Author: Luke Miller
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The littorine snail in that kid’s knee
This news story about a seashore snail found living in a child’s knee wound has been making the rounds lately. Apparently 4-year old Paul Franklin from Southern California was camping at a beach in central California near Morro Bay, when he fell and hurt his knee (Orange County Register). For several weeks afterwards, the wound…
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The dangers of overexposing western blots
It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black. – Nigel Tufnel, lead guitarist of Spinal Tap. None more black (or none more white) is a real concern when you’re talking about imaging western blots. If you only want to verify the presence of a protein,…
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Stupid water bath tricks
As part of the downward spiral into increasingly esoteric subjects that is currently happening on this site, I now present some info on making a water bath do things. Simple things, but things nonetheless. As part of an ongoing project in the lab, it became necessary to start carrying out simple temperature ramps with…
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O2 conversion
The molar volume of an ideal gas is ~22.4 liters per mole (we’ll consider O2 to be an ideal gas for these purposes, and 22.4 is an approximation that varies with temperature, it’s 22.414 at 0C). Convert from 22.4 liters to milliliters ( = 22400 ml per mol). So if you have 1 milliliter of…
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Removing security features from a pdf
Whoops, I totally made my own pdf and accidentally included a bunch of security features, so now I can’t use my highlighter or type notes on the document. It sure would be handy to take off those security features that I put there myself when I made the pdf, myself. With a full copy of…
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More tide prediction with R
Edit: There is now a full-fledged R package, rtide, to accomplish the same basic task of generating time series of tide predictions that is outlined here. See this more recent post for information. In the previous post I outlined how to query the XTide software with R and parse the results into a handy-dandy data…
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Interfacing XTide and R
Edit: There is now a full-fledged R package, rtide, to accomplish the same basic task of generating time series of tide predictions that is outlined here. See this more recent post for information. XTide is an open-source program that predicts tide heights and current speeds for hundreds of tide and current stations around the United…
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Book Review: The R Book, Second Edition (2013)
The first edition of The R Book by Michael J. Crawley was an ambitious work, but managed to be slightly rubbish due to the atrocious typographical layout of the original book. The good news is that the new 2nd edition, released in 2013, has a substantially improved layout that makes the book far more useful…
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ImageJ StartupMacros
Before I lose this file again: StartupMacros.txt This is a text file, based on the original StartupMacros.txt file that came with ImageJ, that can be dropped in the ImageJ/macros folder that is created when you install ImageJ. Start up ImageJ, and if this macro doesn’t automatically run, go to Plugins>Macros>Startup Macros to load it. It…
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Analyzing western blots with Image Studio Lite
Image Studio Lite is a free software package from LI-COR Biosciences aimed at life scientists that want to analyze gels, western blots, dot blots, and other similar lab outputs. Although the Lite version is free, there is a more comprehensive paid version of the software that aims to easily integrate with the apparatus that Licor…