Reviewing high school and university science subjects

I learned an awful lot of science in high school and university. And it’s a shame that all of this knowledge from years ago has been forgotten. I’d like to rectify this by refreshing my knowledge of chemistry, biology, math, and physics. And I’d like to use books that are more interesting than what I used in my courses.

For instance,


General Chemistry by Linus Pauling ($9 used including shipping at bookfinder.com)

Why we like it: It’s by Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel prizes.
What you’ll learn: Covalence, oxidation, aldehydes, etc.
Amazon-review money quote: “Linus Pauling's treatise on general chemistry is exciting and interesting.”
Opening line: “The universe is composed of matter and radiant energy.”


Biology by Neil Campbell ($4 used including shipping at bookfinder.com)

Why we like it: It’s widely considered to be the best undergraduate biology textbook.
What you’ll learn: Photosynthesis, DNA, circulation, etc.
Amazon-review money quote: “Many times I forgot to take notes because the richness, depth and flow of the text made me feel like I was reading a novel instead of a text.”
Opening line: “In this very first section, we introduce one of life’s most distinctive features, its order.”


Math Refresher for Scientists and Engineers by John Fanchi ($26 used including shipping at bookfinder.com—get at least the 2nd ed. to get the statistics chapters)

Why we like it: It’s a dozen math courses packed into one short book.
What you’ll learn: Linear algebra, calculus, statistics, etc.
Amazon-review money quote: “It's the sort of book that you can easily read for an hour, cover 20 or 30 pages, and not feel too exhausted.”
Opening line: “Math Refresher for Scientists and Engineers, Third Edition is intended for people with technical backgrounds who would like to refresh their math skills.”


The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman ($57 used including shipping at bookfinder.com—search for ISBN 0201021153 to get the 3-vol set)

Why we like it: We love anything written by Feynman.
What you’ll learn: Relativity, dielectrics, the Schrödinger equation, etc.
Amazon-review money quote: “If you already know physics you can probably breeze through the books pretty easily getting a lot of nice insights, but otherwise you need to be prepared to work hard. ”
Opening line: “This two-year course in physics is presented
from the point of view that you, the reader, are going to be a physicist.”

What textbooks would you recommend (or not recommend)?

How merging works the second, third, etc. time you merge a file?

I asked a programming question on stackoverflow.com for the first time today. I was pleasantly surprised to get an answer in 9 minutes.

My question was about how revision-control systems do repeated merging between two branches. I understand that the first merge is a 3-way merge between two files and their common parent. But I didn't know what happens on the second, third, etc. merge: what are the 3 files involved in the 3-way merge at that point?

Greg Hewgill gave me a great answer—in short, use the two files and their “closest common parent”. See Greg's answer for a nice diagram of this. It was an Aha! moment for me.

Buying glasses online - success!

A week ago I wrote about buying glasses online for the first time. Well they just came in today.



Note the coupon code: TELLAFRIEND, for 20% off.

The glasses seem pretty nice. My eyes are gradually getting used to them. Going to give it a few days before sending in the payment.

Around a lake in Victoria in October

Come with me and I'll take you on a mini tour around Swan Lake near my place in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.



Brrrr! First thing to notice is that it’s cold in Victoria in October. Good thing you’re wearing that sweater and warm jacket.



A neat thing about Swan Lake and other nature sanctuaries in Victoria is that you’ve got all these nice bridges and old wooden structures. They’re a part of my childhood.



This little bog feeds into Swan Lake. I wouldn’t recommend swimming in it. Ducks like to eat the green stuff though.



It’s definitely fall—everything’s orange except for the evergreens. OK let’s head home for some hot chocolate!

Is it cloudy and chilly back where you live?

X-Acto Personal Paper Trimmer

I picked up this X-Acto paper trimmer at Staples for 15 bucks. Basically it cuts a straight line through paper up to 12" wide. I don’t use it often, but when I need it, it’s a pleasure to use.

Simply apply a little pressure to the knob, then slide it across the paper.

30 Essential Typefaces for A Lifetime

My bro recently blogged about the book 30 Essential Typefaces for A Lifetime which is a survey of 30 important typefaces.

Here’s the list. The ones installed on my computer (woefully few) are in bold:

• Sans-serifs: Akzidenz Grotesk, Avenir, Bell Centennial, Bell Gothic, DIN, Franklin Gothic, Frutiger, Futura, Gill Sans, Helvetica, Meta, Myriad, Trade Gothic, Univers and Vag Rounded.
• Serifs: Adobe Caslon, Adobe Garamond, Bembo, Bodoni, Clarendon, Courier, Excelsior, Lucida, Minion, Perpetua, Sabon, Stempel Schneidler, Times New Roman, Trajan and Walbaum.

I hope you have more of these gems than I do.

Microsoft Word has a nice outlining tool built in

Sometimes when I’m writing code, I need to check a tree of function calls. It can be tricky to remember which nodes I’ve checked and which I still need to check. Tracking my progress on paper or in a text editor doesn’t work very well. Sometimes I would use a diagramming tool (bubbl.us) to build out the tree, but it’s cumbersome.

It turns out that Microsoft Word has a great outlining tool built in. You can add sibling and child nodes very quickly (by pressing Enter or Tab). And you can easily cross out items that are done.

I’m a fan.

Buying glasses online - the experiment begins

Ordered some glasses online from clearlycontacts.ca. My optometrist would not give me my PD measurement. Fortunately there are ways to measure your PD yourself—I like Ken's Post-It method. ClearlyContacts (or CoastalContacts in the US) is cool because you can try glasses on a photo of yourself, you can return the glasses if you don’t like them, and all lenses are antireflective, antiscratch, and UV. My frames and lenses came out to $100, but because of the high prescription I opted to pay another $100 for an ultra-thin lens. $200 ain’t bad for a pair of glasses.

Here’s me trying on some Guccis.

Recharging on Sunday: Physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual

According to author Matthew Kelly, this is a good way to spend a Sunday:

Fill the seventh day with enriching experiences that bring new meaning and depth to your life…in each of the four areas of legitimate need—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.

Here’s what I’m doing in each of the four areas today:

• Physical: Going for a walk up nearby Christmas Hill.
• Emotional: Took my mom out to a Chinese buffet.
• Intellectual: Read five chapters aloud from the Book of Psalms.
• Spiritual: Went to mass at St. Andrew’s Cathedral.

What activities are you doing today to recharge?

Type Drop

For his typography project my brother is dropping eggs stenciled with Helvetica Condensed from 50 feet.

Automatic photo resizing for Mom’s webmail [Windows]

Mom asked me how to attach photos from her digital camera to her webmail. I showed her, but we waited an annoying amount of time for the five 3-MB photos to upload. Googling around a bit, I found a great free utility called Shrink Pic. It magically resizes photos down to 50-150kb. Works for both webmail clients and desktop email clients. It’s totally automatic—Mom doesn’t know it’s there (other than an icon that appears in the system tray).

Mini Kitchen Scale

This is one of the most useful $8 purchases I’ve ever made. It's a small kitchen scale. It weighs things up to 450g (16oz). I use it to weigh my cereal in the morning (55g of Mini Wheats). But it’s also come in handy for determining how much postage to put on envelopes and parcels.

Executor is better than SlickRun

Executor and SlickRun are keyword launchers for Windows. With a hotkey, you pop up a window and enter a keyword representing a webpage or desktop application to launch.

I’ve been using SlickRun for three years. But yesterday I switched to Executor. Why?

• Unlike SlickRun, it's under active development.


• It shows an auto-completion drop-down.


• SlickRun sometimes caused my windows to go all flickery after launching a keyword.


• Executor also looks cool.

I exported my keywords from SlickRun, massaged the output a bit, then imported them into Executor. Someone should write a conversion utility for this.

Almonds + Apples = Yum

Today I discovered that thin slices of apples go nicely with almonds.

Try it as a snack.

The sad state of window management in today's operating systems

Window management hasn't changed much since the Xerox PARC days. They are still these overlapping rectangles that hide other rectangles. I currently have 19 windows open, and only 3 are visible (full screen on 3 monitors). I cannot tell at a glance which monitors the other 16 are on.

Surely there must be a better way to manage all of these applications—all of these contexts—that are open on one’s computer screen. Surely some clear-thinking soul has thought up a second way to manage this plethora of rectangles—some way that is easy and natural, that doesn't involve hiding windows behind others, losing your focus and context in the process.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, I am fighting the problem of multiple window contexts with a variety of approaches:

• Desktop Sidebar. This sidebar keeps the time, mini calendar, system statistics, a mini web-browser, and (most importantly) a mini notepad always in view.


• mIRC. This IRC client has a text-to-speech feature that lets me hear what people are saying, even if the window is hidden behind other windows. This saves a bunch of real estate.


• Executor. This command line pops up with a hotkey, and lets me launch predefined shortcuts (with parameters) for web pages and applications. SlickRun is similar, albeit no longer developed.


• MaxiVista. This lets me use a spare computer as a third monitor. It doesn’t solve the root problem, but it alleviates it a bit.


• Alt-Tab Powertoy. A slightly better Alt-Tab. In addition to showing you a bunch of icons to choose from, it shows a thumbnail of the window for the selected icon. Not sure if this helps much.


• iswitchw. This tool lets you switch to an open window by typing a few letters in the window title. For example, to get to my Putty window, I do Alt+w put. Saves one’s mental health.


• A script for moving the active window from one monitor to another when I press both mouse buttons. I use this a lot.


• VirtuaWin. A virtual desktop. Having too many virtual desktops confuses me, so I just have two: my main one, and an alternate universe that I switch to when someone interrupts me with a question and I don’t want to mess up my window arrangement.

It’s an ugly set of interactions, but it helps. Sorta.

Many of us live in our computers, so there must surely be a connection between a chaotic ecosystem of windows in which one cannot find the window one needs, and one’s mental health.

So for the health of our world,

for the sanity of humanity,

someone please give us a better way to do window management.

Relying on intuition when debugging

We see it every day. Intuition/hunches help us debug complex, unfamiliar systems. “How the heck did I figure that out?”

Be not afraid. Dive into that unfamiliar problem, look at that mass of data, and be confident that your intuition will help you figure out the cause.

D'oh = chagrin

For the longest time, I’ve been wondering about the name of the emotion expressed by D’oh!. The closest I could think of was “regret”, but that isn’t quite right, because regret implies that it’s your fault, whereas D’oh can be for circumstances that aren’t your fault.

I’ve found the word: chagrin—basically, annoyance or disappointment.

Shower Idea Capture Mini

I previously wrote about using Crayola Bathtub Crayons to capture ideas while in the shower. That idea fell into disuse as the other occupants of the home were displeased with seeing the writing on the wall. Also it was sometimes hard to read and to clean.

Here’s an idea that eliminates these problems with the crayons: write on a plastic container. You can write smaller and more legibly, and it is easier to clean. It may not be perfectly legible, but it’s good enough for you to remember what you were thinking about.


johnny: how sw vers?

DVD: Miracle Maker

One of the most engaging portrayals of the life of Jesus is a 2000 film called Miracle Maker. Would you believe it's claymation?

See it.

Camera shopping for Mom

I wanted to buy a camera for my mom that is fully automatic—just push the button, and it takes a good picture. Panasonic’s fully automatic FS7 was tempting, but didn’t have many reviews, so I decided to stick with our tried and true brand, Canon. I figured Mom’s requirements matched the snapshooter profile, and wanted the following specs: automatic scene selection, image stabilization, and long battery life.

The three candidates were the SD1200, SD780, and SX120. All of them have automatic scene selection, image stabilization, and reasonable battery life, so she couldn’t go wrong with choosing any of them. The SX120 has a nice big 3" screen, but the others weren’t too bad at 2.5". I wasn’t sure if she would find the SX120 complicated, as it has more buttons and dials than the others. It was also the largest of the three.

	Image Stabilization	Auto Scene Selection	LCD	Battery Life	Price
SD1200	Yes	Yes	2.5"	260 shots	$200
SD780	Yes	Yes	2.5"	210 shots	$250
SX120	Yes	Yes	3.0"	370 shots	$300

In the end we went with the big SX120. The tipping point was its use of AA batteries—easy to replace while travelling.

I’m definitely jealous. It has twice the megapixels and LCD size of my camera, a 5-year-old Canon A75. The 10x optical zoom is pretty cool. I would recommend turning off the 4x digital zoom though—it makes the pictures blurry.

Using MaxiVista on Linux to give Windows an extra monitor

If your main computer is on Windows but you have another computer running Linux, which you want to use as an extra monitor for Windows, you can do so using a combination of MaxiVista ($40) and Synergy (free).

MaxiVista lets you use another computer as an additional monitor. But it is a Windows program. So you'll need to use Wine to run it on your Linux box.

One issue though is that, when using Remote Control mode (i.e., viewing your Linux desktop instead of your Windows desktop), mouse clicks and the keyboard won’t work. I stumbled upon a workaround though: if you run Synergy at the same time, your mouse clicks and keyboard will work. The catch is that your Synergy screen is “one screen past” your MaxiVista screen, so you’ll need to move your mouse across the screen until it reappears on the other side. At that point, your mouse clicks and keyboard will work on the Linux desktop. A bit annoying, but it’s not that bad.

Single Irreducible Purpose of Existence

Suppose that you were destined to live the rest of your life in a dark, closely fitting, narrow box. How would you spend your time? You couldn’t read any books—there are no books, nor light to read by. You couldn’t write letters—there’s no-one to read them, and nothing to write with. You couldn’t exercise—there’s no room. What would you do?

In this bare minimum of existence, if you can figure out what you would do, how you would stay sane—this would be your Single Irreducible Purpose of Existence, your SIPE. It’s not much different from being imprisoned by torturers, or confined to a bed for the remainder of your life. This thing that you would do, without mobility, without light—this would be your single irreducible purpose.

I think I know what I would do. What would you?

OK, O.K., ok, or okay?

“OK” and “okay” are the correct variants. It is an abbreviation of “oll korrect”, a slang spelling of “all correct”.

Playing around with Linux (Ubuntu)

I’ve been meaning to install Linux for a while, and decided to when I saw the book Ubuntu Unleashed in the 005 section of the library. It had a CD with Ubuntu 7.04 (which I later found out is rather old), so I took it home and was pleasantly surprised to see that it “just worked” when I inserted it into my laptop. I decided to install it on my 5-year-old 2.4GHz Celeron with 512MB RAM. The hard drive was dead so I dusted off my scooter and went to Office Depot to pick up an 80GB one for $50.

As expected, there were a few obstacles, but nothing that couldn’t be solved by Googling for error messages. I’m happy to say that I’ve got the Jaunty Jackalope version of Ubuntu finally up and running. Sticking with Gnome rather than KDE, which I haven’t tried. My primary computer is still a Windows laptop, but this Linux box will serve as a third monitor (via Synergy) and as a print server for the other computers on the network. I’ve signed up with SpiderOak to back up my data directory—they give 2GB for free.

Installing Ubuntu has actually been pretty fun. And there are still a bunch of things I’d like to learn, which I’m looking forward to reading about in this big Ubuntu Unleashed book—which the Amazon reviews rate poorly, but it seems alright so far.

Prepaid dial-up as broadband backup

I found a prepaid dial-up ISP called Maglobe, and I'm writing this blog post with it, via my laptop modem. The speed is surprisingly usable. Sorta.

I'm going to use this as a backup when my broadband connection goes down. I'm pretty sure Maglobe is legit as it was mentioned in a 2001 LA Times article. I paid $15 for 28 hours—it expires after a year. Works in the US and Canada.

Carbon-fiber violin, viola, and cello

Back in my school-orchestra days, it would have been nice to have a carbon-fiber volin. And $7500 with which to buy one.

Evidently the sound is superior to wooden violins of the same price (videos). Yo-Yo Ma likes them.

EULALyzer (Windows) - terms-of-service/license analyzer

I find EULALyzer handy. It’s a Windows program that lets you paste in any software license or terms-of-service text, and it flags suspicious-looking phrases that you may want to look at more closely.

Interesting Data Graphic: The Andex Chart

The Andex Chart (US version, Canadian version) is a graphic that combines a ton of data from various sources for the past century: presidential terms, market indexes, world events (“IBM PC introduced in 1981”), interest rates, price of oil, inflation, etc. It’s intensely interesting.

js-kit for quickly adding comments / ratings to a website

I heart js-kit. To add a 5-star rating widget to Yubnub, I simply added the following to each page:

<div class="js-kit-rating" view="combo" path="(optional unique identifier goes here)"></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

Similarly, adding comments to each page was simply a matter of adding:

<div id="js-kit-comments" path="(optional unique identifier goes here)"></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>

Leave off the path="..." bit if you’re not going to use it.

Skull-and-crossbones jogging pants, circa 1988

I felt so cool that day in Grade 6 when I wore these skull-and-crossbones jogging pants,

that Friday when regular clothes were permitted,

when we leapt off our schooldesks in imitation of snowboarders…