HEY!

I’m still here, and it seems I really have to catch up on my backlog of WHVs, all the more as I was starting to notice the beginnings of BPP (Backlogged Posting Paralysis, of course). So I’ve spent a few minutes gathering a selection of life snippets of the past six weeks (week 21 through week 26) and will now proceed blasting them out this old Web 1.0 exhaust. I wasn’t completely idle blog-wise, however. I did write a post about my EuroVis 2011 and my Schloss Dagstuhl SciVis seminar adventures.

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I’ve written before about EuroVis, the most important European scientific conference on visualisation. In 2009, it took place in Berlin, in 2010 it was in Bordeaux, and, an a surprise non-twist of alliteration, the 2011 edition was held in Bergen, Norway. With 216 attendees and a practically perfect organization, this year’s edition has been described as the biggest and the best EuroVis ever. In a bid to save some time (I still owe you a mega-edition of the Weekly (actually Monthly) Head Voices), I’m going to give my biased account in bullet-list form:

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Somewhere in a remote but picturesque location in southern Germany, there’s a special castle called Schloss Dagstuhl. Every week, the castle fills up with a smallish group of Exceptionally Privileged Computer Scientists, who can only go there Because They Have Been Invited. Every week hosts a different field; In my case this was the Scientific Visualization seminar, one of the oldest participating groups. Everything has been setup just so to guarantee a perfect computer sciencey week for all guests. Because I’ve already been boring too many people with this story in person, I thought it prudent to write it up. Let’s hope it’s not a first (and second!) rule of Fight Club situation, in which case posting frequency over here might drop quite drastically.

(post summary: linkedin news, the week in bullets, backyard philosophy!)

Dearest readers,

Yesterday I made my 400th LinkedIn connection. Yes, I know there are people with zillions of LinkedIn connections, but mine are special. I’ve actually had contact, outside of LinkedIn, with each and everyone of them. In most cases the contact has been in person, in some cases even involving beer, and in the others the contact has been sufficiently significant, by my metrics of course, to warrant a real connection. Whatever the case may be (how many times have I used the word “case” so far?), reaching this milestone has made really happy, and this again warrants a great big thank you to each of you little coloured dots! The visualisation below shows my complete network, where I’ve labeled each cluster with the place or institute it’s most associated with:

Seven years ago, a wise man gave the following advice on this blog:

There are two rules to success in life:

Rule 1: Don’t tell people everything you know.

At that stage, twitter did not exist yet (the first tweet would only be made on March 21, 2006), so the clearly visionary post author had the habit of writing short, tweet-like blog posts. Because times have changed (my posts are slightly longer than 140 characters these days), but the advice is still sound, I’m repeating it here.

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As you all would have guessed by now (ALL my readers are insanely astute, of course), GOUMEs stands for Genetic Offspring Unit Maturation Events. You see, the first week of May has the fantastic privilege of hosting the birth dates of both of my Genetic Offspring Units. One of them is too young to appreciate the significance of this event, the other is now at the stage where one tends to over-estimate said significance. In any case, more on this in a bullet or two.

There’s a really big dude with a cowbell dancing around in my head:

My life seems to be just full of cowbell at the moment. During the coming months, more will be revealed. During the past weeks, the following things seemed mention-worthy at the time:

• On Sunday, April 17, I went with a posse consisting exclusively of spectacularly hip people, who prefer to remain anonymous on this blog but who might pop up in the comments now and then, to the Coldcut Energy Union gig in Amsterdam. As you will know, if you’re also unbearably cool, Ninja Tune the record label is run by the same two dudes making up Coldcut. On this particular Sunday, Matt Black was doing the honours. He can certainly DJ, but unfortunately the performance was dominated by its green message, and much to its detriment. When I go to a gig, I really prefer not being preached to. Whatever the case may be, the presence of the spectacularly hip posse made for a fabulous night nonetheless.
• Completely of my own accord (this was done on the Saturday BEFORE the coldcut gig) I have now changed to a green energy provider. My household’s electricity quota is filled with exclusively wind and sun energy, and my gas usage is compensated for by lush forests in the Amazon. Coupled with my house’s 95% warmth efficiency (on heat-emission aerial photos, our whole neighbourhood appears to be completely dark) and my bicycle-addiction, I now have a license to be more snooty about environmental matters at parties, so there.
• There are two job opportunities I would like to bring under your and your social network’s attention: The first is a well-paid Ph.D. position under my supervision here in Delft, working on the next generation modelling and visualisation required for the Virtual Surgical Pelvis. See the VSP vacancy website for all the details. If you don’t feel like getting a Ph.D., or you already have one, but you still want to work on visualisation and bio-mechanical modelling, you could do much worse than apply for this software application developer position at Motek Medical under the supervision of my good friend Frans Steenbrink, who is an alround kickass-type but still doesn’t have his own website or blog.
• I made a nice MobiPocket / Kindle version (that’s an ebook, you caveman) of the latest available web-version of the Django Book 2.0, and then I wrote a geeky blog post about it.
• Beautiful easter weather made for some stunning outings, such as an early-morning visit to the Delftse Hout and to a café called Knus (“cozy”):

  

Week 14 was awesome, thank you very much for asking! There are many reasons for this. The photo below is a memento of one of them, and was taken from my bicycle on Sunday, at that moment gliding gracefully through Schipluiden, genetic offspring #1 chattering away from the back:

Just slightly before this week is over, here’s a super quick WHV looking back on last week, #13 of the year 2011. Let’s start the show with this delightful body-motion-art music video, brought to my attention by the intriguing TNR:

The most noteworthy items of my week were the following:

• The VisWeek 2011 deadline, together with EuroVis our most important yearly paper deadline, smashed through our lives on Thursday. I had the distinct privilege of participating in two excellent submissions, and once again came to the realisation that I absolutely love writing papers, even when chasing deadlines as serious as this. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s quite the kick crafting that perfect gooseflesh-inducing sentence. Now cross yer fingers that both of these get accepted!
• I attended the early retirement party of one of my group’s professors. He gave a superbly humorous talk, amongst other topics on the changing culture at my employer (issue #1: Too Much Management and related to that issue #2: Research Institute Thinks it Should Act Like a Commercial Entity and Predictably Does So Embarrassingly Badly). This, as well as his compressed review of 30 years of academia, constituted serious food for thought.
• On Saturday I had the privilege of giving a talk, in Dutch (!!), to an audience of more than 200 clinical physicists at the yearly conference of the Dutch Society of Clinical Physics.  I presented an overview of our surgical planning and guidance research, including the absolute latest results of the VisCAS survey that we’re working on (when I say “we”, I of course mean that one of my MedVis Ninjas is doing most of the hard work). If you’re also lucky enough to find yourself in Bergen, Norway for EuroVis 2011 in May/June, you’ll even be able to come and admire our poster on the topic!

For my truly backyard philosophical conclusion, I’d like to refer to an interesting piece in this weekend’s Volkskrant on Pascal Bruckner, a real-deal non-backyard philosopher, and his refreshing view on our eternal quest for happiness. Bruckner makes the point that happiness used to be the exception, implying that then it was already quite an achievement just being able to survive.

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With every edition I claim that I have no time to post, but this time, I have even less time than usual. However, here I am to bring you a super-duper compact time-saving edition of the Weekly Head Voices, filled with the highlights of week 12 of 2011. I’ll start this edition with some church: