I’m a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view. I’ve been watching, since I grew up, the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences. And while these are both wonderful things in their own right — they both have very wonderful things going for them — truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date. (Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-ful things, by meaning, they are things you can worship. They are ideals that are powerful, they are irreducible, they are unique, they are useful — sometimes, often a long time, after the fact. And you can actually roll some of the pictures now, because I don’t want to look at me on the screen.

Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences. They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed. If you look at the math, E=mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there’s an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe — these are things that are really difficult to understand.

And what I’ve tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator — since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor — I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories. So that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood.

Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they’re taught is compartmentalized and it’s drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident. It’s almost like that old recipe for chicken soup, where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone. We don’t want to do that to our students. So we have an opportunity to really open up education.

And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard. So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell, that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on. They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that’s occupied by micro-machines.

And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life. These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids. And these micro-machines power how a cell moves, they power how a cell replicates, they power our hearts, they power our minds.

And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the center piece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will — in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactics stuff — put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works.

So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together. We worked with a theme, which is, you’ve got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they’re touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they’re picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there’s an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can’t see and sense. But they get the information that causes them to stop, causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape, and try to get out of these capillary and find out what’s going on.

So these molecular motors — we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did. And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on, but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening.

And so what I’m going to show you is a three-minute Reader’s Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It’s an ongoing project that’s going to go another four or five years. And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures — these little walking machines, they’re called kinesins — that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size. Run the movie, please.

But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life. Because all of these machines interact with each other. They pass information to each other; they cause different things to happen inside the cell. And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that’s brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes. No life, from the smallest life to everybody here, would be possible without these little micro-machines. In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse. (Laughter) (Music)

This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell: this little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that’s full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it’s needed in the cell — whether it’s to a membrane, whether it’s to an organelle, whether it’s to build something or repair something. And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells. So no matter how lazy you feel, you’re not really intrinsically doing nothing. (Laughter)

So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are, and think about some of the things that we’re learning about cellular mechanics. Once we figure out all that’s going on — and believe me, we know almost a percent of what’s going on — once we figure out what’s going on, we’re really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health, with what we do with future generations, how long we’re going to live. And hopefully we’ll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty. (Music)

But it’s really quite amazing that these cells, these micro-machines, are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding. They work together; they make the cell do what it needs to do. And their working together helps our bodies — huge entities that they will never see — function properly. Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. (Applause)

“螳螂虾能够分辨出12种颜色和多种形式的偏振光。相比之下，人类只能分辨出其中3种”；

“英国布里斯托尔大学的研究人员称，螳螂虾的视觉系统可能成为下一代DVD和CD播放器的仿生研究对象”。

“最让人兴奋的是它的结构竟然如此简单。”罗伯茨博士说，“这种由细胞膜构成的自然结构远非人类合成结构所能媲美。在未来，或许我们就能通过液体结晶和化学工程学方法模仿螳螂虾的眼睛，制造出更强大易用的光学设备。”

]]> http://flatfish166.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/%e5%a5%87%e7%89%b9%e7%9a%84%e8%9e%b3%e8%9e%82%e8%99%be/feed/ 0 jbxing 螳螂虾3 http://flatfish166.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/firefox%e6%a1%a3%e6%a1%883-%e4%bc%98%e5%8c%96%e4%bd%bf%e5%85%b6%e5%8f%8d%e5%ba%94%e6%9b%b4%e5%bf%ab/ http://flatfish166.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/firefox%e6%a1%a3%e6%a1%883-%e4%bc%98%e5%8c%96%e4%bd%bf%e5%85%b6%e5%8f%8d%e5%ba%94%e6%9b%b4%e5%bf%ab/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:44:13 +0000 jbxing http://jbxing.edublogs.org/?p=148 ]]> 已经做过的优化：
地址栏输入引号内内容“about:config”

1.新建－布尔（boolean)项，输入：config.trim_on_minimize,并设置为true。（作用：最小化时自动释放内存）

2.找到：browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers，修改值为5或更小。（页面快进/快退功能中保存的页面总数，默认是-1(无限)）

3.找到: network.http.pipelining, 将其值改成 true

4.将 network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 的值改的高一些，如30。（意思就是要求它每次发送30个请求）

5.“新建”—“整数” 首选项名称为：nglayout.initialpaint.delay 值改为“0”。（表示当浏览器收到网站回复的信息后能够快速的反应）

重启FireFox。

视频链接 http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/00395.2007/DC1

参考文献：Role of Eye Movements in the Retinal Code for a Size Discrimination Task J Neurophysiol Segev et al. 98: 1380

用途：

强大的搜索功能，用鼠标选中要查的单词（即高亮显示）后，按一个字母键就可在线词典中（如merriam-webster dictionary, ICIBA等等）搜索网页上的英文单词释义（其中一个字母代表一个词典，如按“m”键表示在Merriam-Webster查词，可自定义）；可在搜索引擎（如google, wikipedia, gigapedia等等）中搜索在网页上显示的文字。而且结果是在同一窗口中的网页中右边或左边显示，鼠标在点击原来网页时脚本自动关闭。

前提：

需要安装firefox游览器，并安装 greasemonkey插件，Lookitup2 脚本是安装在greasemonkey中的。

用法步骤：

1 安装好lookitup2脚本后，重启firefox。

2添加词典，如以Merriam-Webster为例。

1）呼出lookitup2 setting 页面。方法有2，

protocol 1：右击猴子头—–用户脚本命令(c)—-lookitup setting

protocol 2：高亮选中网页上任一词，按shift+3 即 ﹟ 键就会自动跳出设置页面。

2）先把原来已有的“Merriam-Webster ”site 删除，点右侧Delete 。点左下的new site, 填空:

Name: Merriam-Webster

Url: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/[words]

encoding: 选中UTF-8

key(即为自定义的快捷键): m

mode: 0

注：在填写其他搜索引擎的Url的时，随便用一个词去搜索，然后复制得到的网址，用[words] 替换该网址中的搜索词即可。

3）填好后 点save 即可。

3 查词：高亮选中所要查的单词，按m 键，右边就会跳出想要的结果！从此你的效率不知道会高出多少倍。

辅助软件： KatMouse。（安装了lookitup,会出现两个滚动条，实在很不方便，安装了这个软件后，就很方便，试一试就知道了，哈哈）

参考：1 《Firefox傻瓜教程: (4) 强大的LookItUp》

2 《推荐一个好用的油猴子脚本：lookitup2（类似划词搜索，个人感觉更好）》

2         Deciduous monsoon forests       落叶季雨林

3         Tropical savanna forests          热带稀树草原

4         Northern coniferous forests         北方针叶树林

5         Tropical rain forests                      热带雨林

6         Temperate evergreen forests           温带绿叶林

7         Temperate rain forests                   温带雨林

8         Tropical scrub forests                    热带灌丛林

第一次听到这句祷告词是在同学的电脑里翻看电影《布鲁克斯先生》（Mr. Brooks），在电影开场，布鲁克斯先生在获年度商业人物的晚宴上，低头默祷：

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

就在那一刹那这句话把我震撼住了！虽然我不信宗教，那时也完全不知道主角“布鲁克斯先生”为什么会用这句话做祈祷（那时我还以为这仅仅是一句台词，其实是Reinhold Niebuhr写的祈祷文）。

看完电影，我就把这句话记录在了校内状态栏上，现在看日期是08-11-29 13:20，这句话在状态栏上挂了3个月……

就这样给震撼了！或许是在心灵深处一直希望有这么一句话作为座右铭去指引我、改变我做事的态度：“用宁静去接受我所不能改变的，用勇气去改变我所能改变的，并用智慧去分辨两者的不同。”

今天在看李笑来的博文《改变现状要从接受现状开始做起》时，又一次震了！

从容、勇气和智慧，应该作为一个男人一生牢牢把握且应有的品质！

默认情况下导出图像分辨率是96 dpi(每英寸点数), 像素为960 x 720，而文献一般要求是300 dpi，像素为3000 x 2250，所以需要通过添加注册表设置来改变导出图像的分辨率。

步骤：

1退出 Microsoft Windows 程序——单击“开始”—–单击“运行”——键入引号中文字 ：“regedit”—-单击“确定

2将注册表展开到下面的项: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\PowerPoint\Options

3选中 “Options”项—-“编辑”菜单—–指向“新建”——单击“DWORD 值”—–键入 ExportBitmapResolution—–按 Enter 键。

4选中“ExportBitmapResolution” —-单击“编辑”菜单—–指向“修改”—-选中 “十进制”—-在“数值数据”框中，键入 300—–单击“确定”—-退出注册表编辑器

（注：PowerPoint 2003 导出的最大分辨率设置为 307 dpi）

（二）将 PowerPoint 幻灯片导出为图片

定位到要导出的图片—–“文件”菜单—–单击“另存为”—–“保存类型”中选择为TIFF Tag 图像文件格式 (*.tif)—–命名，保存。

参考：

1. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827745/zh-cn

2．Yam, C. (2005). “Using PowerPoint to create high-resolution images for journal publications.” American Journal of Roentgenology 185(1): 273-276.

]]> http://flatfish166.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/%e5%9c%a8-powerpoint-2003-%e5%88%b6%e4%bd%9c%e5%ad%a6%e6%9c%af%e7%ba%a7%e5%9b%be%e7%89%87/feed/ 0 jbxing