Power Point Geometric Patterns

PowerPoint is a pretty awesome program in general, but I've recently been using it to make geometric patterns. There are tools for just about any shape you can think of, and layering shapes is a breeze. Below are a few examples of some patterns that I made.

Vyrus

Blobs

Squircle

Trap Ninja

A Lesson in Microscopes

Microscopes are nuts. I got a lesson in microscopes today from a specialty microscope setup engineer from Olympus. He was setting up a IX71 inverted microscope in a lab, and showed me some of it's features. First of all, the optical cables that brought the light from the external light source were filled with a clear liquid, not the normal fiber optic cables. Cool, I never thought about doing that, but it makes sense. Second, it has two light sources, one regular white light, and the other is a UV light to use on fluorescing samples. Ahh, so that's how they do it. I always imagined a UV lamp was used externally. And then he showed me all the apertures, levers, a do-hickeys to get a image into focus. And then there's phase-contrast, which uses the shift in the phase of the light as it passes through an object to impart a higher contrast ratio to the image. Which makes cells look super crisp.

Genetic Engineering

I'm a pretty big fan of genetic engineering of plants when it is in the form of selective breeding. Gene splicing and recombination is quite a bit trickier and could potentially cause some sleeping-beauty-esque disasters (poisonous apples anyone?). Richard Espley from a Plant and Food Research company in New Zealand shows red fleshed apples and selective breeding enhanced by gene research.

Google Trends

Google tracks basically everything anyone does on the internet. It's pretty amazing, and Google Trends lets you search through their mountains of search and site visit data. You can find out a whole bunch of curious things with this data, for instance, most of blogger.com's traffic comes from the US (which is true for most big sites), but the region with the second most traffic? Indonesia. That's pretty random. The daily unique visitors chart for blogger.com is show below.

Now on to everybody's favorite subject: Facebook.

Girl Walks Into A Bar

I saw just about half an hour of this movie, but I do plan on watching the rest. I just have trouble setting aside an hour and a half for a movie that is free and easily accessible. It's kind of strange, because even though I want to watch it, I'm not really in a hurry to. I think many people feel that this movie is probably not worth their time (as evidenced by heavy promotion garnering only 500,000 views), but it's a murder scheme with quite a few famous people (Danny DeVito, Josh Hartnett, Zachary Quinto who is the guy that played Sylar in Heroes, and Carla Gugino who was the Silk Spectre in the Watchmen). I was kind of hoping that more free feature length videos would premier on the internet, but judging from the lack of success that this movie is having, I don't think there will be another one anytime soon. The trailer is below.

Kobe or Frobe?

Neither seem very happy.

created using the animated gifs maker at MakeAGif

Epic Rap Battles Of History - Einstein Vs. Stephen Hawking

I know everyone has seen this, but it's soooooooooo good. Stephen Hawking and Einstein entangled in rap battle of cosmic proportions. 'Nuff said.