It’s Alive!

A mate sent me this today, knowing my love for sports and all things manly.

Stumbled across these guys randomly on Scivee the other day. They call themselves the Galileo Players and they’re hilarious.

Some not so recent photos from the Mars Rover have been reported which almost seem to depict a human-looking figure.

Some have claimed that this image is big-foot. I, however, have a different theory…

Probably the funniest SNL sketch since “dick in a box”. Embedding has been disabled unfortunately so here’s a link to it instead.

This thing has been doing the email rounds within science departments over the past couple of weeks. A nice wee ditty about PCR. Although I couldn’t help but notice that there are no lyrics about how infinitely frustrating it can be when a PCR reaction doesn’t work quite the way it is supposed to (a pain felt by almost every molecular biologist in the universe).

A recent post on WIRED science contains a few cool links about nitinol, or memory metal. This is a nickel titanium blend that has the capability of returning to its original configuration no matter how bent or twisted it becomes. The science has been described elsewhere and this is not exactly a new invention, but I find it awesome because it’s pretty much only a matter of time before we are able to create the T-1000 from terminator with this technology.

One thing I should point out here is that I haven’t officially finished my MSc from Otago Uni yet. Sure it’s been submitted, and examined, and even passed (with a well deserved grade I will modestly say), but I am yet to actually get it printed and hard bound, which is the final requirement to graduate. The inherent problem here, though, is that I need to get it bound in Dunedin and I am several thousand miles away and otherwise preoccupied with a PhD. 

The format I had my thesis in on my laptop was a series of PDFs for the text and about 30 separate PDFs for all the figures, but to get it printed I have to send one uber-PDF with all the pages in the right order. Thus, the problem I’ve had over the last couple of weeks has been how to compile all this into a single PDF. Sounds like it should be simple, but unfortunately I did not have any of the software required. The obvious choice would have been to put it all together in Adobe Acrobat, but as most will know this is a big bastard of a programme that costs the friggin earth to buy (like, hundreds of dollars!). Fortunately, I found a brilliant review that suggests two very good programmes for editing PDFs on a mac.

The first of these is PDFpen from SmileOnMyMac.com. This programme looks really nice (obviously very important when deciding on what softwarre to use) and it sounds very easy to use, particularly when it comes to on the page editing, although apparently it can be a bit of a pain in the arse when it comes to dealing with super massive thesis or dissertation sized documents.

The other programme suggested is PDFclerk which is not able to do the sort of fine scale editing that PDFpen allows, but is absolutely brilliant for putting big documents together, whether you’re working from PDFs or straight from raw document files such as .doc. This is the programme I went with in the end and have just finished putting my thesis together (clocking in at around 140 pages) which is now sitting on CD ready to be sent away for printing and binding. About bloody time too.

The only drawback to these programmes is that you gots to fork out a bit of dough for them, although nowhere near as much as Adobe Acrobat. More in the vicinity of $40-50 US dollars. I did happen across a quasi-legal version of PDFClerk here although I by no means endorse it. If you’re in academia and deal with PDFs a lot then you haven’t got much to loose by investing in the actual versions.

This time of year usually sees the internets awash with unobtainable resolutions, vague predictions and best-of-the-year-prior lists ad nauseam. My favourite blog posts are those that manage to encompass all three of the above. I was emailed this video by a friend, however, that sums up my feeling towards the new year quite nicely. It’s by a couple of guys that seem to have too much free time (they’ve also done a funny song about facebook).

If anything, my resolution is probably to actually write on this blog semi-regularly. Have been fairly slack since starting it a month or so ago, although that’s mostly due to the carnage of the festive season.