Beauty in Science

I like taking the time to take an image of a particularly stunning cell while I'm at the microscope churning through the experiments:




microtubules in yellow, DNA in green, the red is an out of focus centrosome.

Things you'll find on a lazy Sunday bike ride.....

..like an old Soviet cemetery filled with hundreds and hundreds of graves from WW II and soon after.




I'm gonna have to go back with a real camera....

My Widgets

Now that everybody seems to finally be buying macs, I thought I'd fill some blog space with the 'widgets' I use with the mac operating system. When this 'dashboard' concept first came out I thought it was pretty gimmicky, and was sure I'd never start using it. But now, 4(?) years later, I use every widget I have just about every day. So I thought I'd share with you the widgets I use to make my daily life that much easier. I don't actually spend much time looking for new widgets.
So if you have any of your own favorites, comment on what they are, there's a million out there these days, I'd be curious to know what else is cool.

In no particular order:

Leo translator widget

This is pretty invaluable. With a brush of the trackpad I get a text input to type whatever German or English word I need to translate, and then get a browser window opened up to that word on the leo webpage. I truly use this multiple times a day.


Currency Converter

I also look at this one many times a day. Watching the euro vs. the dollar mostly, but also any country I'll be visiting soon. As an example, I want to buy a camera soon that is sold in Europe, England, Canada, and the USA at different prices in different currencies. I can quickly convert what each would be in euros to see where the best deal is, having friends in the other countries that could potentially hook me up.



Yahoo Finance Stocks

I stopped looking at this one for a while because it was more depressing every day. But things are looking up now. You can follow real time updates of the dow jones, or individual stocks, or even combined mutual funds that you may have.





Calculator

Needs no explanation. handy.






Converter

This guy is a real do-it all and converts various units in volume, area, length, weight, energy, temperature, time, currency, speed, pressure and power. Particularly useful for converting the more awkward metric to US conversions.




Accuweather

Again, self explanatory.









MPI-CBG lunch display

Pretty useless for anybody that doesn't work in my institute, this widget will give you the lunch menu for the day or future days of the week in the MPI-CBG cafeteria. Can be helpful for deciding when it's one of those days where it's time to go out for lunch, or if it's build-your-own hamburger day and you should probably show up for lunch 10 minutes earlier to avoid the lines.





MPI-CBG staff search

Again, institute-specific, but easy to quickly look up emails and phone numbers. Would be nice if it included pictures like the database, though, in case you need to find somebody you haven't met before.





Genetic Code

This is my most recent addition, and I've been using it a lot. You get all the codons plus the 3 letter and one letter amino acid code. They appear to even be color-coded as to their structure/function. With a quick brush of the trackpad, it's much faster than finding a book or website. This is my nerdiest widget.









Screenshot Plus

This guy comes in handy because I can NEVER remember the keyboard shortcuts for taking screen captures/window captures/etc. You get a number of options, then a preview, and an option to save the picture, re-take the picture, or open it up as a preview. I use this actually more than I would have expected.







Right, that's it. Le me know if there are others I'm missing out on.