My 256MB flash drive has stopped working. It was plugged into a knee-level USB port and I fear it may have gotten bumped while I was getting up out of the chair, causing a connection inside the flash drive to get broken. It’s not acknowledged by any computers I stick it into so I think it’s dead.
This is bad, because the most recent versions of the talk and paper I’m working on were on the flash drive. However, not fatal because I also have copies of everything scattered about on my desktop computers. So at best I’ve only lost a week’s worth of changes which were fairly minor and easily recreated.
There were several other things on the flash drive, but they were just copies of stuff already on my other computers and nothing critical.
Sucks to lose the stuff on the drive, but at least it’s only inconvenient rather than really bad.
New digital mammo hitting the road
MUSC has a brand spankin’ new Mobile Health Unit (operated by the Hollings Cancer Center) offering among other services, digital mammography with our 5th digital mammography unit. The MHU travels to different places around the area (mostly rural locations) offering various screening services to people that might otherwise have a hard time getting these done.
The MHU is going to be parked in the horseshoe on campus on April 18, so if you’re in the area stop by and check it out. I’m told the new van is pretty swanky and posh inside. It’s also going to be visiting the Family Circle Cup Tennis tourney for an open house on April 14 (tomorrow).
Why can’t MS Excel do…
Now that I’m starting to do a little more research and submitting things for publications, I’m learning just how utterly useless Microsoft Excel is for graphs that aren’t destined for screen or online presentations.
Totally and completely useless.
I’m sure this is nothing new to fellow scientists out there. This of course begs the question: Why can’t Excel create publication quality* graphs and charts yet? People have been using Excel to do analysis, number crunching and graphing for years and years now ever since it came out. So why doesn’t Excel support exporting graphs as a vector based graphics file like EPS (and not just a bitmap rendered as a bunch of PS commands either).
Excel is still an excellent tool for crunching numbers and doing analysis. Lots of functions, easy to do quick data visualization and other things. The graphs it does make are usually pretty decent looking, but when it comes to creating publication quality graphs, fuggedaboutit.
This leaves me with hunting for (free) alternatives to my graph making like R, Octave or Gnuplot . I’m currently using R and Gnuplot for my current project, although climbing the learning curve for both programs is making the going a little bit slow. They are becoming quite useful though.
*Publication quality generally means 300-600 dpi, 7-10 cm long, black/white or grayscale (colour if you can afford to pay for it) or some kind of vector based graphics format like EPS.
Decisions
It is pointless to worry about whether you have made the right or wrong decision. Instead focus on figuring out how to best live with the decision you have made.
2007 Hurricane forecast
The Tropical Meteorology folks over at Colorado State (the Klotzbach and Gray group) are forecasting another busy season this year with 17 named storms, 9 hurricanes (5 of which will intense hurricanes). It’s similar to their forecast this time last year but with fewer hurricane days.
According to their summary of last year’s season, last year’s season turned out to be a dud (thankfully) because of El Niño. With it dissipating, this year could turn out to be a busy one. I hope the storms continue to stay away from here though. They also predict a 73% probability of a tropical storm making landfall along the east coast, 66% for a Cat 1-2 hurricane and 50% for a Cat 3-5 hurricane. The probabilities in the Lowcountry area are much lower though.
The NHC forecast will probably be similar, although it’ll be a few more weeks before that one comes out.