Annual car inspection (aka state-mandated consumption)
Apr 17, 2012, 4:54p - Law
The way I like to think about taxes is that it's goverment-mandated homework. Just when you think you're done with school and you'll never have to do homework ever again, haha, think again. At least that's how it feels to me.
If you're lucky enough to own a car and live in the only state I know that likes to ... more »
Read comments (6) - Comment
Sachin
- Apr 17, 2012, 5:26p
Wow, that's super lame.
How much is the inspection itself?
When are you moving??
Dan P
- Apr 17, 2012, 6:22p
Hey dude -- interesting post. Don't forget about our lovely Smog Check system out here in CA
Glad to hear you're heading back out to CA. Bay area or otherwise?
Marlon
- Apr 18, 2012, 8:41p
Great read, thanks for sharing the gory details. Sounds like Mass is a fascist communistwealth. Come back to California soon, we love cracked tail lights!
nikhil
- Apr 19, 2012, 10:53a
The inspection itself is set by the state at $29, and almost every gas station or mechanic is licensed to do it.
Moving to Bay Area, but not for 1-2 more years... Gotta keep the worms happy until then!
John
- Jun 19, 2012, 12:47p
Fascinating post. On a similar note: what if I don't want to not slap people in the face when best suits me? When will government do the right thing and give me my independence back?
nikhil
- Jun 20, 2012, 6:41a
Independence is never given. It must be taken.
Making DNA look simple (again)
Apr 10, 2012, 6:30p - Science
I recently got sick of doing science. After observing my own productivity and passion for science ebb and flow over the past few years, I've found that I live a roughly 6-month cycle: 6 months of scientific experiments, 6 months of something else (usually programming, often blogging, sometimes installing hardware floors and doing experiments on myself). It seems that when ... more »
Read comments (15) - Comment
Tron
- Jul 25, 2009, 10:27p
Thank you very much for making this available.
belle
- Aug 5, 2009, 7:16a
this is the best thing since sliced bread!! thank you just saved me thousands of hrs
dude,
- Nov 3, 2009, 6:33p
awesome.
jasonII
- Nov 12, 2009, 8:59a
Thanks, this works great. A few things though. Some of us work on large (18kb) genes. Is there any way to change the scale bar? Also, being able to indicate alternative spice events would be nice.
nikhil
- Nov 18, 2009, 9:29p
Thanks for the request jasonll. I've updated the graphic maker so you can now change the size of the scale bar, to be something more appropriate for your 18kb genes. Not sure what the convention is for indicating alternative splice sites - why not just make 2 separate gene models? I guess if there are several it would be nice to consolidate them into one image. If you have any ideas about what this would look like, lemme know.
nikhil
- Nov 19, 2009, 11:54p
Alan Marnett over at Benchfly.com asked me to write a blog post for them about the Exon-Intron Graphic Maker. It's just like this post, slightly revised. Storing the link here for safekeeping.
http://www.benchfly.com/blog/making-dna-look-simple/
omar
- Nov 29, 2009, 11:07p
dude this has advanced my research significantly
jasonII
- Feb 21, 2010, 8:40a
thanks for the scale bar modification. about the alternative splicing, i suppose it would be helpful if you could color them in. this would also be helpful to mark out certain functional domains easily. three or four colors would be wonderful and spice things up a bit!
siavash
- Apr 4, 2010, 6:10p
hi nikhil,
i also wanted to thank you for making this available. saved me so much time. also wanted to second jasonII's comment about other colors, for marking protein domains, etc.
but its wonderful, thanks a million.
Nick
- Nov 15, 2010, 7:09a
Thank you very much for this. I am an undergraduate doing a genetics research project and this has given me the ability to graphically show exon and intron positions the way I wanted to!
Pascal
- Feb 27, 2012, 7:34a
Great tool. What you also might want to consider is that UTRs can be across more than one exon. I think with the current options it is not possible to do that.
nikhil
- Mar 10, 2012, 7:36a
Pascal, actually I think you can do what you want.
Just like with the protein-coding field, separate exons and introns in the UTR fields with commas, and you'll be all set. That way you can display a single UTR containing multiple exons and introns.
jsto
- May 18, 2012, 1:24a
Thanks a mil nikhil
I wonder if its possible to extend the image to show up and downstream regions?
Pakpour
- May 31, 2012, 12:40p
Thank you thank you thank you so much for sharing this program. You have saved me huge amounts of time and it is such an easy and intuitive program to use!
BMD
- Dec 27, 2012, 12:29a
Hi Nikhil,
Thank you for this awesome tool! I used it to make a figure for my PhD thesis. I couldn't find any other tool that would draw high-res gene structures for me. At first, I was skeptical, because your tool required manual input of the sequences and boundaries, when this information is already available for my genes in GenBank. Also I was worried that the spaces and numbers that were contained in the sequences I pasted would mess things up. But it worked fine and only took a few minutes to copy-paste the sequences and put the commas. The genes I'm working with are monster genes with tons of exons each, and some very long introns, so I'm glad it worked so well. The only thing I would have liked is to have an option to have the exons numbered.
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