Medicine & Productivity & Reading & Technology 25 Nov 2006 11:27 am
Printing to PDF: the awesomest thing since sliced bread
I haven't written anything in a while, mostly because I don't have much to say that others would find interesting. However, I would just like to say that printing to PDF absolutely kicks ass. I discovered this nifty little thing a couple of months ago, and I've been using it religiously ever since.
For those of you non-Mac users, and those who are but haven't noticed, OS X has a built-in print to PDF feature — made much more useful if you click the print page link, or printer-friendly link that most sites have before printing to PDF. (Click for full-size.)
For the last couple of months or so, I've been creating my own little library of research papers of things I'm interested in, or have had occasion to use:
I've actually been accumulating material faster than I can read it thanks to school and work, but I'll have time to catch up in the coming weeks. When I want to find something that I know I read, just Command-Space and I can search the contents of all of the PDFs instantly using Spotlight.
Lots of people complain about Spotlight, but it's better than anything Windows has out-of-the-box.
All of this can be accomplished on Windows, as well, but it's just easier on a Mac. I save CEs, journal articles, whatever I find interesting. It's also interesting that a lot of what you read in medical news and journal articles is 1) uninteresting 2) unremarkable and 3) useless. It seems it's always fun to compare things to placebo when it would be much more interesting (and useful) to conduct head-to-head tests of drugs.
There is no "best-of-breed" drug for a given condition most of the time, thanks to the near-infinitely variable nature of complex higher organisms. There are very few absolutes in medicine, but there are trends that usually emerge. It'd be nice if researchers started going out of their way to look for them. That's somewhat difficult, though, when most of the big studies are funded by large pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in seeing their drug perform well. You'd be a fool to hundreds of millions of dollars for a big study only to have your drug not perform as well as a competitor's… Sometimes the NIH funds head-to-head studies — the only entity besides Big Pharma with pockets deep enough to do so — but only when there is a significant amount of money to be saved by establishing a "winner".
If I get bored someday soon, I'll post some of the names of the huge studies to which I refer in this mini tangent…
on 25 Nov 2006 at 11:40 am 1.Something a little off-topic… :: OnThePharm said …
[...] I was poking around the blogosphere today, and I found something that might be of use to those information gluttons (like myself) that like to save useful things: printing to PDF of journal articles and CEs that are of interest for easy searching later. [...]
on 19 Mar 2007 at 9:28 am 2.iPhoto/iTunes for your digital medical library :: OnThePharm said …
[...] It'll scan your entire hard drive for PDF documents, which to me is not really useful, so I narrowed its search parameters to only search my medical library, which up until now, I have kept organized by hand. [...]