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.
The Nemo in Amsterdam. Pinball Machine of Science.
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:
Photo taken with telephone, loosely held in one hand, finger curling around to try and touch the little iris thingy on the touch screen, other fingers attempting to prevent said telephone from accelerating towards and coming to a sudden stop on planet earth. Don't you get any silly ideas now: The fact that my telephone has a touch screen does not mean that it has no keyboard. pffft!
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.
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:
Pretty spring photo of the back of the New Church in Delft, taken whilst I was waiting for my guest (Our Man in Vienna, temporarily in Delft!) to exit his hotel.
Carrying the portentous number 42, this edition of the Weekly Head Voices owes it to the sometimes nerdy expectations of its readers to offer at least a small part of the answer to life, the universe and everything. In other words, #42 is 100% backyard philosophy.
Water, and bridges, and paths, taken this morning especially for you. You should start feeling all pensive now.
(Post summary: TPN makes me a blog jingle, restaurant micro-review, the making of Dr. Zhao, a question for YOU about your weekend habits.)
In spite of severe lack of time, I have to write this blog, because the therapist in my head said so. Well, there’s also the matter of having really important things to talk about, but I could just have kept it all bottled up as well, so that doesn’t really count.
This is where this blog’s astronomical rise to the top could have begun.
You have arrived at the 40th edition of the Weekly Head Voices! This blog will soon buy a black leather jacket, start riding around on a motorcycle that is far too big for it and see its therapist concerning its little “Is this all there is?” existential crisis.
Spring has arrived in suburbia! Today was glorious, with zillions of little kids running around outside in the sun, and parents chatting contentedly about the barbecue potential of the coming season. See this camera-phone impression:
Nerd warning: This post really belongs on my nerd blog VXLabs.com, but as this blog has a rich tradition of popular [processing posts][2], I’m posting it here.
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[GSVideo][4] is a brilliant library that you can use in [processing][5] to capture live video, on Windows, Linux and OSX, and it’s a huge improvement over the built-in capturing support. Unfortunately, a number of us (including some of the 123 students we got to build augmented reality music instruments this September) have been running into a problematic frame error crash that meant captures didn’t last for very long before unceremoniously crashing the application. Error info and stack trace look something like the following (edited for brevity):
This past week I was away from work, doing a nano-sabbatical in my secret lair.
Example of some random evil lair. Mine is exactly the same, except that it's not in a hollowed-out volcano, doesn't have my face on the outside and is not near the sea.
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