It’s a dilemma that any real-time PCR researcher will face in his or her career: Do I choose TaqMan® or SYBR®? Inspired by the sentiments of researchers all over the world, Life Technologies has produced the “Rap Batttle in the Lab” pitting TaqMan® and SYBR® chemistries against one another. Gather your lab mates and watch this epic confrontation unfold.
[Via YouTube]
MinutePhysics looks at the mind-boggling many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real.
[Via MinutePhysics]
Trivia whiz Ken Jennings has made a career as a keeper of facts; he holds the longest winning streak in history on the U.S. game show Jeopardy. But in 2011, he played a challenge match against supercomputer Watson — and lost. With humor and humility, Jennings tells us how it felt to have a computer literally beat him at his own game, and also makes the case for good old-fashioned human knowledge.
[Via TED]
I decided to publish some of my own personal projects on MoG in a new category: MoG Weekend Project. In this first MoG Weekend Project I will publish my paper2movie script.
Back in December I posted Timothy Weninger’s research paper timelapse. At the time I just started writing my master thesis and I decided I would create a timelapse of my thesis as well. Unfortunately, Weninger did not release his software. When I looked through the comments of the video, I found a SVN version of a papermovie script created by Andrew Ferguson. However, this version contained a lot of hard-coded stuff, so I decided to make my own paper2movie script.
The paper2movie script is a bash script that loops through a git repository to create all the intermediate versions of the paper from the Latex source files. It then calculates the dimensions of the images in the video. Next, the images are created from the PDFs using the montage tool from ImageMagick. In the last part of the script, the movie is created using ffmpeg.
The result is a timelapse of your version-controlled research paper:
Since the paper2movie script is written in Bash, you can only run it on a Unix-based operating system. Furthermore, you need to have ImageMagick and ffmpeg installed. You should note that the movie is encoded with h264. This encoder is by default not available in Ubuntu due to licensing restrictions. You can install in following this guide. Of course, you also need a Git version-controlled research paper written in Latex.
Before you can run the script, you need to change the input parameters by editing the file. A description is given for each of the parameters. After all the parameters are set you can run the script. The runtime depends on the number of versions and the number of pages of your paper. For my thesis, it took 40 minutes to create the movie (on a Intel Core i5 M480 with 4GB of RAM).
Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.
On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun’s lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays — a phenomenon known as coronal rain.
[Via YouTube]
Ionica Smeets explains the danger of mixing up causality and correlation at TEDx Delft.
Thanks for sharing, Albert!
[Via Youtube]
Coding isn’t just for computer whizzes, says Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab — it’s for everyone. In a fun, demo-filled talk Resnick outlines the benefits of teaching kids to code, so they can do more than just “read” new technologies — but also create them.
[Via TED]
