Category Archives: weekly head voices

Happiness slingshot. [Weekly Head Voices #61]

Posted on November 5, 2011 | 3 Comments

Make sure you won’t be disturbed for the next 2 minutes and 57 seconds, and then focus your full attention on this marvelous YouTube clip:

Yes people, there are apparently some brilliant human beings, the pinnacle of our society you might say, who took the time to construct a giant slingshot with which they then proceeded to shoot each other through the blue summer sky. This is the sign that we, the human race, must be doing something right.

Because I need all the time that I can get to play may part in being a good human, I will now switch to Bullet Time(tm):

  • IEEE VisWeek 2011, Mind-Blowingly Awesome Visualization Conference, took place in week 43. For the first time in years, I was NOT there. The TNR went and came back inspired. My fearless and revered ex-leader Frits Post received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Career Award, which is yet another official recognition of his awesomeness. I hope he still has some space on the mantelpiece next to the Eurographics Honorary Fellow award.
  • Through the #visweek conference twitter stream and some of the blogging that was going on, I was able to follow the conference at a distance. There was a Blogging about Visualization BoF (birds of a feather, a kind of informal meeting to discuss some topic of interest; also read Dominikus Baur’s blog report), which motivated me to revive the MedVis.org webblog! We even have a twitter account now. If you have even a mild interest in medical visualisation or imaging, please subscribe via email, your RSS reader or the twitter account.
  • This blog won one of Joe’s official SA Blog Awards! Buy me a beer when you see me.
  • A real Italian explained to me that putting sugar in your espresso is entirely acceptable and even desirable. Herewith I’m going to stop feeling ashamed about my sugar-in-espresso habit. I’m not sure what I was thinking that combining two of the best substances known to humans was a sin.
  • After spending some serious quality time with The Email Game, I wrestled both of my overgrown inboxes to the ground. Lessons learnt: 1) Even the thin layer of gamification offered by The Email Game was sufficient to motivate me to start and finish a task I’ve been dreading for weeks. 2) Inbox Zero actually is more important than I’ve recently come to think. The trick is deciding when exactly you’re going to empty it.
  • Here’s a picture of a hedgehog after a bath:

It's a hedgehog. After a bath!

So recently I was having a conversation with someone in a bar. Soon the question came up: What are you striving for in your work?

Imagine my surprise when I didn’t have an answer ready. I was surprised, because I usually spend a significant amount of time on introspection, pondering the usual questions:

  1. What makes me happy?
  2. Why are we here?
  3. What should I strive for?

I mostly have answers to all of these and more, often involving coffee drinking in some form, along with a healthy dose of perspective, and harmony. However, due to general work-related business the past few months, my moments of introspection have been few and far between. As is the case with these types of philosophical guidelines, one does need to spend time regularly pondering them, else they sink quickly deeper below the surface of everyday life.

So I spent some time trying to remember what it was that I was striving for in work. Fortunately, not that far below the surface, I found it again:

Create value.

That’s really all there is, but it works for me.

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Visual Boy. [Weekly Head Voices #60]

Posted on October 26, 2011 | 6 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this, the sixtieth edition of the Weekly Head Voices!

I know that I’m terribly late, so I imagine that you’ve probably missed my incoherent babbling. To try to make up for this, allow me to present you with this YouTube clip of me babbling almost coherently for 20 minutes! In week 41 I had the privilege of giving an invited talk to an audience of 100+ medical imaging geniuses at the yearly symposium of the Netherlands Forum for Biomedical Imaging in Leiden, and the whole thing was recorded by the artist formerly known as fpixel:

If you’re not into academic talks, I suggest the following YouTube clips as alternative entertainment: First, the new Avengers trailer resulted in the accute arrest of my teenage comic book fanboy heart. Besides all the superheroes (SUPERHEROES!) some Next Level Human Being (NLHB) opted for Nine Inch Nails as soundtrack! The previous time I gushed this much about a trailer, was with Iron Man 1 and their choice of Black Sabbath, and you of course remember how that turned out.

Second, do you remember that dude in the really terrible Police Academy movies who could make like a million sound effects WITH ONLY HIS MOUTH? His name is Michael Winslow, and with the following clip he has completely redeemed himself:

So now let’s get back to talking about me.

I grew up eating science fiction books for breakfast, lunch and dinner and dessert. I was one of those strange kids who used to read secretly under the covers (with the backlight I ripped off my microscope of course. yes, I owned a microscope you jock.) whilst I was supposed to sleep. Please try to imagine what it was like when I read last week that Virgin Galactic has just finished building Earth’s first commercial spaceport. People, we have our first frikking spaceport, you know, where spaceships take off and come to land!

We’re living in a science fiction novel.

Finally, Genetic Offspring #1 officially learnt how to tie her shoelaces on Tuesday, October 11, 2011. Genetic Offspring #2 started feeding herself four days after that. Now that’s amazing.

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Hell Yeah! [Weekly Head Voices #59]

Posted on October 9, 2011 | 8 Comments

We kick off this week’s edition of the WHV with Ben Goldacre giving his TED talk on “Battling bad science” at 180 km/h:

He’s fabulous, isn’t he? If you haven’t done so already, you should really read his book “Bad Science” too, and don’t forget to hand a copy to anyone in your neighbourhood that might be confused about homeopathy, accupuncture, any other forms of alternative medicine, or anything by Patrick Holford, vitamin-peddler of note.

On a completely different note, I’ve fallen in love with a piece of software again. This time it’s Zotero, open source reference manager. For those of you not into writing (scientific) articles, a reference manager is an indispensable tool that keeps track of all the other articles that you’ve studied and helps you to cite them correctly whilst writing your latest attempt. I tried Zotero in 2009 but wasn’t that impressed. It seems that much has happened since, as I’ve been completely blown away this time. Killer feature #1 is the extreme ease with which I can import new references, by clicking on the little icon in my Firefox 7.0 url bar (Zotero 2.1 is a Firefox plugin). If the PDF is available, it’ll add that as well. I can also just drop a PDF directly in there and tell it to extract metadata to make a bibliographic entry. It does this surprisingly well.  Killer feature #2 is the explicit support for storing one’s reference database anywhere else, for example in one’s Dropbox, another piece of software with which I have a long-term romantic involvement and which in this case ensures that I have transparent access to my whole reference database, via Zotero, from any computer I care to use.

(NB: If you’re going to do this, make sure you don’t run Zotero concurrently on multiple machines. A better solution, which I’m now using, is to have only the zotero “storage” folder in your dropbox, and then symlink that into the default zotero firefox profile directory. Please let me know in the comments if you need more detail on this.)

Just in time for our regular coffee-themed blog post interlude, there’s been yet another study on coffee-related health benefits, and now it looks like coffee drinking may also protect against depression in women. As you will recall, I recently blogged about the coffee-related prostate-cancer protection. Seems coffee is perfect in one more regard: It’s an equal opportunity health benefit!

For my birthday, TNR bought me Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, and beamed it directly to my Kindle (go 21st century!). Derek Sivers is the guy who started CD Baby almost by accident, a company that became the largest seller of independent music on the interwebs. I say by accident, because his goal in the beginning was purely to sell his own CDs online (which was quite a feat in 1997, as there was no PayPal and not that much WWW yet), and then friends asked if he could sell their CDs too, and before he knew it, he had 85 employees, 150000 musicians and 100 million dollars in revenue. It’s a fabulous story, all the more because he really just wanted to keep his company as small as possible and do what he loved.

The book is chock-full of philosophical nuggets, for example the one that inspired the title of this blog. Sivers explains that when you have to decide whether to commit to a new project or not, there are only two choices: It’s either HELL YEAH! or NO. Your time is too limited to take on just yes or even maybe. Makes sense, no?

What really resonated with me however, was the following thought on how people grade themselves:

For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.

I think that I’ll leave it at that. Now go have an epic week kids!

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Time-traveling Danube Dubstep in my BBQ [Weekly Head Voices #58]

Posted on September 27, 2011 | 4 Comments

The title is pretty close to pure gobbledygook, but that’s what you get when the foundations of physics seem to have been rattled every so slightly. Let’s first take a gander at this gentleman, pointed out to me by TNR, as he rattles the foundations of absolutely insane facial expressions. He really gets going at about 23 seconds into the video:

The insane asylum soundtrack accompanying this artwork belongs to the music genre called Dubstep, music that is notoriously hard to dance well to. However, the following gentleman seems to have mastered the art just perfectly (if you’re really pressed for time, start watching at 1:13):

At this junction, as they say, you might be wondering why I’m showing you dubstep videos. Well, I have only the following to offer: Alliteration!

You see, this week I flew to Vienna (unfortunately not under my own power yet) for a meeting with some old and some new friends (Graz, my man in Vienna, Rostock, Bergen, Delft) to set up a new EU research project. It’s just grand when you sit around the table discussing the ins and outs of a research project and realise that the convenors have managed to put together a perfect team in terms of skill set but more importantly also in terms of social interaction. Cross your fingers that the thing gets granted, then I’ll be able to tell you more.

On the topic of flying, you will not have missed that CERN LHC scientists measured an ever-so-small discrepancy in the arrival time of neutrinos travelling over 732 km through the Earth (I wish I could do that) to Gran Sasso.  The neutrinos seemed to have arrived 60.7 nanoseconds earlier than they should have, had they been traveling at the speed of light.

Oops.

The scientists really did their best to explain that the devastating impact of this result, were it to be true, necessitates further study to find for example hitherto unknown systematic errors that could be the cause. The media of course had great difficulty not sensationalising the whole business. Personally, my money is naturally not on faster than light travel. Whatever the case may be, this world event has resulted in the prerequisite physics jokes. My favourite is this one, via @flyosity on twitter:

“We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here”, said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

On the topic of world events, Saturday September 24 was the South African national Braai Day. BRAAI DAY PEOPLE! As is the duty and pleasure of every red-blooded Saff Efrican I fired up my BBQ on Saturday. On Sunday, I did so again, this time with some of them lovely rib-eye steaks (yes, after years of practice I make a perfect medium-rare pink-in-the-middle steak on the barbie) and, even more importantly, joined by a full complement of my super-social neighbours. Perfect weather, scorched animal parts, zillions of kids running around (not scorched), beer and friends: Life is exceptionally good.

For this week’s backyard philosophy, I wanted to bring under your attention Steven Pinker’s new book, to be released on October 4 and titled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker is a well-known experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author with a penchant for evolutionary psychology. In this book, Pinker argues that we humans currently find ourselves  in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence. Looking back through history, it becomes apparent that we’ve been becoming persistently less violent over the past hundreds of years. I find that an absolutely marvelous observation!

Let me conclude with suitable Pinker quote, found on this Pharyngula post (emphasis mine):

I think the final and perhaps the most profound pacifying force is an “escalator of reason.” As literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. And it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.

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Coffee addiction potpourri. [Weekly Head Voices #57]

Posted on September 18, 2011 | 4 Comments

Yes boys and girls, I was keeping back writing that Rebecca Black post, but now it’s 4 days later and I can let ‘er rip again, like I promised. This week’s post sort of reflects my week 37: Chock-full of super-dense life nuggets. Hmmm, sounds like a brilliant new high energy meta-physical chocolate bar that would probably be immediately declared illegal by the current conservative and non-thinking (excuse the tautology) batch of spineless politicians (excuse the tautology).

Let’s get today’s life lessons started with Mitch Hedberg, Comic Genius (note the captital C, and the capital G):

Hedberg’s genius unfortunately could not save him from drug addiction and his overdose-related death in 2005.

On the topic of addiction, fpixel forwarded these new findings that coffee drinking is genetic, both in terms of capacity and perhaps also in terms of addiction. Even my atoms are addicted to coffee, so that feels about right. What’s really interesting however, is that the documented study found that the genes involved in the metabolism of coffee (CYPIA1 and NRCAM, if I understand correctly) are also related to the onset of Parkinson’s disease. You see, coffee drinkers are less prone to Parkinson’s disease (as well as a whole list of other diseases including prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer). However, past studies of course show correlation and not causation, i.e. coffee drinking and low risk of disease X appear together, but that does not tell us anything about what causes what. This new study has made the first steps towards understanding the mechanism that actually links Parkinson’s disease and coffee drinking.

On the topic of coffee and addiction, TNR and I spent the Monday morning working (like animals) on our new parallel startup (there, I said it) at the Coffee Company in Delft. Two things:

  1. The Coffee Company makes a killer cappuccino. The milk is steamed to perfection, but it’s got the perfect espresso bomb exploding through all that milky goodness at just the right moment. BAM! HELLO THERE! Highly recommended. With every purchase, you get WiFi access for one hour, so no surprises or misunderstandings.
  2. It’s amazing what such a change of working environment does for one’s creativity.

On the topic of startups, Dr Jorik Blaas, ex PhDer, full-time genius and friend, is now the director of research and development at Synerscope (probably no relation with sinister, but my subconscious is just not behaving today), a high-potential startup that makes visualisation-based tools for fraud detection in big data (big money, IOW). Synerscope has brought together some of the top visualisation brains in the country. Personally, I can’t help but imagine it like this:

Are you in there somewhere?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we made a quick train trip (*cough* 9 hours there due to delay thank you NS, 7+ hours back) to Magdeburg for the bi-annual German MedVis meeting. You’ll recall that I spent my first micro-sabbatical there. The city almost feels like home, and it was really great seeing many of the Magdeburg peeps again. The meeting itself was of high quality, with a number of VisWeek contributions being presented. Thomas Kroes (should I start using fictitious names and acronyms again?) presented his interactive photo-realistic volume renderer too! By the way, download it, use it (it makes fantastically beautiful renderings), spread it, and do cite the soon-to-appear article.

On Saturday, it rained (again, or still, I forget), so I decided to flip Mother Nature the bird by BBQing four juicy rib-eye steaks outside. Take that Mother Nature! The steaks were delicious, thank you. Mother Nature is not all bad though… Check this out: The Southern Lights. FROM SPACE!

Aurora Australis (thanks Bart!) FROM SPACE, taken by Ron Garan. Click on the photo to go to the original.

I’m going to wind down this post with two backyard philosophy-themed bits. The first is a quote by mathematician Alfred North Whitehead from this article on “The Skill that Matters Most” (found via Joe Botha, serial entrepreneur, currently changing the world with Trust Fabric):

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

I haven’t thought about it that way before, but it does make complete sense. The more things we humans do well in a routine fashion, the better.  Otherwise, our inconsistency is prone to lead to problems. By the way, the mentioned skill is self-control.

Finally, AJ forwarded this video called Disconnect to Connect. I’ll just let you watch and think about it for a while:

I’ll be off now. Please do have an epic week, and think of me when your level of enjoyment is at a local maximum. At these points, you might also consider jumping around randomly.

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