This may be all fine and dandy for currently-trending topics, but it’s rarely been tried in an academic topic.  I’ve seen the occasional video that has succeeded (like this one on hovering quad-rotors), but they’re nearly all from computer science departments that are already familiar with the impression value of the internet.  Using the internet to convey an interactive experience that supplements a paper could be an invaluable tool in understanding the concepts and conclusions presented by the paper, and can make drawing corollaries and further inferences easier.

I feel like this difficulty is coming from inaccessible ways to present data visually and allowing the user to play around with it.  Pivot was a cool exercise in this respect, but Microsoft pulled the plug in favor of a (much less flexible, platform-wise) Silverlight application.  Most solutions now are custom-built, and I’m looking at doing something similar for my research.  The implementation has to be simple enough to update, however, since data will keep coming are more details get uncovered!  I’ll see if I can’t abstract the implementation so that others can use it.

Academically, it’s still a gold mine.  My research is revolving around using graphene as a substrate and it’s absolutely critical that all research in this area piggy-back in order to help grahpene reach its potential quickly.  This is definitely a lower-cost alternative to the forging of tough metals.  With so much chemistry and energy potential going into the creation of carbon-carbon bonds, it’s really neat to see that a sheet of graphene can be derived relatively easy.  Computationally, it’s much, much simpler to simulate a carbon surface than nearly everything else, so it’s also a huge chance to refine our strategies in determining choice compounds (including peptides and other organic matter) to interact with graphene.

Here’s a link to the Nobel Prize site and some background information on graphene.

Not to mention that Folklife is tomorrow! I think I’ll be leaving home with Amanda’s group of friend (see my events on Facebook for that info), but if you’re down there, definitely give me a call and we can go jump in the fountain together.

Last evening was my little sister’s prom at some big house on Lake Washington.. that was definitely kind of awkward. Many family members of the 8 kids there came out, and we just took tons of pictures. Since I had checked out the digital SLR from UW for the weekend (mainly for Folklife and general screwing around), I had a blast taking pictures, though I dunno if they’re any good. One of the worst things about the experience was that the host woman brought out wine right before the kids were about to take pictures. I mean, really, wtf. Now the patio reeks of alcohol; is this really what we should be showing to the kids? I mean, wine is good, but it really seemed like an inappropriate time.

I’ve got some pictures to show of that and awesome night pictures that Amanda and I took, but I’ll have to wait after they’re done converting from RAW. Maybe I’ll post a link to my Flickr account, but for now we’ll have to wait on that because it’s not completely pretty right now!