Have you ever wondered what is contained in the food you eat? The USDA National Nutrient Database can help you find out. Developed by the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory, the program contains an extensive database of foods and their contents. The software is very simple to use and definitely has enough data to satisfy the most curious ones. In my opinion it is probably the best tool I know of to evaluate the nutritional value of different foods.
An online version exists at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/, but I find it more convenient to have a desktop edition installed, so it is available without an internet connection.
December 22nd, 2008
12:01 am
Math
Engauge Digitizer can help you quickly digitize scanned charts, plots and maps into numeric data. The workflow is easy to follow and includes the following steps:
- Import an image file to digitize.
- Pick three points on the axises to define the X and Y axis (those can be for cartesian, polar, linear and logarithmic graphs).
- You can clean-up your image by features like automatic grid removal, and discretize. The discretize is very helpful in cleaning up the image, where you can specify various thresholds with real time preview of the image.
- You then face two choices – manual and automatic digitizing process.
- Finally when happy with the results – you can export the data to a .csv file to be processed with other software.
Overall I find it a very useful freeware program especially for engineers, scientists and students, where very often it is helpful to digitize data from a plot, scanned from a book. It is a powerful software with a very good set of automatic detection tools.
PAFreshney’s Periodic Table is an interactive periodic table of the chemical elements. It contains detailed information about each element, along with images. It can filter by physical state (i.e. solid, liquid, gas or synthetic),. Really cool feature is a temperature slider and you can see how the element’s state changes with temperature.
The periodic table can also be colored by melting point, boiling point, atomic radius and many others. It also contains animations of the atomic structure and many images of the elements. Periodic Table also implements an interesting search feature, where you can search for example for elements with melting point < 250K and boiling point >= 500K…
Even though I am not an expert I think the program is a very useful tool for students or anyone else at least as a handy and convenient information source.
September 8th, 2007
3:29 pm
Math
SpeQ is a small and portable program that can help you with quick math calculation on the fly. It is very easy to use – you just type as you would have written on paper and it automatically calculates the results. The same way you can define your own variables and functions, which can later be used as part of more complex calculations.
You can also make different types of function plots, analyze intersections, minima, maxima. Logarythmic plots are also available. Plotting multiple functions on the same plot is a breeze.
The user interface is very intuitive and easy to use. The work area is syntax highlighted which helps to identify variables, functions, answers, etc. On the right side a library with the integrated functions and constants is available. The program has a very nice and well written help file.
Have you ever wondered what is contained in the food you eat? The USDA National Nutrient Database can help you find out. Developed by the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory, the program contains an extensive database of foods and their contents. The software is very simple to use and definitely has enough data to satisfy the most curious ones. In my opinion it is probably the best tool I know of to evaluate the nutritional value of different foods.
