Category: Journal

• July 26, 2016

  Things you see with a camera trap

  I had the time lapse camera described in this post set out in the rocky intertidal zone in Monterey. Late one afternoon it caught these images of a ground squirrel venturing down into the mussel zone and picking small mussels (Mytilus californianus) off the rocks and eating them. If you replay the video a few…
• January 10, 2016

  Is live-tweeting meetings losing steam? #scicomm

  As I write this in early 2016, sitting in the armpit of Silicon Valley (San Jose is, undeniably based on geography, the armpit of the south San Francisco Bay), we are beginning to witness the first signs of a contraction of the exuberant venture capital markets that have fueled utterly silly tech startup company valuations…
• September 3, 2015

  Adventures in course management software: Canvas

  Course management software is universally garbage, but Canvas has managed to be better than most. Which is a lot like saying “This is the best tasting pile of dog poop I’ve found today.” The ability to create online quizzes that have the answers entered for easy grading should make for a useful system, but today…
• May 21, 2015

  iButton internals

  I’ve written in the past about iButtons and my attempts to waterproof them. Although iButton temperature dataloggers are fairly well sealed, they are not waterproof. But if you know an old person that used iButtons in the late 90s or early 2000s, they might claim that iButtons are absolutely waterproof. It turns out that iButtons…
• May 18, 2015

  Basic text string functions in R

  To get the length of a text string (i.e. the number of characters in the string): [code lang=”R” gutter=”false”] nchar()[/code] Using length() would just give you the length of the vector containing the string, which will be 1 if the string is just a single string. To get the position of a regular expression match(es)…
• April 30, 2015

  Electronics parts list

  Here’s the start of a list of common bits and doo-dads I use for building electronics projects. https://github.com/millerlp/parts_guide/blob/master/parts_guide.md That’s all there is to it.
• April 29, 2015

  Preserving equations in Powerpoint when going cross-platform

  This is another one of those tricks that I forget how to do unless I write it down. When I move Powerpoint (2010) presentations from my Windows machine to my Mac (Powerpoint 2011), the equations usually get destroyed along the way. The workaround is to turn the equations into images that can’t be altered by…
• April 22, 2015

  A plot of co-authorships in my little corner of science

    Here’s a mostly useless visualization of the collection of journal articles that sits in my reference database in Endnote. I deal mostly in marine biology, physiology, biomechanics, and climate change papers, with a few molecular/genetics papers thrown in here and there. The database has 3325 entries, 2 of which have ambiguous publication years and…
• April 6, 2015

  Disassembling an ancient Si-Tech dry suit exhaust valve

  Experienced cold water scuba divers will tell you that a dry suit is a vital piece of safety equipment, especially in challenging conditions (seriously, they’ll tell you without prompting, and then babble on about their gear until you walk away). Serious divers will also tell you that maintaining your gear in tip-top shape is an…
• March 31, 2015

  Open Wave Height Logger prototype in the water

  I finally got around to deploying a prototype OWHL unit in the real live ocean to log some waves. The low-tech housing is made of 1.5″ schedule 40 pvc pipe. The pipe snugly fits the D-cell battery holder, while the electronics fit inside the modified 1.5″ end cap. I try not to rely solely on…