Spams that mimic real emails

I always felt the spam emails I receive mimic the real emails in my inbox. I spoke to our web admin about this several months ago since I was worried that our mail server was infected by some viruses that "learn" the patterns of our real emails. Today, it just occured to me: it is NOT that the spams mimic our real emails. Rather, ONLY spams that look close to our real emails get pass our spam filter. I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier.

BST files for journals

Here is a collection of style and bst files for journals. Some of them are pretty helpful.

Ser-Venn-ity prayer redone.

Saw a nice venn diagram in Andrew's blog and loved it. But I sort feel the proportions do not agree with my perspective about the world and I love prettier colors. So I made one for myself.

SimPed: for pedigree data simulation

Found this online. I think it will be a nice tool for future simulaions.

Milestones in the history of data visualization

I found this website accidentally. It is very interesting and contains a lot of information.

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/

Too tired to proof-read your draft?

How about proof-hear it then?

In a referee report we received days ago, the referee kindly pointed out an overlooked typo in our draft. We mis-spelt "child" as "chilled". After many times of proofreading, this silly mistake just skipped the big blind spot of our eyes (the three of us). We were more anxious about the logic, the flow, the math of the draft.

I was telling a friend of mine this instance since I think it is pretty funny. And then I remember I had a nice experience using Adobe Acrobat Reader to "read" a thesis draft to me. I remember, hearing the draft read aloud allowed me to catch more typos. So I should do that more often.

To have your Adobe Acrobat Reader "read aloud" your paper:
view>read aloud>read ... [a page or the whole thing]
To stop or pause
view>read aloud>pause (stop)

You can change the voice and speed in "control panel>speech".

Sure, you would still have to proof-read really HARD your math equations.