Various bits and pieces that have been taking up much needed room in my brain. I now release them onto the internet so I can stop thinking about them.
- In my attempts to avoid becoming the-lame-advisor-who-doesn’t-know-how-to-do-anything, I’m switching to using JabRef to keep track of my references. I’m in the midst of tracking down various bits and pieces of evidence for an astrophysical phenomenon that lots of people have noted, but that hasn’t been put together in a big enough package that it’s become standard lore. It’s a major literature slog, and keeping a running plain text file wasn’t cutting it anymore. I’ve got a pretty good system going for importing gobs of papers off ADS, but haven’t yet figured out a hack to automatically set up a link to the ADS url.
- Last night, the next to last thing the 3 yr old uttered before going to sleep was “My dog’s name is Fat Ferocious Gum”. We have no dog.
- Watching an episode of Electric Company (now out on DVD, huzzah), I spotted Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and Mel Brooks (voice only). Man, that was a great show. It’s aged surprisingly well, with the exception of the computer graphics, which seem to be run largely by an oscilliscope.
- Doing a little google stalking of a former high-school classmate made good (Hi Steve!) led me to a graphic novel Two-Fisted Science that features actual scientists doing actual stuff (i.e. not fighting with laser beams or anything). There’s even a study guide for intrepid teachers.
- A man just got the record for casting a stone that skipped 51 times. That just seems impossible.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:42 am
The student I work with uses bibdesk, though that is a Mac application. He highly recommends it.
The other major collaborator in that project uses copy and paste out of vi. Of course, he also still uses UCB mail with some hand-rolled smtp fu to deal with attachments.
51 times is insane.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:10 am
Phil recently asked how people organize their pdfs and bibliographies and got some good responses in the comments if you’re not totally satisfied with JabRef.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:44 am
CiteULike automatically sets up links to the paper URLs provided you add them to your library in a certain way — if you click on their special bookmark when you’re at the abstract URL, it adds the paper to your library complete with all the bibliographical information. It works with ArXiV, ADS, APS, AIP, and many others besides.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:31 am
When I was working as a research associate at the American Institute of Physics back in the last century, I noted that the publisher of “Two Fisted Science” sent a copy of the comic book so that it could be noted in Physics Today. There was an angry note placed on the comic book by a certain luminary, stating that we wouldn’t acknowledge such “garbage”. I felt his opinion was a little small-minded, and the readership would find it interesting, and certainly Feynman (the subject of that particular one) would have loved it.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Fifty-one is indeed amazing. I do wonder how many plinks and pitty-pats went into the record.
Oh, and if you haven’t already started collecting the odd, interesting, and amusing things your child says, I recommend you do so soon.
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:16 pm
So JabRef is BibTeX, but unnecssarily fancy …. ?
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Necessarily fancy! With the gawdawful literature trolling I’m doing, I’m building up enormous databases of observational papers, and the ability to group them easily, to have paper titles in an easily scanned column, to have the list automatically alphebetized by author, to automatically generate the reference tags, and to set up click through links to the actual papers all make trying to track down stuff much easier. An assiduously organized person would be fine with a plain text file of the BibTex, but for me, that system has started to break.
I’d heard about bibdesk, but needed something I could run under linux as well.
The CiteULike looks promising, once I get over the name soundling like they’re marketing a new flavor of gum.
October 2nd, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Oh, so that’s how people write those papers with reference lists that take up more than a page? It looks interesting, maybe I’ll get around to it – after I start using BibTex. I’m only going to be truly impressed once it lets you run a cron job to scrape ADS and automatically update your CV.
Also, Brad, there are programs to read mail? I just use “cat /var/spool/mail/username”
If you attached the bibcode to the entry on import that would make automatic links out to ADS fairly trivial.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:20 pm
The Electric Company DVDs (having to small children provides my convenient excuse for buying these) have brought back to my memory all the great Tom Lehrer songs that he did for that show. “Silent E” is awesome.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
51 times!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7deV22aWESc
That’s impressive.
October 5th, 2007 at 4:58 am
or styrofoam-coated… I hate to be a doubting Thomas, but that rock doesn’t seem to sink even when it’s not moving forward anymore. Partially pumice…? Does anyone have the stone?
October 5th, 2007 at 5:11 am
I recommend checking out Zotero. Its a great firefox plugin for organizing references and notes about references.
It recognizes the bibliographic information on various webpages — like ADS, Spires and the arxiv — which you can easily add to its database.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Thanks to everyone who provided links. Oddly enough, I was just thinking that I was getting way tired of starting up another new bibliography list, let alone managing my existing one. I’ll definitely check out the OS X choices …