Category Archives: Science

Science (mainly space and planetary) related blog entries

zotero, zotfile and zandy – publication syncing heaven

“Back in the day” I used to use EndNote as a literature database – this, together with a precious photocopy card, a sturdy filing cabinet and a supply of yellow markers made for a fairly robust method of filing and tracking interesting papers. Of course these days it’s all different – now we have online journals, vast abstract databases, full-text searching and the like. In fact it’s almost too easy to acquire a possibly vaguely relevant paper – the need for a good archiving methodology is paramount!

I stuck with EndNote for a while, and started storing PDFs of my articles there. But, gradually (and more rapidly when I started to switch from Windows to linux!), I started to look for something (a) less bloated, (b) free/open source and (c) cross platform. Around the time I moved to Austria, I made two significant (to me) discoveries – one was Evernote, but I’ll talk more about that another time. The second was zotero. Continue reading zotero, zotfile and zandy – publication syncing heaven

Nice video summary of the Rosetta mission

Although Rosetta is primarily a European Space Agency mission, it also has US involvement, and NASA has recently released a nice video about the encounter:

As the video says, the spacecraft, lander and all instruments are currently in hibernation, since Rosetta is so far from the Sun that even with her 32 m span of solar arrays, there is not enough power available. Of course this doesn’t mean that the teams are sleeping also! There are still a lot of details to pin down before the comet encounter, from exactly which orbits are possible as the comet becomes active, to the scientific planning of individual instruments.

In search of the perfect academic ebook reader

Although I’m something of a tech aficionado, a finite bank balance and not wanting to buy into the next BetaMax often temper my enthusiasm and am forced to resist jumping on the bandwagon. So it was with ebook readers – I always like the idea of having an electronic text, but my PDAs and phones just didn’t provide a reading experience to match the tactility and focus of a real book.
Continue reading In search of the perfect academic ebook reader