interweaving ideas
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A Review of Albert Brook’s 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America
2030 For a man with a memorable career that spans three decades Albert Brooks doesn’t seem to have that many credits to his name in IMDB. The writer/director of Real Life, Defending Your Life, Mother, and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World has brought us only a handful of films, but they are all…
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Is Archeopteryx a Bird or Dinosaur? The Fuzzy Lines Drawn between Species
Archeopteryx Credit: digital cat On top of Pluto being demoted, the non-existence of Brontosaurus, and whether it’s okay to proposition a woman on an elevator at 4:00 in the morning we can now add a fun new debate for the online scientific community: is Archeopteryx a Bird or Dinosaur? Analysis of a Xiaotingia zhengi fossil…
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Why the Age of Enlightenment Matters
Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump I did everything in my power a few months back to avoid all news about the British Royal Wedding that had so many Americans captivated. It was disheartening to see the American media paying so much attention to the antiquated and irrelevant institution of…
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Yuri’s Night Space Party and the 50th Anniversary of Manned Space Flight
“Circling the Earth in my orbital spaceship I marveled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!” ~ Yuri Gagarin Yuri’s Night 2011 50 years ago, on April 12th, 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted the Vostok 1 into space, entering the history…
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Computer Science in Tron Legacy
Tron and Tron Legacy I attended the Experiments with the Imagination session at Science Online 2011, where we discussed what made good versus bad inclusion of science in fiction. Interesting points were made, such as audience members being able to excuse bad science for kick-ass portrayals of scientists, like in the movie 2012, and a…
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Our Science Wedding
Mad Scientist Groom and His Lovely Bride Atheist, agnostic, humanist, secularist, skeptic, empiricist, Ockhamist, and Patafarianist are all different flavors of the philosophy of life my wife and I share, but Vicky and I prefer the term “Spiritual Naturalist” to describe the deeply fulfilling sense of wonder we get from engaging the natural world around…
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“Kill Your Darlings” is a Programming Principle Too
Proce55ing Source Code Credit: Niels Heidenreich In his book On Writing Stephen King argued that to be a good writer, you must be able to “Kill your darlings,” where, for the sake of keeping the prose moving, you must cut out the non-essential parts, no matter how well-written: Mostly when I think of pacing, I…
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Breakout of Slide Presentation Linearity with Prezi
Mxplx Prezi Screenshot At Science Online 2011 I was introduced to the Prezi Presentation Paradigm by Stacy Baker of Extreme Biology. After getting past a surprisingly mild learning curve, I was able to produce the following presentation mixing a Prezi presentation with desktop video capture: Keeping in mind this is not the best example of…
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Deep Science Cuts in 2011 Budget, but Oil Subsidies Remain
PEW Center on Cuts Spending cuts outlined in the Continuing Resolution (CR) bill currently top out at $74 billion, but, with the Tea Party holding Republicans to principle, it will reach $100 billion (updated cuts here). Predictably, this bill has lots of bad news for Science and Technology in America; unfortunately, it maintains the status…
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Generating Grids, Hexmaps, and Image Markups with JavaScript
Corrosion Mapping, Hotspots Highlighted (Not an Actual Report Image) One application I had the honor of working with in my time with the Coast Guard was a Corrosion Mapping tool used by Engineers to track the wear and tear on aircraft parts over their lifetime. Using an Active X control, users would bring up a…
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Social Network Mapping Fun with NodeXL and Science Online 2011
Social Networking Results for #scio11 Hash Tag on Twitter (Click to Enlarge) The above image is just one graph of the many tweets related to the Science Online 2011 Unconference. I generated the above graph using the open-source free software NodeXL, a Microsoft Excel plugin that harvests social networking data from common online sources and…
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Introducing mxplx: A Citation-Management Tool for Researchers and Active Readers
The Memetic Ecosystem Within Mxplx I’m a big reader, and a lot of what I read inspires the posts for ideonexus. I love it when I find a brilliant insight in a text and can slap it down as a blockquote or relate it to other citations I’ve come across in the past. I’m tickled…
