thor's blog

The UBC MRI Research Centre invited me to participate in an intra/intersite qT₂ reproducibility study. Six of us are traveling to various locations in North America and scanning ourselves twice at each location with advanced MR techniques like 3D multiecho T₂, diffusion tensor imaging, and spectroscopy. Last week we scanned at Dartmouth and the University of Chicago. The preliminary results for both intrasite and intersite qT₂ reproducibility look promising.

At first glance, it is hard to tell what Wolfram Alpha is good for. There is a search box, but google-like queries are often not understood.

Yesterday I was talking with Neena about interest rates. Our experience with interest rates, mortgages in particular, is recent and we had no feel for how quickly, hostorically, rates rise or fall. Then it hit me - Wolfram Alpha would know.

I rented a car <Opel Meriva> when I toured Denmark. My favourite feature of the car was that there were no blind-spots due to a simple tweak in the side-mirror design. The side mirrors were normal <flat> starting from the car frame outwards. There was a vertical line separating the normal portion of the mirror and the outer most 10% that was slightly convex. This simple design eliminated blind spots on either side of the car.

Plagiarizing in the news again, this time with a twist of irony.

An 'independent' Canadian report concluding Canada is one of the worst countries for pirating got busted for plagiarizing a US report. You can listen to Jesse Brown interview the founder of the organization that wrote the report on the recent TVO Search Engine podcast.

Check out these amazing winners of the Wiki Commons pictures of the year (2008). Some are absolutely stunning.

AnalyzeNNLS has been updated.

I now have an RSS feed for the opensource project, which will be used to update users on releases and documentation.

Check out what plagarizing a thesis looks like <the yellow lines mark word-for-word copying>. The plagiarizing author is now a president of a USA university.

CBC's Spark did a feature on Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) farming, which uses otherwise unused urban spaces <such as rented backyards or vacant lots> to plant dense, Organic gardens.

Coolth is still gibbled. My doctor suspects I tore one of my rotator cuff tendons, but confirmation from ultrasound seems unlikely since the earliest I can get in is July 16th. While no longer painful when resting, I have reduced mobility in my arm <reaching straight forward or to the side> and I feel pain when I force it. I have a prescription for physiotherapy and will hopefully start next week.