’t care.
Sshh

Welcome to the food web

’spect most of the folks that read this blog are out obsessively writing and collecting data and have little time to spend cruisin’ the blogs. It is field season, after all.

That said, as an entomologist in a department of vertebrate biologists, this video does the heart good.

Happy Friday–Penn and Teller

I study social insects for a living. That said, honeybees have always seemed to be rather wimpy, and thus prone to the kind of abuse in this video.

I’d love to see them try this with army ants…

Photos by Christien Ziegler

GTDA Poll: What software are you itching to learn?

I have two. I have gone as far as buying phone-book sized manuals. They stand on my desk, mocking me, exuding their “new, unused book smell”.

R

Yes, I know it is high-end, extraordinarily flexible, and doesn’t suffer from the bloat and baroque passive-agressive coding of SAS. But I know SAS. I learned SAS using punch cards. And I don’t want to sound like a pirate.

Dreamweaver CS3

Gawd I hate web design programs. It used to be MS Frontpage. An abomination. Currently I use Adobe’s Go Live! CS2. That program!, and the people behind hit!, are personally responsible for the collective loss of about 4 cm! of my stomach lining!. Now Adobe has bought Dreamweaver.  Do I have any reasonable expectation for things to be better? No. But it is integrated with all the other Adobe stuff that I do use.

So have at it. What software do you feel compelled to learn, through some combination of peer-pressure (yeah, Aaron, I’m talkin’ bout you), slick marketing (Oh! A piece of candy! Oh! Another piece of candy!), and serious issues with procrastination? Leave your approach-avoidance conflicts in the comments.

Mac apps for various academic tasks

The software one uses is typically some combination of what you were trained on, what you can borrow…erm…afford, and what you, on a wild hair, decided to try out.

New software cries out like a siren. It offers new features. It will allow you to finally drop that klugey program that annoys you daily. Like the guy in the adjacent cubicle who is way too fond of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors.

But new software is also a seductive opportunity to avoid working on that manuscript. Software invariably has some incompatabilities that are not trumpeted on it’s homepage. And finally, all software has a learning curve. Before you hit that “download” button, ask yourself, “Do I really need this, or do I just really want it?”.

With that warning, if you are a MacHead, take a look at Kerry Magruder’s list of cheap effective mac apps that take on and, in his mind, supercede Microsoft Office, Endnote and a host of other programs that have been around since the Cold War. Magruder, who is a science historian, makes a compelling argument:

Are you accustomed to using one application for everything? A single “kitchen sink” application that tries to do everything usually ends up doing nothing well, while locking you in and preventing future migration to new and better tools. On a Mac, things are different. The best applications tend to be small and agile, optimized to do a small number of taks extremely well. These apps work well with others, and pass information back and forth so that you can put together your own favorite, customized suite of applications that work best for your writing and research needs. Mac users work in many different ways; the abundance of high-quality Mac software may surprise you. Also, don’t let their relative affordability fool you: these are superb apps. Rather than buying Microsoft Office, try Neo-Office and invest in some of the following instead. Soon you’ll be wondering how you ever got anything done without them.

Magruder also has an excellent page on his paperless workflow. It leads you, step by step, through the programs and protocols that start with reading and proceeds through analysis, writing, onto publication.

Go ahead. The sirens are calling.

See also:

On leaving MS Word for greener pastures

Second brain software

5 steps to capturing and storing your ideas

Happy Friday–Isabella Rossellini

This is so cool.

And disturbing.

It’s coolsturbing.

All I know for certain is that this is one helluvan effective way to teach invertebrate zoology.