Ubuntu Gutsy upgrade the best ever

I updated my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. It was the fastest and most hassle free OS upgrade I have ever done. Kudos to the developers. It took an hour to download and install the entire upgrade and all my personalized items (desktop, music etc.) were identical to how they were before the upgrade. Ubuntu even sensed all the third party software I had installed and upgraded them where necessary.

If you have not tried Ubuntu yet, try it. It is worth the effort.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

One of the most inspirational talks I have ever heard. It is a long video and boy was it an hour well spent. Thanks Randy for sharing this with us.

Watch it here.

Cool Physics Videos

Can meat eaters be environmentalists?

Last week, I happened to go a vegan Korean restaurant in Chicago called Amitabul. Being a meat eater myself, I was a little skeptical about the food because in regular Korean restaurants, one does not find many vegetarian items. To my surprise the food was great. If you are ever in Chicago, do try it out (it is in Korea town).

I found an interesting pamphlet in the restaurant about the evils of non-vegetarian life style on the environment. I will list some of the details that shocked me:

• Pollution: The meat industry causes more water pollution in the United States than all other industried combined because animals raised for food produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population.


• Land: More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.


• Water: It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat.

More information can be found at www.GoVeg.com

A must see video

Note the attention to detail in every frame of the video. So much detail is presented, yet not one frame is overcrowded. Thanks to Abi for pointing me to this video.

Fitting in . . .

Dennis M. Barden has a nice article (link) on the importance of ``fit'' in the hiring process in academia. Here is a sentence that I liked:

fit is the sine qua non, the factor that ultimately separates the well-suited candidate from the merely well prepared.

Replace Bar charts with Dot Plots

You rarely find bar charts in a science journal. This is mainly because it is not the best way for presenting most of the scientific data. Personally, I am not a big fan of bar charts. As Edward Tufte puts it

Bar charts have a very low data-ink ratio.

i.e., they waste a lot a ink without adding any information.

On rare occasions that I have been forced to use the bar chart, the result was disappointing. I found the dot plots to be much better in presenting the same data with less clutter. Dot plots also have high data-ink ratio, meaning every dot of ink adds value (information) to the plot. Take a look here.