A common problem with Windows is that when you plug in a USB drive it may acquire a new drive letter. Usually this is no problem, but if you use the drive with a program that wants the data to be on the same drive each time it is inserted, you need to force Windows to use the same drive letter. Doing so is not hard. Here I will illustrate using Windows 7.
Click START and type in diskmgmt.msc in the search box. Press enter to run the program.
One of my pet irritations is making a numbered list and discovering that the numbers seem to arbitrarily change font. eg
1. This is point 1
2. this is point 2
3. this is point 3
Easy Solution: … Continue reading
I came across some data from the National Science Foundation in the US. They surveyed ~2000 members of the public in 2012 (but there is also data going back to the 1980s) with some simple questions assessing basic science knowledge. Here are some of the questions and the proportion of respondents getting them right:
| Question | % answering correctly |
| How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year? | 55% |
| Electrons are smaller than atoms. | 53% |
| Lasers work by focusing sound waves. | 47% |
| Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. | 51% |
| Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. | 48% |
Given these were either true/false or 3 options one might expect a random answer to be correct 50% or 33% of the time. I guess this highlights a dismal failure in the education system.
Jill is doing fantastically well in her photography. She came away from the presentation evening with 2 trophies – highest aggregate points for prints in B grade and highest aggregate points for EDI (projected images) in B grade. This is despite being bumped up to A grade in the middle of the year so for the second half of the year her points came from A-grade competition. A fantastic effort.
drawing of newborn wallaby created in Powerpoint
If you want to create drawings like the one to the right using a program you already know how to use, I have written a tutorial that may help you. Powerpoint is not ideal for this sort of drawing, but it is easier than Inkscape (free) or Adobe Illustrator (very expensive), since you already know how to drive powerpoint. No new user interface to learn, just a few tricks and tweaks to get the head around.
My tutorial will take you through the key steps in generating this illustration of a newborn wallaby attached to a teat in the pouch. I will show how to generate the base by tracing the outlines from a photo, and then how to embellish this with fills and shading to get a reasonably 3-D appearance.
Tidying my room today I came across a very dusty doc I had made yonks ago on the importance of computer backup. It had the “Backup song” that parodies the song “Yesterday” by the Beatles. I rather like it, and it still rings true today. Enjoy.
|
Yesterday, Suddenly, I pushed something wrong Yesterday, |
Google led me to a source, Rob Cosgrove who attributes authorship to Sunni Freyer with the original lyrics (and additional ones by Bill Frick) at http://web.archive.org/web/19990117031458/http:/alice.net/yesterda.htm
Shaking hands with DEATH
Alas, DEATH has come to take Terry Pratchett from us. Viv has written on this on one of her blogs – clearly she was greatly affected. Read her comments HERE.
2014: #8 in Australia
I just got a pleasant surprise. Reading through the latest School of BioSciences newsletter I found I had been #8 in Australia in the Lecturer of the Year nominations.
Just had a little play with Photoshop with a picture with converging verticals.
 here is the image taken looking upwards so the verticals converge |
 I used the perspective crop tool to correct the convergence, leaving a blank wedge at the bottom left |
 I selected the blank area with the magic wand then expanded the selection by 2 pixels to be safe. |
 Then I pressed the delete key and chose the “content aware fill”. The fill is remarkably good, particularly given the complexity and structures involved.Then all it needs is a tweak to the image width, to correct the distortion introduced by the perspective crop. |
Some interesting data I came across, showing patterns of enrolments over time for subjects in year 11 (the start of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) that is our final educational qualification before tertiary/post-secondary studies).
Some Recent Publications
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7421-7136