Author Archives: Dan Gezelter

Freakishly good rant involving monkey urine

I won’t even post a summary. Just read Evil Monkey’s inspired rant over at NEUROTOPIA. [tags]science, graduate school[/tags]

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Allegra Goodman’s Intuition

I’ve known Allegra Goodman since she and her husband and I were all thrust into the same rainy and damp nine months in Churchill College, Cambridge. If I’d trust anyone to observe and write about life among scientists correctly, it … Continue reading

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Posted in Science | 1 Comment

Best comic ever

Today’s Non Sequitir hits the nail on the head.

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Posted in Fun, Policy, Science | 1 Comment

The Future of Higher Education

A number of people (including T. Daniel Crawford) have pointed me at an article by William Stuntz in The New Republic called What Summers’s fall says about the future of higher education. Stuntz makes some interesting points, although this statement: … Continue reading

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Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments

IMTEK Mathematica Supplement

We have a new software link today to the IMTEK Mathematica Supplement, a set of Open Source Mathematica Add-Ons to do things like Electrical Circuits, Finite Element Methods, Quantum Mechanics, Solid Modelling, Game Theory, and all sorts of other nifty … Continue reading

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IMTEK Mathematica Supplement (IMS)

The IMS is an open source Mathamtica Add-On providing more than 650 functions to Mathamtica: a nD fintie element environment, a circtuit simulator, model orde reduction, unstructured plotting and visualization. Many tutorials for simulation, Quamtum Mechanics and interfaces to VTK, … Continue reading

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Reasonably good NYT article on ice

The New York times has a reasonably good article today on the mystery of ice skating, which is explained incorrectly in many (if not most) high school chemistry and physics textbooks. The canonical explanation is that pressure depresses the freezing … Continue reading

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What is the Value of a Columnist, wallowing in ignorance?

Oy. Here we have Richard Cohen’s most idiotic column: “What Is the Value of Algebra?” in which he argues that basic mathematics is not nearly as important as, say, more classes in English. I’m an advocate of more education of … Continue reading

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Posted in Policy | 1 Comment

VMD

Useful for viewing PDB files, etc. Relatively powerful configuration for graphical representation of molecule. Find VMD at: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/

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Pandora & The Music Genome Project

This isn’t directly related to Science or Software (the topics that usually occupy my writing here at OpenScience), but Pandora.com is changing how I listen to music. The Pandora site claims to be powered by something called The Music Genome … Continue reading

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Posted in Fun | 1 Comment