The Futile Cycle

I use Papers to organize all of my, well, papers. I read a lot of journals regularly, because I have a lot of interests; without a good workflow, I’d get buried under a pile of PDFs (admittedly, not that heavy, but >1,000 PDFs is hard to manage, no matter what the organization folder system).

The new version is much better. It integrates with more search services, such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, and the organization system just got a lot easier. The search integration with Spotlight is much snappier now, there is now even better BiBTeX integration, and lots of bugs seem to have been fixed, as it hasn’t crashed for me yet. There are still some small nitpicky issues (like not being able to specify a Smart Collection that gathers all papers imported in the last month), but overall this is a much more stable and useable release. Worth the price, especially with the student discount!

In other news, Dscam in flies is alternatively spliced to almost 18000 different forms so that each neuron can randomly have a unique form of the protein, allowing them to recognize themselves. This reminds me a lot of GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers)!

For some reason, many people who’ve bought iPhones early on are complaining now that Apple issued a $200 price cut. These people may sound like whiners, but really, it’s because what they’re buying is not just a phone they really like, but the prestige of being able to shell out $600 for a phone. It’s the brand, the exclusivity, the signaling, that they’re buying. Sure, the iPhone is more functional and much better made than most other phones, but several hundred dollars worth? It’s hard to say; individual preferences and weights strongly come into play there. For most people, I’d say it isn’t worth it, in the same way that the “hand-made quality” and “attention to detail” in an Aston Martin just isn’t worth the cost to most people.

So, that’s why consumers are complaining. The theory doesn’t make them any less whiney and pathetic, but it does explain why there’s so much backlash, and Apple does need to realize that it’s not just competing as a technology company, but as a fashion company, one in which price plays a large role in social prestige and branding.

This image resizing technique really blows my mind, and yet it’s so simple and clever a concept.

Hopefully, I will never have to touch Microsoft Word ever again, thanks to Apple. The new version of their word-processing and page layout program, “Pages”, finally has a “change tracking” feature, which is apparently compatable with Microsoft Word’s Track Changes. This was really the last reason for me to use Word, which I’ve avoided as much as I can with LaTeX. Word was slow, buggy, and not native to Intel Macs (making them even slower). It was also kind of a pain to use. Now that I can do the editing in Pages, I don’t have any need for Word, other than to open the occasional file sent to me. But that’s what PDFs are for, right?

xkcd really hits the spot this time, with this brilliant strip:

This brings back many memories of the good old Macintoshes. I found an excellent webpage that explained how to set up an emulation of Dark Castle, with all the appropriate links to files, and now I’m working my way through “Fireball 4. ” I remember playing this on my dad’s old Mac way back in the 1980s on a black-and-white System 6 machine. I don’t know what happened to that old Mac or the Dark Castle disks (probably relegated to archival floppy hell), but now I have my own working copy!

For those of you who want to play along, all you really need is to follow the instructions on that website, and download the appropriate Mini vMac emulator for your system (works for almost any system). The hardest part is getting Dark Castle onto a disk image, and that unfortunately requires borrowing a non-Intel mac for a few minutes. But to relive the past…it’s completely worth it!

If you want other great old-timey Macintosh games, try Macintosh Garden. (All these on Mac Garden require the Classic environment, which means no Intel Macs, sorry. Maybe you can get them to work under emulation, I don’t know.)

EDIT: I got Beyond Dark Castle working as well.

I occasionally come across pages like “The Beauty of LaTeX” or other tutorial and article that evangelizes the semantic, archival, aesthetic, and typographical value of LaTeX. Whenever I do, I’m reminded of this reason I once heard from a graduate student:

My advisor really likes to crushingly edit my work; no phrase goes untouched. So when I wrote my thesis, I did it in LaTeX, and since there isn’t a “Track Changes” like in Microsoft Word, he has to edit it by hand, on paper. Suddenly, only really relevant suggestions and edits were given back to me.

(Of course, LaTeX does have a sort of “track changes” type package, but it’s not quite as easy to use as MS Word, and requires knowledge of LaTeX.)

Hmm…so it seems that the Apple iPhone will come with VPN support, and it also opens PDFs. Which means that if I bought one, I could browse science journals and read papers on the iPhone using my university’s institutional subscription.

But alas, I am a graduate student, and have no need for such a device for the cost. Dead trees are still far cheaper for reading things while traveling. Plus, who wants to be on call from the Boss all the time?

There’s a very interesting article at Ars Technica on the use of CAPTCHAs in order to help computers digitize images of text. A CAPTCHA is essentially a slightly distorted image of some text (letters and numbers) that is supposed to make sure that the user of a website is a person and not just a computer program. If you try to comment on a Blogger Blog, for example, you’ll see the CAPTCHA.

What these researchers did was take the CAPTCHAs and instead of scrambling random text, they would use images of text that was difficult to digitize, and people could then help the computer. So if I had a scanned page of an original page in an old edition of Shakespeare, for example, and my computer couldn’t recognize one of the words, then they could disseminate this word’s image on the internet to ask people to figure out what the word is. So, the “useless” work that people do on a constant basis on the web can be harnessed to accomplish something real. It’s a really neat idea!