A Good-Natured Resolution

I'm not much for making New Year's resolutions. They seem to stick for about a month, and then ... not so much. But this year, I decided to try what so many millions of people do and make my own resolution, one that hopefully I can (and will want to) keep. There is some additional incentive, other than just meeting a goal -- I invested money in this resolution up front, so I'm betting on that keeping me motivated. 

So what do I want to do? It's not your typical resolution. My goal is to read Nature every week. (Well, not ALL of it, but a good bit of it.) For those of you unfamiliar with this magazine, it's a weekly publication, and is one of the premier scientific journals in the world. Because of its prestige, its articles are only available to its paid subscribers. Countless times I have stumbled across a Nature article on PubMed and salivated over the abstract ... but I had to move on, because there was no way for me to read it. 

Thanks to some Christmas money from my grandma, problem solved! I subscribed the day after Christmas, and will be getting both the print edition, as well as online access going back more than a dozen years. (And of course, there is a Nature app for the iPad!) A subscription -- even a student subscription, which is half the regular subscription price -- cost a pretty penny ($99 students / $199 everyone else). But I think it will be worth it. After all, how can any self-respecting MD/PhD-wannabe NOT be subscribed to Nature? My point exactly. 

Assuming that I do follow through with this "resolution," I hope to post here about some of the things I read. There are very technical articles, of course, but also editorials, features, and other types of material in the magazine. I look forward to my year of Nature, and to writing about what I learn.

And as you may have noticed, I have made a new "discovery" related to blogging, as well. With the iPad blogging app I have (BE Write HD), you can set backgrounds for your blog posts. It took a bit of researching as far as how to reduce an image's opacity so that it would work as a background (I downloaded a photo editor app, PhotoForge2, for that). But I've got it figured out now.

And so here you have in the background a cell -- soon to become two cells -- in anaphase of mitosis. Pretty cool, eh?