The Wonders of Creationism!

Jerry Coyne just sent these great clips around EvolDir.

I love 'em! Creationist don't need any help in looking stupid. I have to wonder where they come from 'cuz the second one looks too much like a spoof to be real.

Uprising in Burma

Probably everyone has already heard of the recent protests in Burma. Here are a couple links of the recent events from Spiegel Online on Monday and again today where shots fired at protesters, including monks are reported. The media has not started dubbing this the "Saffron Rebellion" I guess in keeping with the colour revolutions of Eastern Europe. I am really amazed that violent action is being taken against the monks. In Buddhist tradition harming a monk is akin to doing the same thing to your parents, it is really a loathsome act. Here are some other links:

You can sign a petition here, and keep up with breaking news at mizzima. Here is a video of interest. (Thanks to Jolanta and Bhante Ashin Sopaka at KBC for the links)

Photo from Spiegel Online

Best Software for a Paperless PhD

I am now working on a super beautiful and fancy MacBook Pro that is provided by my chef (special shout out to the MPI-Evolutionary Biology).

there are lots of great MAC software for scientists. One good place to start is the Apple homepage for Science related software. There are plenty of great freeware things there.

Another great piece of software is the pdf manager called Papers developed by two dutch guys: Mek 'n Tosj. It's not freeare but you get a free 30 day trial and a 40% discount for students, which makes it a great bargain and it is certainly worth it!

There is a great tutorial about how to work with Papers and Net News Wire, a nice stand-alone RSS reader, which is also not freeware, but you can use it with annoyances without paying.

the other great software, which is freeware, is Journler, although it isn't marketed as an eLabBook it can certainly be used like one. I tried some of the Devon software but I didn't think they really did what I wanted for managing my files and eLabBook as a whole. Journler has the advantage of very easily putting in links to files on your hard drive. This is useful if you have lots of sequencing files or you ahve analyzed data and have the raw data plus that analyzed data in a folder. You can make an entry about that project/experiment and then make a link to the data which makes it much easier to find the software on your HD afterwards.

Another great piece of work I like is QuickSilver. This makes navigating around your harddrive and files alot easier. Although there are still some quirks I am happy with the rudimentary knowledge I have of the program. One thing I did was to make short cuts (apple+1 for firefox, apple+6 for papers, etc.) for all my frequently used programs. Then I don't have to see icons anywhere and they are even easier to access than clling up QS and typing in their names.

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