RMstudents Technology meets medical education

Learn the principles of chemistry with the Chemical Party video [hat tip Peter Srinu].

I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look.

In traditional Lifehacker style, I’ll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat and MusicTracker (displays currently playing song in my away message) plugins. I’m using 3 Screenlets: Now Playing (displays currently playing track and album art), Sysmonitor (displays current system information) and Trash. Finally, it shows one of my new favorite productivity applications: Gnome Do. “Do” is a launcher that can be extended by a number of plugins. For example, you type Super(Win)+Space to launch Do and then start typing what you want to do. Start typing an artist’s name, like “beat”, and then pressing “enter” will open all my Beatles songs in Rhythmbox. Typing the first few letters of a friend’s screen name and then “enter” will open a chat with them in Pidgin. Those types of things are useful. Oh, and I got my wallpaper from iunewind.com.

My August 08 Desktop featuring Avant, Pidgin, Now Playing Screenlet, Sysmonitor Screenlet, and Gnome-Do

Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.

A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson’s easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to come by. This technique was developed for ALS, and it’s been applied to 10 new diseases.

The full list of diseases represented: adenosine deaminase deficiency-related severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome (SBDS), Gaucher disease (GD) type III, Duchenne (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD), Parkinson disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), juvenile-onset, type 1 diabetes mellitus (JDM), Down syndrome (DS)/trisomy 21, and the carrier state of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

Sound like a list of diseases we studied in class, anyone?

A comment on Mark Pilgrim’s Hello Darkness My Old Friend:

“No one cares about freedoms for the same reason that no one cares about oxygen. As long as they’re there, why bother? Freedom zero is so abstract to most people that no one even thinks about it, let alone care. It’s like the string theory. It’s only when things are taken away that there’s reason to get upset.” -Jesper

For those who are unfamiliar, Freedom 0 is one of four freedoms listed in the Free Software Definition:

“The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.”

So I went to check out the replay of last night’s phenomenal 4×100 Men’s relay only to find an annoyingly disturbing message: the NBC Olympics vidoes don’t “support” Linux. First of all, what kind of ludicrous claim is that? They’re freakin’ videos. If I’ve got the correct codecs installed, then I’ll be able to watch them. If I don’t, then I won’t. And what is this? 1998? Who still designs a website for only a select few browsers? I know I reported that the FAFSA website does, but at least theirs turned out to be just a warning, and it lets you continue anyways. Shouldn’t something like coverage of the Olympics be accessible to anyone, especially since broadcast coverage seems so locked down? They currently support 4 browsers: IE (Win), Firefox (Win), Safari (Mac), and Firefox (Mac). Sorry Opera fans, you’re not privileged enough to see the Olympics online.

NBC Olympics only allows 4 browsers

Sorry to say NBC, but there are a lot of web browsers out there that are capable of displaying your videos. No one’s asking you to go out of your way to “support” them all, just don’t preemptively block them. Plus, is anyone else concerned that they’ll start doing this to Hulu and other network’s sites? Well I am, and I’m not one bit happy about it!

Harvard made a great video called The Inner Life of a Cell a couple of years ago using some great computer graphics [hat tip Sadie]. It tells a brief story of the mechanism of inflammation being activated in a leukocyte. It was put to some great music by Studio Daily. I highly recommend you check it out.

If you’re wondering what all that stuff is, you can check out one of Harvard’s versions, which contain a play-by-play. I must admit that (having no real idea of what I was looking at) I got a little bit lost in the video, so Harvard’s version definitely helped clear up a few things. But Sadie and I agree that it’s pretty cool that we can watch a video like that and actually mostly understand it. After spending years studying something like bio, you forget how much you know about it that the average Joe has never even considered.

Surprise, Surprise. Vista gets seriously pwned at Blackhat 2008 [via Gizmodo]. The exploit is actually based in a bunch of Java and .NET exploit that takes advantage of Internet Explorer’s ActiveX controls. Giz claims that this has potential to infect many other systems (theoretically because they’re not based on platform specific technologies). Although you can’t count it out, it’s highly unlikely that it would affect my Ubuntu install, even if it did access Java on my machine. It will probably also help that OpenJDK was released and will be the default Java installed in Ubuntu. But even if a Java exploit did access my machine, what’s the most it could do? The most it has access to is my /home directory. It can’t damage my actual system. So I’ll back that up and sleep easy for a while. Good luck, Windows users. Oh, and I can’t speak for Macs, but I’m still waiting for the day for that bubble to burst. Could this be it?

Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet!

Aaronth posted a photo:

It has been almost a year since my last SS photo-post - somehow there's just not enough time in the day.

Here I was playing with the flash to get a diferent exposure of the lotus flowers all about the gardens and parks in Beijing. My previous attempts have all relied on available light so this time I thougth I'd try something a little different.

Aaronth posted a photo:

"Add inspirational text here."

... though, I have none ...

There are so many Lotus plants in the parks and rivers (read: ditches) around Beijing that one can hardly help but to stop and photograph some of their beauty. It's interesting to me that I've never seen any of these plants (potted or wild) (though some have I'd imagine) in the US. With their gargantuan leaves, eatible stems/other parts and beautiful flowers I'm not sure why they're not more common/popular.

Aaronth posted a photo:

Flowers in a tree in Suzhou, China.

Aaronth posted a photo:

A helpful little correction to a type-o on a sign in Suzhou, China.

This also ends a 5-photo-post day - a rarity on this photostream due to the limited amount of photos I am normally able to take. Enjoy!

Aaronth posted a photo:

Could have been better, but this is all I ended up with. Orange is just one of my favorite colors.

Aaronth posted a photo:

Detail of a tiled roof in the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou. Best viewed Large.

Aaronth posted a photo:

My fiancee and I ran across a website dedicated to this thing called phooning - striking a pose as though you are running mid-stride. Since it's such an amazing idea, and one that will keep our shutters flicking, there will be more coming in the future for sure.

You can always check my Fiancee's flickr page for more as well!

Aaronth posted a photo:

...the rose, not my fiancee, sheesh (ok, my fiancee too, but only I'm allowed to say that).

This is why I don't buy her flowers very often. In fact, this was the first time I even dared to get her any but I figured it fit with the proposal and all.

Pulled from the archives.

I remembered reading an article on ifacethoughts a few months ago about keyboard shortcuts in web browsers. One or two of them stuck, and I keep wishing that more had. I really like using scroll click (press down on the scroll button of your mouse to click) to open links in a new background tab. I also started using web shortcuts quite a bit. It seems much easier for me to type “wp atelectasis” into the address bar to do a Wikipedia search for “atelectasis” rather than having to change the search engine in Firefox’s search box before typing the term. I’ve gotten so used to them, it made me try to remember a few others I learned that hadn’t stuck. A quick “gg firefox shortcuts” (google search) led me to a whole list of ‘em.

Can you be a more productive at browsing the web by learning a quick trick or two on the keyboard? I really feel like I have. And I’m about to get even more efficient. In fact, I’ve found myself paying attention more to keyboard shortcuts in other programs I use. The GIMP (an awesome, free Photoshop-like image editor) offers a lot useful keyboard shortcuts that I quickly picked up on. Hopefully as time goes on, I pick up on more and more ways to be more efficient on my computer.