Dear Apple: open the iPhone!

My new iPhone is just about the most amazing piece of technology I’ve ever used. There’s just one problem: I hate hate hate the calculator. Apple’s normal desktop calculator on OS X is remarkably functional. It has the standard scientific functions, a programmer’s mode, and best of all, there’s an RPN mode, which is essential for those of us who grew up with HP scientific calculators and therefore can’t figure why one would even want to use a “normal” calculator.

I guess I was expecting Apple to just port the desktop calculator to the iPhone. Instead, we’ve got a visually beautiful, but essentially useless, four function widget. I know it is a visual tribute to Dieter Rams’s design of 1970’s-era Braun desktop calculators, and I can appreciate simple and elegant design as much as any Apple fanboy. That’s what has me so annoyed; I love the look, but I need sin, cos, y^x, sqrt, log, e^x, DRG to RAD, and all the other functions of a scientific calculator.

I know there are a couple of good web-based scientific calculators designed for the iPhone: Belfry’s scicalc is one, iPhav has created MiniCalc, there’s a fake HP-35, and a pared-down barebones version, but as great as those are, the lag to load up a web app when using EDGE is just too long. Apple, if you want to make us nerds truly happy, keep your tribute to Dieter Rams when the iPhone is upright, and when someone rotates their phone while in the calculator, have it switch automagically to a HP-15C emulator. (The 15C had a lovely brushed metal finish, and your own engineers can tell you that the 15C was the best calculator ever made.)

There’s also news that the iPhone calculator app also has a relatively serious interface bug.

More importantly, my problems with the calculator wouldn’t be a big deal if third-party applications could run on the iPhone. (Legally, that is. Without jailbreak and iPhoneInterface, and plist editing and assembling a toolchain.) I’d happily start writing a replacement calculator myself if the SDK were available. So Apple, while you guys have done some truly astonishing engineering, can I humbly request that you open the iPhone to third party developers? Please?

Cool new software

A whole bunch of new software to highlight today:

In our Engineering section, we have two new packages: OOFEM is an object oriented, parallel, multiphysics finite element code system for solving mechanical, transport and fluid mechanics problems, and ASCEND is a generalized modelling environment for engineering and science problems. It offers: an object-oriented model description language for describing your system, an interactive user interface that allows you to solve your model and explore the effect of changing the model parameters, and a scripting environment that allows you to automate your more complex simulation problems.

Our Molecule Viewers and Editors section sees the addition of Avogadro, a new molecular editor built on OpenBabel that looks like it will be great (although I can’t find a download link to try it out).

I’m really excited to see CP2K show up in our Theoretical & Computational Chemistry section. CP2K is performs atomistic and molecular simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular and biological systems. It provides a general framework for different methods such as e.g. density functional theory (DFT) using a mixed Gaussian and plane waves approach (GPW), and classical pair and many-body potentials.

PhyloSort is a neat Java code that sorts phylogenetic trees by searching for user-specified subtrees that contain a monophyletic group of interest defined by operational taxonomic units. Look for it in our Bioinformatics section.

And the newest link is to massXpert, a follow on package by the author of polyXmass. massXpert simulates and analyzes mass spectrometry data obtained on linear (bio-)polymers. Both massXpert and polyXmass can be found in our Analytical Chemistry section.

Check them out and keep those suggestions coming!

Technorati Tags: open source, science, software

Heat Capacity of Water

It is no secret to my students, family and friends that I’m now completely obsessed by the odd properties of water, including the anomalously high heat capacity. Here’s a neat parlor trick involving this water anomaly that is masterfully explained by Robert Krampf in one of his many great Science Experiment videos: Heating a Balloon.

Medium Large is back! Woo hoo!

The fantastic web comic, Medium Large, drawn by Francesco Marciuliano, is back on the web after a long hiatus. At least the first strip, the introduction of Teenage Girl President, has reappeared. For the past six months, without ML, my days have been just a little less surreal.

While you are there, go read his Conversations With Dad blog. Guaranteed to make you spit coffee on your monitor at least once.

A physics teacher begs for his subject back

I used to think that math and physics education in US secondary schools was worse than in any other industrialized country. Expectations and standards seem to have fallen so low that some of our best students are showing up at college without basic mathematical concepts (like the distributive property of multiplication over addition). Smart students can survive a weak education, but colleges are having to teach truly basic concepts and ways of thinking to students who should have seen some rigor in their secondary education.

It turns out that science teachers in the US are not alone in our concerns. Wellington Grey has written a very powerful open letter to the UK Department of Education titled “A physics teacher begs for his subject back.” It is an absolutely fantastic letter detailing the problems with the syllabus and exam for the physics General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) [sort of equivalent to the GED in the US]. Although I haven’t seen the exam he’s talking about, I’ve skimmed over the Chemistry section of the syllabus specification that is the subject of many of his complaints. He is spot on. There’s precious little science in that specification, very little of the precision and exact use of language that science requires. Instead, there are a lot of politicized social concerns (which we may often agree with), but which, quite frankly, aren’t science.

Read his letter and make sure it gets a wide audience.

New Software Links

Some cool new user-submitted software links today:

• SAGE is math software that supports research and teaching in algebra, geometry, number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, and related areas. It looks very useful.
• CAE Linux is an entire Linux distribution designed specifically for computer aided engineering. It has pre-compiled packages for Salome and Code Aster.
• Elmer is a finite element code for multiphysical Problems. Elmer includes physical models of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, heat transfer and acoustics, for example. These are described by partial differential equations which Elmer solves by the Finite Element Method (FEM).
• qGIS or Quantum GIS, is a qt-based user-friendly Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. QGIS supports vector, raster, and database formats. QGIS lets you browse and create map data on your computer. It supports many common spatial data formats (e.g. ESRI ShapeFile, geotiff). QGIS supports plugins to do things like display tracks from your GPS.
• PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS “spatially enables” the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRI’s SDE or Oracle’s Spatial extension.

As always, we welcome user-suggestions for software to link to. Simply surf to the appropriate subject area in the Software section of this site and click on “Add a new link to this page”.

Technorati Tags: open source, scientific, software

EquPlus

EquPlus looks like a pretty neat resource. They have a large library of equations from many mathematically-related fields. Each equation can be cut-and-pasted into your documents in LaTeX, MathType, or MathML code. There are also Constants, SI Units, Symbols, and Unit Conversions.

Scratch! Open source programming for kids

I spent about 2 hours last night playing around with a new programming language called Scratch, which was designed for kids. You snap together programs from logical building blocks that you can drag over from a programming palette. There’s also a “stage” where the sprites you are programming can move around. In a matter of about 10 minutes a bright kid can have a functional program up and running. It reminds me a bit of Logo, but honestly, this is much much better.

Scratch is an incredibly powerful teaching tool, but that isn’t the coolest thing about it. The absolute coolest thing is that the designers have made it incredibly easy to share the programs with other users on the web site. Kids can preview (as Java applets) the programs other kids have written, and then download and tweak the code for those programs. Think of it as sourceforge for the pre-teen set. The programming environment itself is cool, but the ease of sharing the code, and the default assumption that the kids will want to share their code is revolutionary.

They’ve even got plans for a hardware sensor board that can be accessed directly from the Scratch window. There are currently Mac and Windows versions and a Linux version in the works. I hope the developers can be convinced to release the code to the Scratch application itself!

Scratch is simply fun to play with. And my kids are going to have a very cool tool to learn basic programming.

Technorati Tags: software, fun, education, programming

Biochemistry with the Stars!

I know it isn’t, but boy do I wish this was true:

via the always wonderful Pharyngula

Embedding Jmol applet in Wordpress posts

By way of one of the comments on an older post, I’ve had a question about how to embed Jmol in WordPress posts. It isn’t trivial, but you can do it. Here’s the recipe:

• unpack the latest jmol binary distribution inside your wp-content directory:

  cd wp-content; tar -zxvf ~/jmol-11.0.RC4.tar.gz

• To make upgrading Jmol easy at a later time, make a link from that directory to jmol:

  ln -s jmol-11.0.RC4 jmol

• add simple javascript function to your theme’s header:

  
  <script type="text/javascript">
  <!--
  function insertJmol(me,width,height,myMolecule) {
     document.getElementById(me).innerHTML = '<applet width="'
     +width+'" height="'+height+
     '" code="JmolApplet" archive="wp-content/jmol/JmolApplet.jar">'
     +'<param name="progressbar" value="true">'
     +'<param name="load" value="wp-content/'
     +myMolecule+'">';
   }
  //-->
  </script>
  
  

• Then, upload both your coordinate file and a snapshot of the molecule to your wp-content directory
• Insert code like this:

  
  <div class="jmol" id="caffeine_applet">
  <img src="wp-content/caffeine.jpg"
       onLoad="insertJmol('caffeine_applet',400,400,'caffeine.xyz')"
       alt="caffeine screenshot"/>
  </div>
  
  

This is a quick hack. I’ve done an end-run around the Jmol.js javascript library to get it to work with WordPress (that’s the reason for the <param name="progressbar" value="true"> part of the script above). However, it does work.

The caffeine molecule below is a live sample; you should be able to spin it.

I’m still working on this. I should have a way to do this using the full functionality of Jmol.js (and all of the applet parameters) soon.