If you can learn one new thing every day pretty soon you will have a good broad base of knowledge on which to draw in order to help you through any problems that you might come across in life. I always tell my research students that science is all about solving problems, but more generally that is what life is about as well. Every time the car breaks down you have to try to work out what to do about it, ie deciding upon the most useful action to take is a problem that needs to be solved. If your phone bill is unexpectedly high you have to work out why, if your girlfriend’s annoying little white dog still has fleas despite having recieved all available treatments modern veterinary medicine can throw at it then you have to work out what to try next. What clothes should you wear, what is the weather going to do, how can we achieve peace in the middle east, what is the cause of Parkinson’s disease, how do you account energetically for the acceleration observed between stars in the universe, how do you reconcile the existance of many different religions particularly when a number of the factual points between them are mutually exclusive, ie if one is true then the other can not be, etc etc.

All decisions are simply problems to be solved. Science is not a body of knowledge but rather a methodology to be used in order to solve problems. So I always find it very exciting when I learn new things. Occasionally though you have a really productive day and you learn lots of new things. Below is the list of new things that I learnt yesterday (Tueday 15th of March, 2011):

• I found that you can crop vector images in Corel X3 – I use Corel for all my graphics needs and have often needed to just use a portion of a much larger vector graphic and in the past have always manually edited out the parts that I didn’t need. I need to produce a series of small maps from a larger map at the moment and so was looking how to do this more quickly and found that you could crop the selected vector lines with the crop tool. It is so fast and easy, I am very excited.
• I found out how to put a vector graphic inside another shape – I am working on my labs web page at the moment (www.neurolab.com.au) and wanted to arrange a bit map graphic inside a rectangle with rounded corners, as well as arrange titles within these rectangles. Until now I always thought you had to use the bit map fill function. All though you can play with the resolution and tiling with this function it is difficult to select which part of the image is displayed within the shape or its orientation. Yesterday though I found that you can use a function called Power Clip. This lets you put anything you like into another shape.

  Both of these functions can be found at: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1153321236767

• Worked out how to work around an error in Firefox that throws out the horizontal formatting of your web pages since on short pages there is no vertical scroll bar, but on short pages there is, thus elements are displayed in different horizontal positions on different pages. The code to do this should be inserted on your CSS page. This will permenantly add a vertical scroll bar in Firefox so that it doesn’t appear and disappear on pages of different lengths.

  html { min-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px; }
  html { overflow: -moz-scrollbars-vertical !important; }

• I learn’t how to attach the flex shaft to my Dremel – I bought a Dremel 400 rotary tool recently and I am still working out how to use all its attachments, so it was exciting to find a You Tube video that showed how to do it since when I first did it the tool switched on but did not rotate the flex shaft. It turns out you need a thing called a driver cap which goes on the drive shaft of your dremel before you screw on the flex shaft, as shown in the video below:
  
  

• I found out that I can buff brass really nicely with my dremel tool – I was trying to work out how to polish metal and get a really good mirror finish and so was trying to do this on an old stainless steel kitchen knife with my Dremel but from what I gather stainless steel is quite hard and difficult to polish. It did work, but I will need quite a bit more time on it. Brass on the other hand is much softer and I found I got a good result pretty quickly with that.
• Found a really useful business – One of the products that I am developing at the moment for my 10 Year Plan, which I have mentioned in passing in various posts, is a line of soft drinks. While searching for a supplier for PET carbonated soft drink bottles I came across a company called the Australian Independent Brewers which can manufacture any drink you might be interested in producing for you, including packaging. I am still designing my drinks and finding suppliers and costs of the materials so far, but once I have that I will give them a call and see how much they cost. On the one hand it would beat building your own manufacturing plant, but on the other hand it is yet another level adding cost to the final price of your product.