Dirty Minded

So I just went to my friend Hai's thesis defense. He's an MD-PhD doing medical engineering, and his research has been on brain imaging during neurosurgery. So, say you have a brain tumor. The docs'd take an MRI image of your brain to use for guiding the surgeon. The problem is, once you pop open the old brain pan, stuff starts moving around. Brain tissue is very soft and floats around in a bath of cerebrospinal fluid. (God, brain words are cool. "cerebrospinal") Once the skull is open, the tissue can swell, CSF can slosh out, and that's before the surgeon even starts poking around. So these engineers like Hai try to come up with ways to model the movement and deformation of the brain tissue so the surgeon can keep tabs on where the tumor's going with all that movement.

Anyway, I bring it up because it turns out they rely on existing models of soil movement to model the brain movement. Soil movement. You know soil: some solid stuff, some liquid stuff, oozing and drifting around under pressure. Just like brains. Who knew?


In unrelated news, Leanne is arriving tonight for a little New Hampsha visit and I've gotta go get ready, so I don't even have time to tell you about my trip to New York last weekend. Brief preview: still crowded, still expensive, traffic still shitty.

Have a good holiday weekend, y'all.

My Last Kerry Insult Post

I think it's clear that my position on Kerry is pretty much the same as this guy's, but the time has come to accept the fact that the upcoming presidential election will once again be a choice between the lesser of two evils, with one of them being a whole lot lesser than the other. It's time to rally, it's time to unite, it's time for Democrats and scared reasonable Americans of all stripes to back away from the circular firing squad and support our best hope against four more years of Bush the Usurper.

So, after this post, I will refrain from taking cheap shots at Kerry, but I did have to do this one last one just to point out that this was pretty funny, even though William Saletan doesn't know what he's talking about when he tries to talk science.

Everyone's Doin' the Relaunch!


Blogger has relaunched (which is presently causing me no end of confusion), The Robot has relaunched (which I suspect is related to some nosy little robots), and around here, Mother Nature has certainly relaunched (Fiddleheads! Yay! Flowers! Yay! Seminude undergrads! Yay!). Obviously, the time is now for a relaunch of my anemic little blogging effort. (As I believe I said something about a New Year's Resolution a while back, I'd like to point out that we're not yet through the halfway mark of the year. It seems like that should count on my side, for some reason.)

So here's to a renewed promise of plenty of nothingness from the life of yours truly. Much bloggy goodness to follow. In the spirit of renewal, I'd like to congratulate all of the happy couples in Massachussetts who are launching Relationship 2.0 today, and offer this from the man who could have been our president, if only we were good enough to deserve him.