I find that Latex slideshows actually look good, unlike there powerpoint cousins which often just look tacky. Unfortunately it can take a little more time putting together a latex slideshow. It seems the best bet is Keynote, but I’m a poor student! So here are a few notes for myself about using latex for slideshows.

To use the CS Beamer package you will need the sty and lyx files from here.

I always forget basic commands in gdb, so here my guide:

• gdb –args program flag1 flag2
• backtrace
• up/down - move through the backtrace
• print var_name - prints value of variable

Today I was reading the 2007/06/02 edition of the Post newspaper (my local), when I stumbled upon an article on page 58 that not only likened ADD children to X-Men but also stated:

“Children with OCD, we’ve found, pick up thoughts, feelings, emotions and sexual energies up to 8km away in each direction.

Now there were two things that went through my head when I read this… One was ‘how the hell did they measure that!?’. The other was ‘how the hell did the ethics board clear an experiment that involved children picking up sexual energy!?’. I’m just glad they were 8km away because that sounds more then a little dodgy. Since this guy was aparently a shrink, I was kinda hoping that he had some research published on the matter… of course finding a journal that would publish this may be a bit of a stretch, but I wouldn’t really know, since I do computer science.
After a bit of nosing about I think I found the event that the article was talking aboutalthough it did seem like it was a little overpriced and that it would be interesting to see what they actually teach the children. After clicking on a link to a related article I ended up with a page with no content… not a good sign. The whole website seemed just a little too polished. Then his personal page on the sitedoesn’t mention anything about how he previously practiced as a shrink. Its too bad, I really wanted to find out more about how OCD children can pick up sexual energy from 8km away :(

My Aunty (well my mum’s mum’s sister), Ellen Barns, passed away around midday on Thursday the 14th of June. She was diagonosed with mesothelioma (a form of cancer caused by asbestosis) in May 2005. Since then she spent some time educating the public about mesothelioma and gave a talk at UWA for the opening of a new research centre.

Sadly… what upsets me most about her death is knowing that I found most of this out from the internet afterher death and I only saw her a couple of times since she was diagnosed. I wish I had thought to see her a couple more times even though I wasn’t close to her. Even so, it is nice to know that my parents did manage to see her four days before her death. They made a trip to Perth just to see her.

I have collected a couple of news items I found about her, the links here are local copies of the relavant articles. One is from the 2006/12/04 copy of UWA News, another is from issue 67 of InterSector magazine, and the last is from Uniview Vol. 26 No. 1 2007.
 At the risk of sounding tacky, rest in peace.

In the initial stages of learning, while the cerebral cortex is building up new nerve pathways helped by what is called the pyramidal system, movements are gross and clumsy. Once all the other support systems such as the inner ear and the eyes have caught up with the instructions for the new movement, then the extra-pyramidal nerve system comes into play, refining the movements and sending the new information back to the cerebral cortex.

The sooner an awareness of the finer movements & adjustments needed to learn a technique is developed, the quicker it can be learned. Research has shown that a part of the mid-brain known as the reticular system plays an important part in this process sifting through the rain of sensory information sent to the cerebral cortex and deciding on the best way for the body to act.

Okay, so you’ve saved a pcolor plot as a fig, and now you don’t want to rerun the algorithm to get your results. Another way to do this (there will be rounding errors) is to go: