As was the case last week, I did a lot of resting and reading this past week. This time, I finished (and will write a review of) Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True. I've always felt my knowledge of evolution was pretty robust, and generally I found a lot of the book was a review for me, but there were several gems and interesting facts I didn't know before. Overall, it's a very accessible (and very well researched) book for anyone who has gaps to fill in their understanding (at a laymen level) of evolution. I will also post the review for this book on my other website sometime soon, as I feel that there's hardly any discussion of many issues that I think are important, or that merely seem interesting to me, in Spanish. As soon as that review is done, I'm probably going to be unable to read much for pleasure for some time, but I want to get to Coyne's other book, Faith Versus Fact, which I have on my shelf as well.
I also downloaded and installed the free, open-source software Inkscape. The idea behind this is I want to produce physics posts that include good-looking graphics, plus I want to avoid stealing images from other people: I'd sleep better making my own. From what I see at the gallery at the Inkspace website, the tool may be overkill for drawing pulleys and incline planes, but I want to try it out anyway. Another option that I have on the table is learning how to use the tikz and pgfplots pakages in LaTeX, which I'm familiar with. I feel that software like Inkscape could achieve many of the same results with a friendlier learning curve, though of course it would be suicide to use it for plotting mathematical functions. (I used good ol' Paint for some graphics in earlier posts, and was not too happy with the result. What I want is something that's easily usable like Paint, but with prettier results.)
No comments:
Post a Comment