Ubik on the beach, please. [Weekly Head Voices #54]

Posted on August 17, 2011 by cpbotha| 6 Comments

At least part of this post was conceived right on this balcony over here:

One day, I wish to own such a balcony.

Yes friends, that there right in front of us is the beach, and right in front of that the North Sea, and right over that the beautiful setting sun. We will definitely be going back there, it’s just that awesome spending a few days right on the sand.

During my vacation, I had time to to spend some of it with one of my favourite authors, the late but fantastically great Philip K. Dick. Those of you with some culture will immediately think of VALIS, a masterpiece that he wrote after becoming more or less psychotic in 1974. The rest will go Ah! when I explain that Bladerunner, Total Recall , Minority Report and many more movies are based on his work. This time I visited Ubik, a book he wrote in 1969, chock-full of precogs, telepaths, anti-psis and the whole idea that your current reality might not be the only or even the most authentic reality. After reading this with great enjoyment, I’ve come to the conclusion that Dick might have been functionally psychotic for a longer time, but somehow was able to channel this masterfully into his truly psychedelic writing.

Ubik drops you back in the thick of things fast. Taken as directed, Ubik speeds relief to head and stomach. Remember: Ubik is only seconds away. Avoid prolonged use.

In other extremely significant happenings, genetic offspring #2 spontaneously started walking independently on Monday, August 8, 2011. Just to prove a point, she started doing dance moves during walking on the same day. Picture this: Little person, head and eyes disproportionately big and hence super cute, walking like a beginner across the room and then stopping halfway to do a little swinging-hips-jig. My cuteness-appreciation gland just about burst.

We’ve now also acquired the pinnacle of human transportation technology:

Say hello to your transportation future, humankind!

Yes people not from Holland, that’s a really weird three-wheeled bicycle with a huge wooden container on the front. Here it’s called a BAKFIETS. You fill the wooden container with kids (I’ve tested up to 4, works like a charm) or crates of beer (I’m soon going to test), fit the tent if it’s raining, and then cycle anywhere. It’s silent and does infinite miles to the gallon! I did get some funny looks when I cycled the 15 kilometres from Bergschenhoek, where we bought this baby, to Delft, but that might have been the fact that it was pitch dark at a time, and I had that crazy I-just-bought-a-bakfiets-and-I-will-cycle-her-home-come-hell-or-high-water look in my eye. Whatever the case may be, I can only very highly recommend this form of transport.

Alright kids, that’s it for now. I’m doing pomodori left and right, but The Man keeps on piling on more work. It’s especially funny how just about every research grant programme worth its salt has its deadline right about now. One day I’m going to stick it to The Man I tell you!

P.S. This weekend, I’ll not be working on research grant proposals at a truly wonderful event with some suitably wonderful people.

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New Samsung NP300V3A laptop is welcomed into the family!

Posted on August 16, 2011 by cpbotha| 2 Comments

It’s traditional around these parts that I write a post whenever I get to welcome a new computer into the family. In July of 2002 it was Dr. Evil, more a brick than a laptop, in May of 2004 it was my beloved 14″ HP NC6000 laptop, in July of 2006 I met my 15.4″ HP NC8430 (employer-supplied, thank you employer!), which in turn led to this Ubuntu-critical blog post of mine that attracted 50000 (yes, fifty thousand) readers over 2 days, in July of 2008 I splurged on a lovely quad core desktop machine, in September of 2009 I acquired an Asus 1005HA-H netbook, and in November of 2010 my employer got me a super-strong Dell Latitude E6410 laptop.

Today I welcomed the latest and probably prettiest laptop so far into the family:

Pretty Samsung NP300V3A-S01NL laptop!

Behold the Samsung NP300V3A-S01NL (Series 3). It has an absolutely gorgeous-to-type-on chiclet keyboard, a 13.3″ matte (!) display, NVIDIA GT520m graphics with Optimus, second-gen Core i5 2410m, 4G RAM and 500G disc, all for a terribly reasonable price, which is important, as this one is not employer-bought. A man needs a laptop like this for his top-secret personal biznizz, yes?

It’s running Windows Home Premium, so I have to use Truecrypt instead of EFS for encrypting my biznizz, which is stored mostly in my Dropbox pro account. The battery life is quite impressive probably due in part to Optimus switching. The drawback of this is that I probably won’t be putting Linux on here anytime soon. These days you can use both the graphics adapters in Linux, but both of them stay active all the time, so it kills the battery really quickly.

We learn at least two more things from this post:

  1. I do seem to exhibit a certain obsessive compulsive behaviour when it comes to keeping track of the arrival dates of the various computers in my life.
  2. When spring comes around, hide my credit card.

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Microscopic Orchestra [Weekly Head Voices #53]

Posted on July 23, 2011 by cpbotha| 6 Comments

Dear friends, I was planning to write a nicely focused post, but it’s definitely not going to be this one. There’s just too much we need to talk about, and by “we need to talk” I of course mean that “I need to do my monologue”. Do strap yourselves in, as this edition of the WHV has tea, peanuts, chocolate milk, general nerdery, some ground-breaking science and even some thought-provoking art.

Nutrition

Will the real Rooibos please stand up?

Rooibos is a brilliant herbal tea from the Western Cape province (the same one that spawned me) of South Africa. It is both tasty and super healthy. As I was shopping for my stash in the local Albert Heijn (huge grocery chain here in Dutchieland), I found all kinds of Rooibos blends, for example with honey or even with orange. Now while I appreciate the fact that you can even find Rooibos in any old store over here, the only good Rooibos is of course PURE Rooibos, so I was quite happy to find the most non-descript Albert Heijn box stating just “Rooibos” (not an orange or honeypot in sight), and also the Pickwick box proudly proclaiming “Pickwick Rooibos Original”. I was considerably less happy when I noticed in the list of ingredients (list? it’s supposed to be just tea!) that the addition of cardamom, cinnamon and ginger (!!!) to these supposedly original specimens was apparently acceptable. In the words of an entrepreneurial friend of mine: MUPPETS. Fortunately, the boys and girls at Zonnatura do get it, and have the right stuff on the shelves, pure and uncut. As if fate needed to equalise this advantage however, their website is pure and absolute Flash suckage. Go figure.

On the topic of healthy nutrition, there are two more tidbits I’d like to mention:

  • Peanuts are of course not nuts, they’re officially beans, or legumes. When further perusing the wikipedia page on peanuts, one is most pleasantly surprised to find that this delectable snack is in fact also super food! Allegedly the favoured core nutrition during (Ant)Arctic expeditions, peanuts contain more protein than any true nut, oodles of carbohydrates (570 kcal per 100g) and also 30 other hardcore nutrients and vitamins. No Vitamin C though, so the perfect diet would unfortunately still require more than just peanuts and beer.
  • This one surprised me more: In a number of studies, for example this one from 2006 and this very recent one from the University of Texas, it was found that (low-fat) chocolate milk works really well as a recovery drink after strenuous exercise, better than those really expensive sports drinks you always see real athletes prancing uselessly around with. CHOCOLATE MILK people!

Nerdery

  • HTC’s Android phones run Sense, a graphical user interface layer over mostly Google’s smartphone operating system. Sense is really quite cool, except for the fact that it’s too easy accidentally answering or declining calls when fishing the phone from your pocket, as HTC has mapped these actions to vertical swiping instead of horizontal swiping. On my nerd blog, I’ve written a short post on how to work around this problem.
  • I’ve recently installed the Rapportive plugin for GMail. Whenever I view or compose a mail, Rapportive shows incredibly detailed information on the recipients or senders in the right sidebar, detail that it grabs from services such as facebook, LinkedIn, twitter and so forth. Obviously you also get to see recent emails between you and said senders or recipients. This context information makes a huge positive difference in the mails that you are able to craft.

Science

I had the privilege of accompanying Genetic Offspring Unit #1 to Naturalis, National Museum of Natural History, in Leiden. On the ground floor, they have a reproduction of the Miller and Urey experiment published in ’53. This was a landmark experiment during which Miller and Urey tried to show that under the conditions on primitive Earth, organic compounds, such as amino-acids, would be synthesised from inorganic precursors. They built a relatively simple closed setup containing only water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen, added water evaporation and an electrical spark (simulating lightning) to the mix, and voila: amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in living cells!

Although more recent evidence suggests that the general atmospheric mix was probably not exactly like in the Miller-Urey experiment, their work did pioneer the study of the origin of life on earth. Current scientific opinion varies from organic compounds arriving here by meteorites, or that organic molecules may have indeed been synthesised in localised reducing environments such as those proposed by Miller, for example near to volcanic plumes!

Now that’s just hardcore.

Art (and a dash of backyard philosophy)

On the top floor of Naturalis, I arrived at what was to be my absolute highlight of the visit: An art installation by Matthijs Munnik called “Microscopic Opera”.

There are better photos of this installation online, but this one is mine.

The installation consists of 5 petri dishes filled with mutated C. Elegans worms, each moving differently due to their mutations. Above each petri dish is a microscope-camera feeding the video to an analysis algorithm that turns each worm’s motion into a different choir voice. The total effect is altogether eerie and quite mesmerising. The artist intriguingly writes:

… I’m also fascinated by the worms, who have no idea of the world above them. We are like gods to these little lab worms, following them from their first cell division to their death, manipulating their bodies and mutating their DNA. Are we really like gods, or are we like the worms, unaware of the things above us in a different dimension, the biggest thing becoming the tiniest.

I think I’m going to leave you with that. Have a beautiful week, worms!

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Opportunity Cost [Weekly Head Voices #52]

Posted on July 17, 2011 by cpbotha| 5 Comments

On Thursday July 14, 2011, it rained for 20.5 hours straight, and it did so from all directions at the same time (yes, apparently also in the upwards direction as my wet socks will attest). The last time it rained this much on one day, was on July 17, 1954, as confirmed by the paper this weekend. I believe I might also have broken several swearing records (in terms of duration, variation, originality and vehemence) whilst struggling through the water on my bicycle, on my way to my work.

I think the Dutch climate is just trying to remind us that it’s just really not nice, and that this “summer” that others speak of is merely a figment of their imagination. Probably for the purpose of wound-focused salt-rubbing, the weather every so often does have its moments, like this morning in my garden when I managed to photograph some bees doing their thing in the few minutes that the sun timidly managed to appear before being assertively occluded by infinitely high stacks of angry-looking clouds:

Besides complaining about the weather, I did want to discuss briefly with you an interesting economic concept, a concept that I’ve decreed will henceforth go through life as a  backyard philosophical idea. The idea that I’m on about is called opportunity cost, and refers to the cost that one incurs engaging in an activity, measured in terms of the best alternative that one could have engaged in otherwise. For example, if you’re sitting around refreshing your Twitter / Google+ / Facebook  instead of implementing a new and improved type of internet-connected sliced bread, potentially worth ONE BILLION DOLLARS, the opportunity cost of your social networking addiction at that point is, you guessed it, ONE BILLION DOLLARS. I really like the idea that Friedrich von Wieser named this phenomenon (that I have previously unknowingly touched upon) and will henceforth apply it liberally. So if I walk away from a conversation, mumbling something along the lines of ONE BILLION DOLLARS, you know why. Seriously though, it is good to keep this idea in mind in everything that you do, especially since cost can be measured in ways other than hard currency.

… and now for something completely different:

I have recently received the joyous news that a certain musical genius and his mind-blowing audio-visual spectacle are planning to be present at a certain festival that is soon to take place:

Just sayin’.

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Barbarossa Town [Weekly Head Voices #51]

Posted on July 11, 2011 by cpbotha| 3 Comments

Here’s a photo:

Some train at the Rotterdam Station. I spent lots of time in these the past week.

… and here are four things, most of which happened last week:

  • I was honoured to be invited by the International Research Training Group (IRTG) of the University of Kaiserslautern to visit their institute and give a presentation on medical visualisation (my field of research, for those of you joining very late). Unfortunately, I was only able to stay an evening and a morning, flanked by two 7 hour train rides. In spite of my short stay, the exceptionally friendly Kaiserslautern peeps managed to put together an enjoyable and especially very efficient program with dinner, a morning of research discussion  and of course my talk, which was only 45 minutes over time, and a delectable lunch outside. It was interspersed with questions and discussions, which I do like, and most of the audience managed to stay awake (!), but I still do have to take a more serious look into accurately timing interactive talks like this. Thank you very much IRTG, it was a perfect visit!
  • The Delft – Kaiserslautern trip is just so that taking the train seems to make more sense than flying. The total trip time is greater, but the difference is small enough to be justified by the great deal of work one can do on these long train rides.
  • I tried out T-Mobile’s new pre-paid Internet “abroad” option, called Travel & Surf. One pays EUR 4.95 for 50 MB over 24 hours, or EUR 14.95 for 100 MB (which they call “unlimited”, HAHA) over 7 days. Without this active, my mobile internet works abroad, but in the zone 1 countries (Germany, Norway, etc.) costs me EUR 2 / MB up to a maximum of EUR 60 per month, so it’s definitely nice being able to pre-pay and control the possibly nasty surprises. However, an Android telephone sucks down 50 MB of data without even thinking, unless you remember to deactivate syncing and background data, which does help to quite an extent. This is certainly a good development, but T-Mobile and all other mobile providers are probably still making an absolute killing by acting like it’s really complicated providing internet just over the Dutch border.
  • On the really good news front, Francois Malan’s paper on measuring femoral lesions despite CT metal artifacts has been accepted for publication in Skeletal Radiology! The full citation (so far, it’s online first) is:  Malan DF, Botha CP, Kraaij G, Joemai RM, van der Heide HJ, Nelissen RG, Valstar ER., Measuring femoral lesions despite CT metal artefacts: a cadaveric study, Skeletal Radiology, 2011. Cite it sesame!

Here’s my final thing, a youtube clip that, to my surprise, I don’t think I’ve shown on this blog before. Pay attention, it’s full of braai-related culture and wisdom:

May your week be full of awesome!

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