Archive for the “Uncategorized” category
Visualizing Taxonomic Synonyms
by Ryan Schenk on February 15, 2011
You probably knew that species have scientific names that are written in Latin. However, did you know that one organism typically has several of them? And that they are sometimes hotly contested? The following graphics show the usage of all (…)
Meta Detergent Logo
by Ryan Schenk on January 7, 2011
My coworker made a little app called Meta Detergent. I fell in love with the name, and drew him a little illustration to use as his logo.
Taxatron
by Ryan Schenk on November 21, 2010
As I work with scientific data, I am always seeking different ways of displaying it. Recently, I’ve been trying to create juxtapositions, trying to display scientific data in very “unscientific” ways. I built Taxatron as the ultimate extension of this (…)
Driving a $0.40 Stepper with Arduino
by Ryan Schenk on March 10, 2010
I recently bought 250 stepper motors (part number 21-02485-03) for a sculpture that I’m working on, for the low price of 40 cents a piece! Even if you don’t buy them in bulk, they are still really cheap. There are (…)
Washing Laser Cut Felt
by Ryan Schenk on January 2, 2010
I had some of my mobile designs laser cut out of wool felt through Ponoko, a fantastic service that makes laser cutting almost laughably easy. The mobile pieces came out looking great, but there’s two problems. When you laser cut (…)
LigerCat Released
by Ryan Schenk on March 2, 2009
I have been working on version 2 of the LigerCat tool since October. Today, we flipped the switch and turned it on, at http://ligercat.ubio.org. LigerCat is the brainchild of Dr. Neil Sarkar, and was created by me. It’s hard to (…)
No_Knead_Bread.rake
by Ryan Schenk on December 17, 2008
# # Denali’s No-Knead Miracle Bread # require ‘cast_iron_dutch_oven’ # sudo gem install dutch_oven –version 3.5 Quart –source KitchenwaresStore require ‘mixing_bowl’ require ‘spatula’ desc "Step 1. To be performed at night" task(:at_night) do ingredients = { ‘Warm (…)
Controlling Whitespace with HAML
by Ryan Schenk on July 31, 2008
When displaying certain elements as inline, the whitespace between tags does matter in your layout. When trying to display some LI tags as inline, I really needed to spit out the tags with no whitespace in between. Unfortunately HAMLs handy-dandy (…)
Using Fixtures with Funky Table Names
by Ryan Schenk on July 16, 2008
If you have an AR Model whose table name does not follow the convention, and you have needed to set it explicitly using set_table_name. class ChiliDog < ActiveRecord::Base set_table_name ‘dogs_made_of_chili’ end Then your test fixtures file must be named the (…)