Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

Cedar Point is offering admission tickets for $25 online (normally $43) if you buy 4 or more. If you’ve never been to Cedar Point, all I can say is that you’re missing out on the best rides in the world. Period. They have three out of the top ten steel roller coasters in the world (the only park to have multiple coasters on the top 10). And if you’ve only ever been to “Great” America, I laugh at you Do yourself a favor. Take a road trip this summer and get to The Point. As long as you like roller coasters, you won’t be disappointed.

Cedar Point has received the Golden Ticket Award by Amusement Today for “Best Amusement Park in the World” for the past ten years. -WP

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Big Buck Bunny (code named Project Peach), the second short open source movie to come from the Blender Foundation, was released online on May 30, 2008. I can still remember hearing about Elephant’s Dream (code named Project Orange) back when it became the first open movie ever released.

Open movies are made with free software. Both Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny were primarily animated using Blender, a great program for creating 3-D animations. While I was unable to find an exact list of the software used on BBB, I’m sure it’s very similar to that listed for Elephant’s Dream. Another benefit of using Blender to create these movies is that numerous improvements were to be made in order to make the visual effects cinema quality. It’s great to see a group pushing the limits of what can be done with free software to help find its weaknesses and then collaborating to make it do what they needed it to do.

Another really cool aspect of open source movies is that the content is also free. I don’t just mean that you can watch the movie for free. BBB was released under a Creative Commons BY license, the most liberal creative license offered by CC. Any part of the movie can be “remixed” into your own creation, provided that you properly attribute the original work. It’s really cool because the character “files” are freely available. That means that anyone using Blender can simply load one of the bunnies and make it do whatever you want. Imagine being able to do that with Sully from Monster’s, Inc. or Woody from Toy Story. That’d be really awesome!

Big Buck Bunny is available for streaming on YouTube, but I’d highly recommend downloading a high-quality 1080p version from the website (see 1920×1080). They’ve got copies in a few different formats, including Ogg, all with HD available. When I tried, the US server for the 1920 OGG file wasn’t working, but the Italian server worked great. Grab the torrent if you’d like to help spread the film and save bandwidth.

Also if you’re interested, the Blender Foundation’s latest is Project Apricot, an open source 3-D game using some of the characters from BBB. The next movie project will supposedly be an action/fighting short. They should hire Randall Munroe to help write it!

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Until recently, I didn’t toy much with the default “look” of Ubuntu. I changed my wallpaper and that was about it. But one of the great things about Linux is how customizable it is. I hadn’t toyed around much with Screenlets or Avant Window Navigator, despite having both of them installed. I’ve been showing both of them off to various people for the last few months and I decided it was about time I changed the look of my desktop (laptop) a bit.

All-in-all, I’m liking Screenlets, but I’m still not 100% sold on Avant. People like it because it looks like the Mac launcher thing, but I just don’t know if it adds anything all that useful. But now that I’ve reorganized my menus, Avant feels like a much more important part of my desktop. Also, I really feel like this wallpaper sums up my feelings on my desktop makeover. It makes me feel like my system is capable of seemingly impossible things! If you’re curious what the default Ubuntu desktop look like, you can check it out here.

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I know I’m a bit late on this bandwagon. I don’t normally have too many Firefox extensions installed, but I’ve been playing around with a few lately. I’ve discovered AdBlock Plus. If you’re a Firefox user and you don’t use this extension, you should. If you’re not a Firefox user, you should be (and you should install this extension)!

What does it do, you ask? Oh, it just hides all those annoying ads that are found on so many web pages today. Notice a difference between these two images?

It comes with a “filter” that removes pretty much every ad you’ll come across automatically. It also adds little “block” buttons to things that might be ads. Clicking “Block” will add these items to your filter and you won’t see them anymore. Pretty sweet, eh? Well maybe not if you like seeing that you’ve won a free iPod on every web page.

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WordPress 2.6 came out yesterday (ahead of schedule). It’s got a few nice new features to it, but not nearly as many changes as was found in 2.5. It was certainly more of a fit-and-finish release, but it looks like (as usual) they did their homework and fixed some good stuff. One of the features from 2.5 that’s still working great is the automatic plugin upgrades. Any time a new plugin comes out, I get notified and upgrading is as easy as clicking a link that pulls the latest version right on to my site. Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress) had mentioned a similar idea to automatically upgrade Wordpress itself in the future. Well as I was going to download the WP database backup plug-in (that I didn’t have installed for some reason), I saw that an automatic upgrade plug-in for Wordpress has been implemented (but not by the Wordpress team). Once I was sure I had everything backed up correctly (I learned my lesson), I decided to try out this new plug-in. Needless to say, it worked great. It even has automatic back-up features built in for files and the database. If only Drupal made upgrades as easy as WP, it would make maintaining RMstudents a whole lot easier.

So far, WP 2.6 seems to be working great! Man, I love this software. It’s got to be one of the best pieces of FOSS out there. Grab it today!

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I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I credit Sadie for recommending this really great book. Or maybe I should just credit Oprah ( ). The Road tells the story of an unnamed man and his son who are traveling across a post-apocalyptic America. The entire world appears to be covered in a layer of ash that also blocks out nearly all sunlight. The boy and his father are two of a handful of survivors roaming the planet and scavenging to survive. The Road is a story of survival. It’s a story of a father who has lost everything and everyone he knows, save his son. The world has to be one of the scariest settings imaginable: hardly any light in the daytime, pitch black at night, bitter cold, almost zero visibility, no food or supplies, and dangerous scavengers around nearly every bend. The story contains some mind-bending, horrific imagery that has to be seen (read) to be understood.

The writing itself is also very different. It definitely took some getting used to. While it doesn’t completely lack punctuation, quotation marks, commas, and apostrophes are left out (and maybe more). While some of the descriptions are eloquent, the dialog between the father and son remains fairly simple. I think the phrase “Okay.” must have been used at least 200 times in the book, and the two saying “Okay” to each other was a common resolution to any discussion. While I found this strange at first, as the story progressed this phrase seemed to demonstrate the strong bond between the characters.

The story was horrifying, endearing, and truly moving. Despite the bizarre setting, every aspect of the story was fully believable, which makes things all the more horrific. The different writing style took me a little while to get used to, but once I did, I flew through the book. I highly recommend you check this out if you haven’t already. It is truly one of the most unique stories I have ever read!

4.5/5

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

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I’ve started a new research project this summer in Marcello Del Carlo’s lab. Dr. Del Carlo is a new faculty member at Rush in the Department of Biochemistry. Our lab is affiliated with a clinical urologist faculty and we’re researching a urological disease called Peyronie’s Disease (PD) [Warning: male nudity]. From a biochemical perspective, we’re studying the process of growth and formation of a fibrous plaque underneath the skin of the male penis in a layer of connective tissue called the tunica albuginea. Currently, we’re analyzing both diseased and non-diseased tissue samples that have been surgically removed from patients with PD. In the future, we’ll also be working with a cultured fibroblast cell line doing similar work. So far we’re using Western Blots to identify and characterize proteins that are up- or down-regulated in diseased tissue compared to that of non-diseased. Our hope is that the studies will lead to a better understanding of PD and how the plaques form to aid in treatment.

In addition to research, Dr. Del Carlo is very interested in using FOSS as it relates to scientific research. By the time I met with him, he had already set up a database using PASSIM in order to keep track of tissue samples from patients. He also had the idea of using a Wordpress blog as a sort of “online laboratory notebook”. I thought this seemed very in line with the Science Commons project, a derivative of Creative Commons. Science Commons is attempting to lower the barriers of scientific research, which is currently not nearly as “open” as it should be, considering almost all of it is funded by the U.S. Government. Most people believe that the fruits of governmentally funded projects should be available to the general public. In many cases, however, scientific research is locked down (for varying periods of time) due to copyright after being published in scientific journals. Since a scientist’s credibility is often judged by previous publications in journals, Science Commons is working to reduce the hold of copyright on this process, so that labs can publish data immediately to the web, allowing it to be indexed, freely searchable, and available immediately to anyone wanting to read it. This will continue to be an uphill battle since journals make a large amount of their money by licensing access to large academic institutions for their faculty. The idea that labs can make their data freely available on their own personal websites is being met with resistance. Still, I feel as a society we must push forward, despite the corporate interests, in order to do what’s best for the public. Plus, my thought is that journals will not suffer any major economic hardship. Their “seal of approval” by publishing the content will continue to be the scale by which research is judged. They would also continue to act as a collecting ground so that researchers looking for the latest data don’t need to worry about sorting through Google search results to find the latest findings in a field. Instead, some publishing groups have the gall to say that in order to publish in their journal you must leave the rights to your work on their doorstep, no matter who did the experiments. This will continue to be a very important issue in the scientific community in the future, and I’m hoping to gain a keener understanding of it over the next few weeks and months.

At least for now, I am the only one updating the Peyronie’s Disease Information Repository and it contains all of our experiments and results to date. Feel free to check it out, but unless it’s scientifically relevant, keep personal comments to my site.

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