Nuclear Twitter

Twitter is suddenly getting a lot of attention, thanks to a number of punts in the media by various celebrities. However, Twitter is not just celebrities subverting a pop culture phenomenon for marketing gain, or a zillion vacuous comments by teenagers with too much time on their hands. Surprisingly, Twitter is becoming useful.

Think of it this way: in the early days of the Internet there were relatively few websites about the things you wanted to know about  – news, opinions, articles and so on – so it was possible to visit a few websites one after another, and many people still do that. With the explosion of content a few years ago – especially audio, images, and video – it took the elegant simplicity of RSS to sort all that information into a few feeds you could put into one reader or homepage.

But sometimes you want to hear ‘what’s going on’, rather than having full-blown articles, or you want to be forwarded articles that are relevant to you. This is where Twitter comes in, and people have been using the service in this way for personal information since it was launched three years ago. An increasingly, people are using to stay updated in technical fields. Think of Twitter as a continuous RSS of little bits of extra information: it’s a bit like overhearing someone’s conversation, which sometimes it actually is.

I work on particle accelerators and on new methods of generating nuclear power, so of course I’m interested in these areas. Here’s my round-up of nuclear and physics-related Twitter feeds, possibly UK-biased. I’ve tried to just include the ones that give genuinely useful information, whilst not bombarding you with thousands of updates that dilute all the others (like, say, the BBC News does).

General and Particle Physics:

Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Energy:

August 13, 2009 | Filed Under Posts, Science | Leave a Comment 

Cars

This must happen to other people, or I am singularly unlucky?

Yesterday in Warrington town centre, I went into town and parked in a completely empty car park – I mean, completely empty. Just me. I sauntered up to a space, if sauntering is possible on four wheels, and pulled in. While I was faffing about getting my jacket from the back seat, a woman in a Volvo came up to the same car park level, and proceeded to park right up against my side of the car – so close that I could not open my door. There was no particular reason for her to do this, as I was nowhere near any exit.

I had to move my own car to get out! Of course, this woman looked at me askance as I moved my vehicle away from hers, like I was the idiot. Her inevitably cow-like expression led me to believe there was no hope in engaging her in debate about her future driving choices, so I comforted myself in pigeon-holing her as a typical Volvo driver.

But this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Oh no. This happens to me a lot, so much so that I’m beginning to wonder if it’s an epidemic, and whether I should consider being inoculated in case I catch this syndrome myself; although I must say that the idea of a cull is more appealing. The best (or worst) example is when Donna and I were visiting Knock Shrine in County Mayo, in Ireland – no, I’m not a card-carrying Catholic, and yes it is a very interesting place for lots of reasons. More on that some other time maybe. We turned up early on a damp weekday, so the car park was empty. I should point out here that whilst Knock is a small village of about 40 houses, the car park will take what looks like 10,000 cars and is about 3 times bigger than the vilage (see Knock from space in Google Earth if you don’t believe me).

So there we are in this vast car park, trundling in to a random space. As I pulled up, I noticed a dot in the far tarmac distance. Quickly exiting our vehicle to prevent being trapped again – I am getting wise to this -  we followed the second car circling in, like a vulture descending onto its prey. After a two minute waltz with an invisible vehicular partner, the Volvo (as it inevitably was) slowed to a crawl, apparently unsure where exactly to cause the most annoyance. And of course, the driver halted right up against the driver’s side door of my car. Only this time, I couldn’t move the car as I was no longer in it. We left this scene of psychological bombing, and returned after our visit to the famous zillion-foot high Knock cross (and of course the blank wall next to it): as you will have guessed, I had to climb across the gearstick to make it behind the steering wheel, an unpleasant experience.

Why is it that women (and it is always women) choose to park right next to me in car parks?

August 12, 2009 | Filed Under Posts | 1 Comment 

Mac applications for academics

Several people have been asking me about what useful applications there are on OSX for academic scientists, so I thought I’d write a short post summarising them. Hopefully this will give people a head start in doing science and scientific computing on their Macs. Not all the programs list are free, but they are all good I think!

Caffeine (free): A very handy menubar program that lets you control whether your Mac goes to sleep or not. Just click the icon and your Mac will stay awake during your simulations.

Canary (free): There are zillions of Twitter clients. This one is free and works.

Cyberduck (free): If you’re moving your simulation files around, you’ll need an FTP/SFTP client. Cyberduck is free and good, and is easy to use.

DiffMerge (free): Lets you compare files and folders for differences and merge if desired.

Evernote (free-ish): I use this application more or less daily for note-taking. I have a terrible memory, so I jot down notes at meetings as an alternative to using a notebook or lots of scraps of paper. Think of it as being a electronic lab book. As well as text, you can also record images, photos etc., and everything is synchronised to an online server meaning you can also access your notes if you’re away from your computer. Text in images is OCRed, and everything is searchable – which you can’t do in a lab book! There is a paid service, but I’ve not needed it yet.

GeekTool (free): Lets you display any Unix command on your desktop. For example, you can have ‘top’ running continuously, letting you know at a glance how your simulations are running.

iStat Menus (free): A handy menu bar panel that tells you what’s happening in your Mac; CPU, temperatures, network activity, memory and disk.

LockTight (free): Gives you a handy keyboard combo to lock your desktop before you walk away from it. Handy in shared offices.

MacGPG (free): Gives you transparent encryption for your files and email. You’ll also want GPGMail.

MacTeX (free): You’ll need a decent TeX editor when writing papers. Personally, I just want something that works on all files and sub-formats, and installs without any fuss. I don’t care about messing around with funny customisations. MacTeX just installs, and works. The front-end that gets provided is TeXShop, which isn’t as good as the WinEdt you can get on Windows, but is fine.

Mathematica (paid): Mathematica is expensive, but is so powerful and useful that it’s worth the money. If you use it you already know how good it is. If you don’t, take the time to try it out and you will probably get hooked.

Matlab (paid): Not as good as Mathematica in my opinion (although it’s faster for lots of numerical stuff), but it’s used so widely that you willwant to be able to open and edit code from other people.

Microsoft Office (paid): Yes, I know about OpenOffice, and it’s ok, but honestly it’s simpler to just buy a copy of MS Office. However, Keynote makes better-looking presentations.

Merlin (paid): MS Office on Mac doesn’t have MS Project. If you need to make project plans and Gantt charts, then Merlin is probably the best program. It isn’t free though, and there are free alternatives. OpenProj is probably the best free one.

Papers (from Mekentosj): This is a wonderful, wonderful application for keeping track of research papers, both your own and the ones you read and cite. It connects to most of the databases, automatically generates BibTeX citations (very handy!), and lets you keep collections of papers for the various projects you are working on. It’s pretty reasonably priced too. I also use it to keep track of things like manuals, presentations, guides etc. Its only downside is that it’s aimed at PDF documents only. However, it’s a much better way to keep track of all the papers you look at than the often-used method of lots of little folders all over your computer.

Plaxo (free-ish): Plaxo is a really simple service to synchronise your calendars and contacts with the online world. Basically, it connects all your email accounts together. On Mac there is a little application that sits around synchronising your Mail and iCal, and again you can view everything on the web. There is a paid service which gives more functionality, like automatically removing duplicate information.

Enthought Python Distribution (free for academics): Python is a great language for tying together other simulations. The Enthought distribution provides all the scientific packages you might want like NumPy, SciPy etc. in one easy installer. Brilliant. The distribution also includes matplotlib, which make data visualisation easy.

Sapiens (shareware): Application launchers are a personal thing, but for fans of the Macbook trackpad, Sapiens (by Donelleschi) is brilliant. You’ll probably get rid of your Dock before long.

Skype (free): You’ll almost certainly already have this! It’s pretty much essential for talking to people overseas.

Smultron (free): You’ll always have a need for a decent programmer’s text editor. My personal choice is Smultron. Bizarrely for something used so often by people, there isn’t really a great editor. Smultron is the best free editor I think, with syntax highlighting etc.

Sticky Windows (shareware): Another great little app from Donelleschi. I can’t get on with Spaces, and whilst Expose is ok, it’s sometimes nice to move your open windows out of the way. Sticky Windows lets you do that, leaving little tabs at the side of the screen. Great stuff.

VMWare (paid)/Virtualbox (free): Sometimes you have to run codes that aren’t Mac-friendly. The easiest way to do this (although a bit slower) is to use a virtual machine. In my opinion, you should either use VMWare (which costs a small amount), or Sun Virtualbox, which is free.

August 4, 2009 | Filed Under Computing | 2 Comments