Scientist's gadgets
Google Wave
Everybody (Terence Tao for one) seems to be excited about forthcoming Google Wave, and so am I. Here is the video demonstrating some of the product’s features:
I think, we are yet to see whether Google Wave is to become ultimate science collaboration tool (I signed up on their site – and hope they’ll get me into beta testing). My current opinion is that Google Wave provides you functionality similar to forums rather than wikis: in collaboration projects, I’ve found that messages tend to group into project categories, not conversations – since it is also good to see also conversations which ended up long time ago, not just recent ones, if the topic of the conversation is the same. And of course, I would love if a collaboration platform naturally would support TeX formulae (embed them as fugures, MathML or in some other – not terribly ugly – way) 
(nobody among big players seems to be interested to satisfy needs of little egghead nerds – scientists)
387. Gapminder and dynamical visualization
Nowadays, in statistical analysis of various economic or social factors we mostly use plots where time is just another coordinate along another axis. In real life we do feel time and dynamics of various processes in a different fashion – time is more like a sequence/collection of snapshots taken at its different moments, in the same sense as a movie being a sequence of frames.
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343. Followup: BumpTop
Just wanted to let you know that BumpTop finally went public – that is, you don’t need to be invited to the private beta to have fun with you desktop. The version 1.0 can be downloaded for free on the BumpTop website.
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325. Scientist’s gadgets: desktop software
Desktop software? What is this supposed to mean? – you may ask.
Well if you are a fellow scientist – theoretician, to be more precise – you know very well how much time we usually spend in front of our computers. Once upon a time I have tried to make a personal estimation in my particular case and found something like 14 hours including work and various useless crap like reading SPAM. This is ridiculous. It is in our very best interests to maximally optimize this time spent in front of a computer, so that we don’t repetitively deal with meaningless tasks, finish meaningful work as early as possible and enjoy the company of our wives/girlfriends (as well as other family members ).
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307. Scientist’s gadgets: Tablet PC and handwriting formulae recognition
As usual, on Sunday I’ll try to feed you with as less technicalities as possible but still make the post useful for you… Today the subject of our discussion will be related to Tablet PCs and functionality they offer to a scientist (in particular, to a theoretical physicist).
Read more on 307. Scientist’s gadgets: Tablet PC and handwriting formulae recognition…
251. Scientist’s gadgets: Kindle 2 vs. Palm
Amazon has recently (announced in New York on this Monday) released Kindle 2. It is currently only available for preorder, but I still want to review it – I am a kind of familiar with the subject of ebook readers, as you will see
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215. Scientific computation in the cloud
This is a guest blog post by Lukas Svec who is working on high performance computing related problems in the University of Washington together with F. Vila, J. Gardner and J. Rehr. I thought that their work is rather cool and decided to learn more about it (whether we want it or not, cloud computing is the way of the future as Google proves very effectively so far). Please also consider this post as a kind of press release for the code that the group of John Rehr has developed. Dmitry.
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210. Video of the day: inside LHC
What can I say? Unless they’ll finally start colliding hadrons and discover Higgs (at least ) in the near future, the thing will remain what it is now – an overly complicated labyrinth of corridors and tubes 
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184. Scientist’s gadgets: Polycom
Dear readers,
yesterday you did not have the pleasure to read (or were not disappointed by ) a new post at NEQNET, but I do have a good excuse – first time in my life I have delivered a 1 hour teleconference seminar overseas. I did need some time to prepare the presentation as well as to deal with technical problems related to the telecon connection. Apart from sharing my impressions, I consider this post as
notes for myself, so that I can easily reproduce the process of telecon connecting in the future.
Read more on 184. Scientist’s gadgets: Polycom…
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