coolth.ca

I knocked up my highschool girlfriend. :-)

The Washington Post has a some neat infographics describing household penetration, cost, and annual sales of various gadgets, from monochrome TVs and fax machines to digital TVs and portable mp3 players.

via Command N

I wish someone would have sat me down prior to my university courses and outlined a few note-taking tips, like those from Lifehacker. The Cornell Note-taking Method would have been useful back then, and presently I think I'll benefit from Symbolizing the Next Action.

Could a Native American woman returned with Icelandic explorers 1000 years ago? Recent genetic evidence spurs this hypothesis <via BoingBoing>. <American Journal of Physical Anthropology article>

The Radon transform plays an important role in computed tomography since it describes how the raw data are collected. As the x-ray tube rotates around the gantry, the detectors opposite measure the x-ray projections through the object, producing a sinogram, which is effectively the Radon transform of the image. This video demonstrates how the sinogram is created by rotating the digital phantom <as opposed to rotating the x-ray tubes around a real object> and taking projections at each angle. The matlab code and original video were created for a section of a graduate course I taught at UBC.

A commonly held belief is that reusing a travel mug, such as a mixed plastic and stainless steel vacuum sealed design, is better for the environment than disposable cups, generally made of paper, with a wax-type lining inside and a thin plastic lid.

Natural resources are required to make both of these items. The major component of one is a non-renewable resource - metal, and the major component of the other is a renewable resource - paper. While the paper cups are generally thrown away immediately, the travel mugs eventually end up discarded as well, after being lost or damaged.

Some awesome photos of CRT TVs powering down. Cathode Ray Tube TVs fire electrons at the fluorescent screen, creating the images that we see. Electromagnets steer the electrons in a raster-fashion across the screen too fast for us to perceive. When the power is shut off, the electrons don't stop immediately, and a latent image decay can be seen, although distinct patterns are generally too short-lived to notice. Of course, this process can be photographed, with some interesting results.

I moved to Kelowna, starting a job as Medical Physicist/Radiation Safety and Quality Control Lead for Diagnostic Imaging in Interior Health.

You can still contact me using the email address on this site <scroll to the bottom>.

Denmark ruling could end hippie conclave. I have a personal interest in this story because of a scary experience I had in Christiania when I visited Denmark. I have copied the previous post verbatim from my old blog <which could disappear at any time!> and pasted it below.

This interview is a lot of fun to read. Some of the questions are serious, like "What is MRI", but others are more humorous:

   RevisingMRI: Has that got anything to do with a flux capacitor?
   Wolfram|Alpha: Power required to operate the flux capacitor in the DeLorean DMC-12 time machine: 1.21 GW. Unit conversion: 1.21×10⁹ W (watts) ≡ 1/10 x power of space shuttle at launch.

Wolfram Alpha's answers are genuine, and if you ask the same questions today, you will get the same answers.