Due to a small accident with a friend’s quantum entanglement device, I briefly got stuck in a high pressure reality vortex. The headaches have subsided, but I do still seem to be suffering from slight time compression artifacts. In any case, that’s why there’s only this one edition of the Weekly Head Voices to cover weeks 43 to 45. As is always the case, please make use of the bolded phrases to guide you through this post. In other words, the fat words tell you what you you might find interesting so that you can skip the rest.

Week 43 was for a large part about re-learning a lesson that I’ve learned and forgotten more times than I care to count, but it was mostly about joining Superbly Cool Extraordinarily Lovely People (hi there y’all!) and going here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now how about that lesson? Let’s go:

On the Importance of Not Getting Interrupted.

During these past weeks I’ve been hard at work completing a mini-thesis (some call it a teaching portfolio) documenting my teaching activities, meaning that I had to spend a significant amount of Contiguous Time(tm) producing a significant body of text. In order to supplement the scarce supply of said Contiguous Time, I spent two mornings working at home. Furthermore, I for some or other vague reason decided not to check email before I started early in the morning and of course also not to keep my e-mail client running whilst working.

My word, what a difference!

Who woulda thunk it, it turns out that that habitual and reflexive email checking really breaks one’s speed and, in my case, causes unnecessary stress as each time the inbox piles up with even more remotely injected work. Bottom line: I’m going back (for the umpteenth time) to 3 fixed email checks and inbox emptying sessions per day: one before the early morning daily review, one just after lunch when my brain is too busy coping with digestion anyway and one in the late afternoon.

Operating Systems all-you-can-eat Buffet

During wind-down time in these past three weeks, I installed and tried out the following operating systems:

• Moblin 2.1 preview on my netbook: Oh my it boots really fast and is very pretty. It would take some getting used to, my experience was too much mobile internet device and too little computer.
• OSX 10.5.7 on my Q9450 quad-core: First: No, I have no idea how that got there! Second: Meh. Looks nice, not my thing though. Third: Eventually I’m going to port DeVIDE to OSX, when either wxCocoa or pySide is ready. I’m only doing this for my goateed, turtle-necked and beret-wearing apologist friends and definitely not for the OS or the company behind it.
• Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my, err, netbook: My jotted down thoughts at the time: Very slick, clutter interface (including maximus) is great for netbooks. It seems the ath9k wlan adapter still has minor problems connecting / staying connected at full speed.
• Windows 7 on my netbook: Yes, the TU does in fact give us all licenses for this type of stuff, it’s a cool perk. Wow, it went on there quite easily, I simply ran “setup.exe” from the unpacked ISO and installed it to an extra 70G partition. After installing the usual suspects (truecrypt, 7zip, avira, vim, asus stuff [Super Hybrid Engine, Hotkey, Asus Update, Touchpad driver], fastcopy, chrome), I was up and running. Looooong battery life seems to be intact.

The End, My Friend

In week 44 a number of us went to defend the whole TU Delft Computer Science research programme at an international research evaluation. Besides leading to my recent PowerPoint post, this occasion surprisingly turned out to be great fun (probably thanks to the 5-star evaluation committee and their interviewing style) and we seem to have done quite well in the evaluation.

Preparing for the evaluation and finishing my teaching portfolio took up much of my time, so much so that I have not been giving the people around me all the time and attention that they deserve. People around me, I am acutely aware of this and I will make it up to you!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #6: Heroic Wave, Brainy Mice, Don’t shoot the Messenger.
2. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36
3. Weekly Head Voices #7: The Answer, a STAR is born, post-human YouTube

For those of you still wondering, I’d like to confirm that it is indeed possible to hack a GMail account over insecure WiFi: GMail does indeed always send your password through secure HTTP (SSL) so that this can’t be directly hacked, BUT, by default, the rest of your session happens through normal clear-text HTTP.  The Watchdog episode of course gives absolutely no technical details, but it’s most probably the “sidejacking” attack first published by Robert Graham, where the attacker reads the cookies of the post-authentication HTTP traffic and uses them to fool GMail into thinking that they are in fact the legitimate owners attacked GMail account.  This attack works on other webmail and -service providers too.

In short, if you EVER use a network connection that you don’t trust, simply change the “http:” in your URL bar to “https:”, or, even better, change your browser connection to “Always use https” on the GMail Settings – General page.   With both of these solutions, the whole connection will use secure HTTPS (SSL), and cookies can’t be sidejacked.

The drawback of the secure setting is that your GMail access will be slightly slower than usual:  The encryption costs more compute time at both ends, and the transmission of data is slightly less efficient.

Related posts:

1. Even more GMail (also for domains) storage for free!
2. GMail Favour
3. GMail I love you dearly

The people that brought you PowerPoint.

Some of you might remember that I posted about a strange PowerPoint 2003 bug and its work-around back in 2005.  In short, hyperlinking to an MS-MPEG4 encoded AVI would result in a completely unnecessary warning dialogue.  Renaming the AVI to MPG made this problem go away.

Guess how I worked around the movie clip black box problem in PowerPoint 2007?  Yes, children, changing the file extension from AVI to MPG and re-embedding the movie-clip resulted in a perfectly-playing embedded AVI.  You can thank the clever guys and girls at Microsoft for keeping life interesting with these pleasant little surprises.

Problem #2 took slightly longer to solve, but Uncle Google soon had me on the right track.  The last slide in my presentation, the one that took 4 to 6 seconds to appear, was quite image-heavy.  It turns out that PowerPoint saves embedded images in a relatively inefficient non-compressed form.  This does, contrary to what we expect from MS, make sense, as one would like to retain all image information.  However, when one is doing a slide-show, the processing that has to take place scaling and displaying all images takes an inordinate amount of time.  Having an upwards of 4 second delay before the next slide appears is simply not acceptable.

The solution is saving a copy of your presentation, but with image compression activated.  Do “Save As” and on the bottom-left of the dialogue that appears, select the “Tools” menu button, then “Compress Pictures”, then “Options” and finally “Screen (150ppi)”.  Now “Ok” twice, then finally select a new filename and click on “Save”.  In my case, the presentation file was reduced from 10MB to 2MB, and the load time for that crucial last slide from 4 seconds (minimum) to slightly less than 1.

That concludes the second installment in my exciting life as a PowerPoint flunky!

Related posts:

1. Hyperlinked AVIs and PowerPoint 2003
2. Second day of IEEE Visualization 2007
3. Final day of IEEE Visualization 2007

Because these bets only realise in 10 or 20 years, I’ve told my betting partners that I would write it up on my blog so that we could check in that much time, and that they would then owe me copious amounts of beer. This also gives them the opportunity to check my wording for suitability, as we might have to cleave hairs when the time comes.

Bet #1: At VisWeek 2019, I and at least one other person will be wearing a HUD pretty much all the time, OR I will have at least one bionic eye.

Courtesy of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

I made this bet with the infamous Dr. Bob Laramee, proprietor of the 5-star webpage.  This came up in a conversation about having some form of non-intrusive display device always available with which things could be looked up, relatively unobtrusively, during for example a conversation.

I do expect that sometime within the next 10 years, HUDs (heads-up display) will be offered as an option with every new set of spectacles.  This is definitely not a push-over bet, but that makes it all the more exciting.

I’m not sure how the bionic eye clause slipped in there, honestly!

Bet #2: 19.5 years from now, there will be more cars with alternative propulsion systems than there are cars with fossil-fuel based internal combustion engines.

This one was made with Dr Helmut Doleisch, linked view data analysis guru and now CEO of SimVis (hey man, BUY THEIR SOFTWARE!).  He is concerned with all the vested interests in fossil-fuel combustion, whereas I think that 19.5 years is more than enough time to introduce non-fossil fuel based propulsion systems on the road, so much so that less than 50% of cars on the road will have need of fossil fuel.

Brazil with its 190 million inhabitants is an interesting example in this regard: A large number of their cars already run on either gasoline or sugarcane ethanol – clearly a great step in the direction of non-fossil fuel options.

Bet #3: In 2029, distributed conferences with tele-presence will be common.

In this case, the beer-donor is Dr Stefan Bruckner, master of all things volume visualisation and father of the VolumeShop software system.  My contention is that in 20 years, conferences where attendees take part via tele-presence systems, whatever they may be, will be common-place.

I’ve called one of the models I envision of this “clustered telepresence”, which would entail that groups of attendees would indeed gather physically, but that these remote clusters would be connected by advanced tele-presence systems, involving advanced displays (think very large, or perhaps even some form of mobile volumetric displays) and distributed and mobile sound.

During the discussion preceding the making of this bet, valid concerns were raised with regard to the efficacy of remote socialising, especially beer-drinking.  I agree that this is an issue of utmost importance, but still contend that technology and efficiency concerns will conspire to address this problem in a way that is at least good enough to fool, to a sufficient extent, all parties involved.

Related posts:

1. Bill Buxton at CARS 2009
2. Eurovis 2009
3. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36

Welcome to the Weekly Head Voices #7, a lucky number for a blog post dealing with week #42, a week that could potentially have something to do with the answer to life, the universe and everything. Auspicious is an understatement.  (Oh my word, I just realised that week #42 is only starting as I write this.  Week #41 is the one just behind us and hence the subject of this post.  Oh well, just add 1 for the answer to life, the universe and everything!)

First the customary (but more uplifting than usual) visual element, I’ll get back to it at the end of this post.  Watch it to get in the mood:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A brilliant and excellently debauched Tuesday evening with friends in Rotterdam led to an exceedingly difficult Wednesday, the difficulty of which was definitely not alleviated by my 6 scheduled meetings. Fortunately a number of the meetings turned out being quite energising, leaving me with an energy surplus by the end of the day.  Beer: 0 Charl: 1.

On Thursday and Friday, Jorik and I helped the famous Jelle Feringa with a workshop he set up to expose architecture M.Sc. students to the Wonderful World of Scientific Visualisation (!!!). Jelle has somehow managed to bring our two fields together with great effect, and was trying to impress some of this magic onto the students. I found it quite challenging explaining bits of Python and VTK programming to a class of students that had for the largest part never seen source code before, but by the time we had gotten to extracting surfaces and direct volume rendering with DeVIDE, things were going just swimmingly. At least that was my impression.

On Friday, I submitted a rather extensive proposal to write a Eurographics State-of-the-art Report (STAR) together with a number of similarly interested colleagues. I’d love to tell you what the STAR’s about, but would prefer waiting until we know whether it has been accepted or not. In any case, if it is indeed accepted, we will have the privilege of publishing the full-length survey article in the Proceedings of the Eurographics, giving a 90 minute (!!!) presentation during the conference next year, and submitting a revised version of the article to the journal Computer Graphics Forum. That’s like Graphics/Visualisation-scientist crack man!

Because this is my little soap-box, I have decided to conclude with one of my typical “I love the 21st century” RA RA moments.

First, as you all know, one can easily upload photos and videos to facebook by mailing them to a special per-user email address: Go to facebook.com/mobile – the special email address is on the bottom left under “Upload Photos via Email”. This is especially useful for sending absolutely useless but seriously incriminating media directly from your cellphone, especially exactly when you shouldn’t be doing so, for example at 3 in the morning.

I’m probably one of the last to come across this, but youtube of course has similar functionality! Login, then go to your account page, then settings and finally mobile setup to find your upload email address. This means you can upload your incriminating media at 3 in the morning to yet another site, except that this one has a far, far greater reach than facebook.

Is this why I love the 21st century? Well, it’s a minor reason amongst many others. A slightly more meaningful one is the fantastically uplifting video clip embedded at the start of this post. That’s a real wedding (and what a wedding it was!), the clip was posted in July of this year and has since been watched more than 27 million times. That’s crazy! In what other century can a visual memory of your humble, although very original, wedding be seen 27 million times and so brighten up the respective days of millions of people that won’t ever even know you?

That’s just so beautiful, it’s post-human.

P.S. The sound-track to the clip is Forever by Chris Brown. Instead of suing the love-birds, Sony (the label) and Brown decided to work together with Google to monetise the occasion. Notice that when playing the video, there’s a box underneath with the name of the song and a “Buy Song” button. It turns out that due to this video, the single was slung back into the top 10 charts, more than a year after its release. This GoogleBlog post describes how everybody involved wins. It’s gratifying that labels are slowly waking up to the new order. May those that refuse to smell the coffee wither away as quickly as their irrelevance seems to indicate.

P.P.S. My mother now has a Blackberry.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
2. Weekly Head Voices #6: Heroic Wave, Brainy Mice, Don’t shoot the Messenger.
3. Weekly Head Voices #3: Powerless meat Zen, Xi leaves, NFBI, Motek

Gadgets:
Public opinion concerning the HTC Hero is generally quite positive, although the extent to which the most recent firmware update has remedied the often-reported laggy touch-screen response leaves me suspicious:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It does have a capacitative touch screen (the best kind), but is apparently still not as responsive as the iphone.  It’s almost as if the finger swiping is seen as a suggestion instead of an actual command.  Now before all you fanboys go “I told you so”, please remember that Android devices actually multi-task an arbitrary number of processes, whilst Apple has determined that fanboys are only allowed one at a time, with some recent small exceptions. I think I might just wait this one out. At least until next week.

When I first heard about Google Wave, I was considering to let this one fad pass me by, so I didn’t go to any effort to get in on the invite frenzy. However, after seeing this short (7 minute) explanatory video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

… I am now regretting my laissez faire attitude. What completely convinced me, was the part where they show how you can organize BBQs using this fantastic new technology. WHY DIDN’T THEY SAY SO IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Slightly more seriously, Wave enables you to combine multiple different forms of internet communication in one stream, called a wave (doh), that can be played back and forth in time and to which other Wave users can be added as subscribers, thus enabling them to take part in the stream by adding more emails, comments on other emails, real-time chats, documents, and anything else one might fancy throwing into the conversation. One is also able to link the wave bi-directionally to other information sources such as blogs, so that for example comments on a linked blog are automatically added to the wave, at the correct point in time.

It’s pretty exciting to see where all of this is going.

Science:
On Wednesday I opposed an M.Sc. thesis that explored the relationship between DTI-based and resting state fMRI-based neural connectivity. DTI, or diffusion tensor imaging, is an MRI-based technique that is able to image neural fibre bundles in the human brain: Very loosely put, this is in fact imaging the brain’s connective wiring, i.e. the structural connectivity. With resting state fMRI, it is hypothesised that one can derive functional connectivity, i.e. fish out the regions that show such high time-activity correlation that there is a high probability that they are working together and hence are probably connectivity. Of course one would like to see these two being in agreement.

In recent literature this has been demonstrated, but in this M.Sc. project no correlation was found. Unfortunately in science, it’s far harder to convince someone of the latter than of the former. Whatever the case may be, this raises interesting questions: Is there no correlation? Are the techniques not sensitive enough? Also in the back of my head throughout the very solid defense was the recent work on finding fMRI activity in the brain of a dead salmon.

On Thursday, I was involved in a meeting with hardcore scientists. How do I know they were hardcore? Well, they do things with mice. Over the past years I have seen a terribly high correlation between scientific hardcoreness, judging by number of publications in journals such as Science and Nature, and Doing Stuff With Mice, Especially Genetically Modified Mice. Although correlation of course does not imply causation, I have decided to acquire some of above-mentioned mice. Perhaps their running around in my office with electrodes sticking out everwhere will also lead to Great Things.

Retail therapy:
Even when you don’t really need it, retail therapy is just fantastic. On my way to get coffee beans for the espresso machine at work, I, completely by chance of course, ran into this lovely little Samsonite messenger bag (in black of course) and just had to get it for my baby netbook. It’s going to Atlantic City next week after all!

Which reminds me, I will probably liveblog (haha I used it in a sentence) from IEEE Visualization 2010 next week, which means that I am optionally excused from Weekly Head Voices duty. Ok?

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
2. Weekly Head Voices #7: The Answer, a STAR is born, post-human YouTube
3. Weekly Head Voices #3: Powerless meat Zen, Xi leaves, NFBI, Motek

Speaking of shortness, I did get some off-blog (yes, face-to-face!) feedback on the previous edition of the WHV. Said (highly appreciated) feedback concerned the length of these posts, more specifically, that there was too much of it. It’s important to remember that I in fact do write these things with the chronically time-challenged in mind. One of the measures I take is to bold the most important themes in each paragraph, so that one can easily skip on to the next paragraph if the mentioned theme does not take one’s fancy. This week, I’m going even further by employing section headings! As always, please feel free to skip paragraphs and sections.

Before jumping in, I give you the traditional WHV photo, this time of my little Weber doing its thing (thanks to some crucial material supplied by my friendly neighbour) on the most brilliant of all South African celebrations: National Braai day!

My humble little Weber on NBD 2009.

Geeky Google Docs love affair

Google Docs is Google’s fantastic attempt (well, it was initially developed by Writely, which was soon assimilated by and has since been happily functioning inside of The Google Supermind) at an office suite. The whole thing, including Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations, runs in your web browser. This means that you always have access to your stuff from anywhere, and you never have to install any extra software. With the offline functionality, you can continue working even without an internet connection.

This was already pretty neat, but then they had to go and make it even neater. In my line of business, one of the coolest features is the fact that you can concurrently edit the same document with any number of collaborators. I’ve written research proposals together with colleagues before, where at a number of occasions we were actually editing the same paragraph of text from two different cities, and Docs didn’t break a sweat merging our edits in real-time. This functionality also eliminates the very irritating “Could you send me the latest version of the proposal” emails, the subsequent waiting and then the infuriating expired time window when the latest version finally arrives in the email.

A recent feature which is admittedly less impressive to the public at large, but made my geek heart miss several beats, was the built-in equation editor. Imagine my surprise when I tried this out for the first time and realised that it is in fact a real-time LaTeX math typesetter: You type your incredibly complex formula in standard LaTeX, and Google Docs shows the typeset math updated in real-time. This is even useful if you’re NOT using Google Docs but just want to fine-tune the formulas in your LaTeX article.  Check the screenshot below:

Screenshot of Google Docs equation editor.

90% of MS Office users probably don’t use more than 10% of its functionality. Google Docs covers this 10% more than adequately, but without the complexity, the platform lock-in and the cost. Next time you’re considering emailing someone a Word document or Powerpoint, have a look at Google Docs first!

Netbook Bad Karma

On an extra partition, my netbook (Asus 1005HA-H, the computer I’m currently in love with) has the absolute latest development version of the Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10 – will be released at the end of October) Netbook Remix. Linux distributions, and especially Ubuntu, have been making great progress recently on state of the art hardware. On this netbook, suspend to ram for example works out of the box, which is quite an achievement for Linux-kind. However, whereas battery life under the bundled Windows with the Asus Super Hybrid Engine (don’t laugh, to me it sounds like some knid of giant fighting robot power source) is an astounding 9+ hours, under Linux it’s a quite disappointing 4 or 5 hours. One very obvious factor is the CPU running at 1GHz at idle under Linux and 850MHz at idle under Windows.

Even installing and configuring the latest eeepc acpi utilities, including kernel module, from the testing repository at StatUX http://www.statux.org/content?page=repo, although enabling bunches of hotkeys, didn’t solve the battery problem. The CPU was still running at 1GHz.

I’m curious to see what the case will be at Karmic release, preferably with the stock Ubuntu Netbook Remix and not too much user fiddling. I’m considering writing a short review at that time, hopefully less critical than my previous attempt with Ubuntu Feisty beta (7.04) on my HP laptop.

Brand new Visual Data Analysis lecture block

For the past 4 years, I have been taking care of the Medical Visualisation parts (2 lecture blocks) of the TU Delft master-level Data Visualisation course (IN4086). Since the beginning of this year, I also give my very own dedicated 5 ECTS Medical Visualisation course (IN4307), which I have designed with the sole purpose of producing MedVis NINJAS. I take great joy in corrupting promising young minds with my special brand of evil science.

In a very recent development, it seems that I will now also be taking care of the Visual Data Analysis block of the general Data Visualisation course. I somehow blurted this out during a recent meeting, and now have the privilege of designing this one from scratch too.

This is quite interesting, because visual data analysis, or visual analytics as it’s sometimes called (urgh), is primarily associated with Information Visualisation, and being a MedVis fanatic I’m supposed to be a Scientific Visualisation guy. To cut a long story short, InfoVis and SciVis are two sub-fields in the broader field of Visualisation, but the communities behind them might as well come from different planets, in spite of the best efforts of some of my colleagues to unify everything. In any case, it turns out that we (when I say “we” I mean Jorik) have been secretly publishing suspiciously infovis-friendly articles the past few years. Look:

• J. Blaas, C.P. Botha, E. Grundy, M.W. Jones, R.S. Laramee, and F.H. Post, Smooth graphs for visual exploration of higher order state transitions, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 15, 2009.
• J. Blaas, C.P. Botha, and F.H. Post, Extensions of Parallel Coordinates for Interactive Exploration of Large Multi-Timepoint Data Sets, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 14, 2008, pp. 1436-1451.
• J. Blaas, C.P. Botha, and F.H. Post, Interactive visualization of multi-field medical data using linked physical and feature-space views, Proc. Eurographics / IEEE-VGTC EuroVis, K. Museth, A. Ynnerman, and T. Möller, 2007, pp. 123-130.

I find this a very interesting and gratifying development. An increasing number of my research collaborations in the medical research field are also benefiting from visual data analysis techniques. Keeping in mind the clichéd but no less real data explosion, we, as visualisation people, can greatly increase our value to the client. The forthcoming Visual Data Analysis lecture block I’m designing is just one step in the evolution of our science.

The End, my friend, also of your common cold misconceptions.

Pressing Ctrl-Shift-C in this Google Doc draft (how’s that for subtle product placement?), I can see that I’ve once again passed the 1000 word mark (1200 to be more precise).

Whoops.

I had even more planned, but instead I’ll conclude with a hopefully useful snippet of information, especially in the light of the coming winter. Many people I run into still somehow believe that there’s a causal relationship between being cold, as in going outside in cold weather, and getting a cold, as in sneezing and having a running nose. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s an age-old myth. A myth I say! See this quote from the Wikipedia article on the common cold (emphasis mine):

An ancient belief still common today claims that a cold can be “caught” by prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions, which is where the disease got its name.^[9] Although common colds are seasonal, with more occurring during winter, experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection, implying that the seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors at close proximity to others.^{[6][10][11][12][13]}

Just to ram that point home: Going outside in the cold, or being exposed to cold weather or direct chilling, very probably does not increase your chances of catching the common cold! Similar to this is the work on influenza. It turns out that there’s a link between the flu and absolute humidity: The lower the humidity, the higher the chance of getting the flu. It’s quite probable that you catch the flu virus not from going outside in winter, but from staying inside your heated and hence slightly drier home.  Chalk one up for all the kids getting told, unfairly and without scientific basis, to dress up before going out or risk getting ill.

On that rebellious note, have a super duper week!  (… and please do your thing in the comments below …)

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36
2. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
3. Weekly Head Voices #4: The New Roomie, MedVis at MeVis, Fairy Tale Beach.

"Haringeter" by Tom Otterness.

Depending on the particular reality that you find yourself in, which itself could be a function of how hard you’ve been partying, we have now left week #38 of 2009 behind us.  I took a significant part of this week off to spend some quality time with visiting family.  On Tuesday, I popped by my work (that’s the TU Delft for the uninitiated) to pick up some stuff for my planned official visit to MeVis in Bremen on Wednesday.  Two noteworthy points spring to mind:

• The New Roomie (TNR) has moved into our shared office.  This is cool for at least two reasons:
  1. TNR (PhD) is inherently cool.  I’m not sure how this happens to someone, I’m thinking it’s genetic, or perhaps he got hit by a radio-active astroid at some stage.
  2. TNR has all kinds of hard-core looking VR equipment (including a table-top VR system) that he has brought with him.  Our room has a decidedly more hard-core ambience, and this tends to impress upon people how hard-core we are.  Or him, and me by association.
• Visiting work from right in the middle of my small vacation was an energising experience that amplified the big smile I already had on my face.  This is a Good Sign(tm).

By Tuesday late afternoon, I had to get on the train to Bremen to attend the German Visual Computing in Medicine meeting, hosted by MeVis. The previous sentence will now expand, Transformers-style, into a number of derivative thoughts. Watch:

If you’ve ever had to book an international train journy via nshispeed.nl, the official site of the NS (Dutch Railways), you’ll know of the pain and frustration involved. Attempting to book the train journey to Bremen was no exception, I have two hours of wasted life to show for it. On a tip from Frits and Jorik, I phoned the Treinreiswinkel in Leiden. LO AND BEHOLD, a friendly person answered, and managed to book the exact journy nshispeed claimed was impossible for a really good price. My tickets were delivered to my house exactly one day after the phone call.

For the first time on such a longish international journey, my computer (in this case Asus eeepc 1005ha-h netbook) had a significantly longer battery life than the duration of the journey: 5 hours of quality time in the train, a whopping 9 hours left on the battery. Score 1 for the 21st century! By the way, I think I might be developing feelings for my netbook.

The meeting in Bremen was great: 10 research presentations, ranging from the latest (working!) user interface ideas for the surgical operating room (Ritter) to DTI-based brain parcellation (Roerdink).  After some serious PowerPoint 2007 love the previous night (yay image shadows!) and more importantly mental rehearsal, my talk on our Visualisation for Molecular Imaging project (Peter Kok is the guy actually doing all the work) went quite well. I think. Well, people seemed to stay awake mostly.

The MeVisLab software is really great, especially when the very capable Dr. Felix Ritter demonstrates on a ginormous plasma screen how one goes about visually designing complex medvis applications in no time. I’m a fan of MeVisLab. In spite of that, DeVIDE does have a niche to fill (hint 1: extreme Python, hint 2: open source), all apart from the fact that one day it will be the preferred operating system of MedVis geeks the world over.

The Amazing Transforming Sentence will now take a break until the concluding paragraphs of this blog post!

On Thursday I spent the day at the TU to catch up with some Real Work, pleasantly surprised by the continued hard-coreness of my office. Meanwhile, the amazon.de swag I had ordered during the weekend (they have free delivery in NL!) had arrived at my house. My netbook (I love you netbook!) now has 2G of RAM, my Wii has Rayman Raving Rabbids (you get to see who can fling a cow the furthest, need I say more?) and my keychain has a tiny little 8GB USB memory thingy:

My Keychain with the new Super Talent Pico-C 8GB USB flash drive.

Friday was absolutely gorgeous weather-wise, so I took my guests to Scheveningen (the beach, that is). I’ll spare you the details of both the preceding visit to Immigration (turns out all foreign visitors that are NOT staying at hotels HAVE to pop by Immigration within 3 days of arrival, what a schlep) as well as the lovely lunch on the beach, all in order to get to the high-light of the day: A coincidental visit to the stunning outside sculpture exhibition of Tom Otterness, called “SprookjesBeelden aan zee”. The first photo of this post is of the “Haringeter”, probably the largest of the sculptures. The playfulness of the sculptures somehow amplifies the messages they contain and made quite an impact on me.

The week’s coincidental art theme was concluded with a Sunday visit to the Kröller-Müller museum in the Hoge Veluwe, home to a beautiful collection of statues by the likes of Rodin and Rietveld, and to a sizable collection of Van Gogh’s work, with some Picassos thrown in for good measure. Especially for you, I took this photo of Van Gogh’s “Landschap met korenschelven en opkomende maan”:

Van Gogh's "Landschap met korenschelven en opkomende maan", taken at Kröller-Müller museum.

Walking through the museum, I did have to spare a thought for the fact that on this casual day, I had on my person at least 3 processors, 12G of flash and a 160G hard drive. I’m probably not completely average in this regard, but I’m not that far from it. The future is very bright. I have already said that I love the 21st century, haven’t I?  Next time you run into me, ask me about it and then watch me go off on a tangent at ludicrous speed!

I’d like to conclude this post with interesting (to me, perhaps to you) aspects of an extremely pleasant conversation that I had with an Anonymous MedVis Friend (AMVF, PhD). We were discussing matters like social networking, for example facebook and twitter, and blogging, what roles these things play in one’s life and how they’re in fact slowly changing the nature of modern human society by becoming an integral part of social interaction. At one point, I made the statement that social networking, micro-blogging and blogging were all new forms of self-expression (doh).  This in itself is not such a revelation, were it not for the fact that I realised at that moment that this is exactly the role these things play in my life, and quite prominently so.  In spite of only fully externalising the thought at that moment, I have always been acutely aware of it.  Every post I make, every apparently inane status update is in fact preceded by quite some thought as to How This Little Piece Fits Into The Big Picture, what it might mean to a potential reader (hi mom!) and whether someone might be entertained or find some form of value in it.

So kids, on that slightly personal note, I am now officially concluding this edition of the Weekly Head Voices.  It’s been yet another fabulous week, and I’m definitely looking forward to number 39.  Please feel free to self-express in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #5: Google Docs, Bad Netbook Karma, Cold does not cause cold.
2. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36
3. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply

You thought I’d forgotten all about you, dintcha?  Nope, not that easily.

Because this edition of the Weekly Head Voices is the most unorganised ever, the trick of bolding the most representative words in each paragraph simply won’t fly.  So instead I’ll just highlight some random words, and you can pretend that they actually mean something.  Think of it as a post-modernistic exercise in missing the point.  I’ll try and be more organised next week.

The most post-relevant image I could find: The overfull bicycle parking behind Delft station on Thursday just after noon, right before leaving for the NFBI meeting in Leiden (see later in this post). Turns out that in the Netherlands, there's on average slightly more than one bicycle for each and every inhabitant.

The past week, #37 of the year 2009, started really quietly with only two regular, but interesting, progress meetings on the Monday.  On Tuesday, things started heating up with another two meetings (nice ones) and a 2-hour long Medical Visualisation demo to a friendly gentleman from VisibleTV, a production company that has been contracted by my employer to put together an 8-minute video showcasing all medically-oriented research at the TU.  Due to the chaos of trying to book affordable plane tickets to Atlantic City that don’t involve 3 days of transit via donkey and a stint on the back of a livestock truck, I found myself in a slightly ruffled state by the end of the day.

I detest ending my day in a ruffled state, even if it is an ever so slight ruffle.

However, fate (we’ll talk about that much later) had conspired to return me forcibly to my preferred Zen state via three powerful avenues: I had to go BBQ at home with family and an extremely welcome guest, and, to make sure that the BBQ had the desired effect, the whole of Westland (my region) lost electricity from right about when I started the fire until midnight.  Just to make sure that the message hit home, the weather was perfect.  Picture this: Darkened houses, perfect dusk, balmy weather, superb quiet except for people all keeping each other company outside.  Complete Zen.

The next day was predictably a winner.  Now Zen-powered, I managed to kill off a scarily big chunk of my over-engineered todo list, in spite of 5 meetings and Xi’s farewell occasion.  Yes, I’m afraid that after a year of visiting our group, doing great work and generally integrating just perfectly, Xi has gone back to Beijing.  We are definitely going to miss her.

The highlight of Thursday was the bi-annual meeting of the Netherlands Forum for Biomedical Imaging, or the NFBI, an acronym that is in fact a significant improvement over NVPHBV (man, what an inside joke).  The NFBI is where all Dutch research groups that do something in biomedical imaging get together to discuss that something.  The meetings usually consist of a number of research presentations.  On Thursday, these were mostly given by post-doctoral researchers.  One thing that struck me was that although the content was of a consistently high quality, the presentations themselves sometimes were amenable to improvement.  I understand that the biggest challenge is actually doing the research, but the value of presenting that research in an accessible and entertaining way should not be underestimated.

My personal favourite, and probably not amenable to all that much improvement , was the presentation by Dr Bram Platel of his group’s work on Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) of the sub-thalamic nucleus (STN).  Turns out that by stimulating this peanut-sized part of the basal ganglia system (by sticking an electrode deep into the brain, hence the name), you can for example remedy some of the motoric symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.  The problem is that if you stimulate the non-motor parts of the STN, this can result in acute depression.  Bram and his group are trying to solve this problem by figuring out the patient-specific layout of the STN via high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI), an MRI-based imaging technique that is able to show structural connectivity in the brain.  Man, I thought that that was going to be a nice and short explanation…  In sharp contrast to my paraphrased version, the presentation entertained, edified and engaged.  To compensate, I alliterate.

Friday morning started with two meetings in Leiden: One concerning starting up new neuro-imaging research together with the LUMC and an extremely capable M.Sc. student, and the other concerning productising existing research.  The former is still in stealth mode, the latter involves putting the motion capture and visualisation software developed by two groups of bachelor students (and ourselves) into production use, first in the LUMC Motion Laboratory, and finally in other labs as open source.

The work week was concluded with a fantastic visit at Motek Medical in Amsterdam, together with Frans, motion scientist extraordinaire, who was the primary guest and graciously invited us along, and Peter, surgical planning guru and motion visualiser of note.  Motek makes and advises on a number of different motion platforms (think for example a 2m conveyor belt on top of a flight-simulator-like collection of hydraulics), matching giant screens and various motion capture setups that enable all kinds of virtual reality and motion measurement magic.  The embedded YouTube clip below shows a demo of their HBM system, that’s able to estimate muscle activation from motion capture in real time:

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the core of all their products is the CAREN software system.  This is an impressive data-flow framework with a visual programming front-end that enables real-time communication with all kinds of sensors and actuators, from humble rotation sensor all the way up to multi-camera optical tracking and industrial-grade hydraulics.  Our gracious hosts, Erwin Albers and Thomas Geijtenbeek, demonstrated by linking up a fresh rotation sensor with collision detection in all of 2 minutes.

So, that was it for this week boys and girls!  I was still planning a short bit on the evolutionary basis of music and dance (seems to be an interesting mystery), but the current post already seems to have outgrown my intentions.   See you in a week, most probably with a much smaller edition of the WHV (Weekly Head Voices man!).  I’m planning a quiet week, at least in terms of bloggable highlights.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36
2. Weekly Head Voices #6: Heroic Wave, Brainy Mice, Don’t shoot the Messenger.
3. Weekly Head Voices #7: The Answer, a STAR is born, post-human YouTube

The time has come for the second installment of the exciting new Weekly Head Voices feature!  My PR people tell me that this is a roaring success and that I am rapidly on my way to becoming an A-List blogger. My therapist tells me that I should find a good psychiatrist.

Before starting, I’d like to show the following photo (will get back to it later):

In order to facilitate your reading experience, I have bolded in each paragraph some words that represent, with differing levels of effectiveness, the theme of that paragraph.  This way, you can easily skip ahead, keeping in mind that you’re probably skipping over some truly inspiring writing.

During the past week, I had 11 face-to-face meetings with students, colleagues and collaborators.  Apart from these meetings, I presented the MedVis group’s research to a group of new postgrads on Tuesday and hosted, together with colleagues from the LUMC, a visit by Tornier on Friday.  It turns out that this job does in fact require a seemingly paradoxical mix of computer nerd and social butterfly.

On Monday, I acted as external member in the M.Sc. opposition of a thesis titled “In vivo identification of short range stiffness in the human wrist” – the student managed to figure out internal wrist muscle characteristics by applying external angular displacement and measuring effective torque.  Reviewing the work was an interesting experience, as biomechanical modelling is not one of my research foci.  All in all, very good work, although it did remind me again of why one should not typeset longer documents with a sans serif font.

The highlight of the week is surely Gerwin de Haan’s PhD defense.  An exemplary opposition, with solid attacks by the committee (6 full professors and 1 associate professor) and great defensive moves by the intrepid candidate, made for an entertaining morning.  The day was concluded with a celebratory party during which the candidate, besides consuming amounts of beer fit for a fresh doctor, received congratulatory loot fit for a PS3 and Rockband-addicted pirate!

In other nerd-worthy news: I am now the proud owner of an Asus 1005HA-H Netbook, rated with 10.5 hours of battery life.  I can confirm that the battery life is indeed awe-inspiring, also in practice.   The little beast easily lasts a whole day, and then some.  The only issue so far has been choosing a good encryption solution.  The little Atom N280 doesn’t manage much more than 30MB/s in the Truecrypt encryption benchmark, and about 38MB/s even with the optimised Diskcryptor implementation.  The Windows XP Home that this netbook ships with of course does not support EFS.  In the end, I went for Truecrypt (I use it everywhere else) and just copied over the 25G encrypted container from my Big Laptop.

Getting back to the photo above:  Boys and girls, thanks to my generous leader and the TU Delft, I get to join said generous leader and Jorik on a trip to IEEE Visualization 2009 in Atlantic City!  For the socially more well-adjusted readers, this is like Visualisation Nerd Heaven: A whole week of mingling with technically creative colleagues, discussing the latest visualisation tidbits, following paper presentations and Sleeping Much Less(tm).  Brilliant!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #5: Google Docs, Bad Netbook Karma, Cold does not cause cold.
2. Starting today: Head voices, every week!
3. Weekly Head Voices #3: Powerless meat Zen, Xi leaves, NFBI, Motek