Via Pharyngula, we found this wonderful page at NOAA about Snow Rollers, which is how nature stocks up for snowball fights.
Seriously, when wind and snow conditions are just right (i.e. when the ground surface has an icy, crusty snow, on which falling snow cannot stick, and when there’s about an inch or so of loose wet snow on top of this, and when there’s gusty and strong winds), you get these wonderful wind-rolled snowballs.
Over at Chris Mooney’s blog there’s an interesting post about Bush embracing Science in the latest state of the union speech. Since part of our research is on nanotechnology, and we’re insatiable users of supercomputing facilities, I certainly noticed this part of the speech:
First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support the work of America’s most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology and supercomputing and alternative energy sources.
But I’m extremely skeptical of Bush’s State of the union pronouncements after the trial balloon about intelligent design was floated a few months ago, after the doctoring of scientific reports, the silencing of NASA scientists, the stuffing of scientific advisory panels, and all the other anti-science actions the administration has taken.
So I’m great with the president wanting to leave a legacy as the “Science” president, but he needs to do two things: 1) show us the budget, and 2) come to bat for Science in the public sphere.
Apologies for the light posting. I’m teaching a new course for me: General Chemistry II, and the load for lecture prep has been substantially higher than normal.
We just had BKChem submitted as a software link for our Molecular Viewers and Editors section. BKChem is free chemical drawing program with many features, written in python. It outputs in SVG, PDF, and can generate SMILES strings (which are strings that contain information about chemical connectivity).
Check it out!
[tags]free software, chemistry[/tags]
BKchem is free chemical drawing program with many features, written in python.
Find BKchem at: http://bkchem.zirael.org/
For your enjoyment, we present this link to “Pup” Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe from Drew Weing. I like Drew’s comics because he messes with the boundaries of the medium. Here’s one where he lets you choose your own adventure.
[tags]comics, heat death[/tags]
My research group’s main simulation program is called OOPSE, and we’ve just released a major rewrite of this code which includes all sorts of new molecular dynamics bells and whistles.
Our code now includes lots of parts bolted on from other open source projects including, the ANTLR parser generator, Open Babel (a chemical format translation package), the Mersenne Twister random number generator, and a heavily modified version of the Java Makefile.
Perhaps the most important part of any new software release is the documentation.
[tags]molecular dynamics, open source, simulations[/tags]
This is cool: URAPIV is an open source Matlab Toolbox for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) analysis. Particle Image Velocimetry is a planar, non-intrusive, optical imaging measurement technique that allows for two-dimensional, high-resolution velocity vector fields of laminar and turbulent flows. URAPIV is also a blog about the software.
[tags]velocimetry, matlab, open source[/tags]
ScienceBlogs looks like a project of Seed Magazine, but a bunch of cool science blogs (including Pharyngula, Living The Scientific Life, Uncertain Principles, and Chris Mooney’s blog, The Intersection) have all moved there in the past few days.
All the cool kids have gone to seed!
[tags]science, blogs[/tags]
The Hubble telescope gives us an image worthy of Dave Bowman’s exclamation about the monolith. At HubbleSite.org, you can read about the panoramic view of the Orion Nebula. I particularly love the google-maps-style zoomable navigator of the 18000 x 18000 pixel image. (That’s 324 million pixels).
[tags]astronomy, hubble, stars[/tags]
URAPIV is an open source Matlab Toolbox for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) analysis. Particle Image Velocimetry is a planar, non-intrusive, optical imaging measurement technique that allows for two-dimensional, high-resolution velocity vector fields of laminar and turbulent flows.
Find URAPIV – open source Matlab Toolbox for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) analysis at: http://urapiv.wordpress.com
