Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Barkley at the dog park

Barkley made his first trip to the dog park today. We stayed there for a couple of hours and aside from the first few minutes of greeting and sniffing, he was pretty much non-stop running the entire time.

If he wasn't chasing down (or being chased) by one of the boxers, he was wandering around exploring, wrestling or playing with the other dogs. Didn't get to test out his retrieving instinct because he was too busy having fun with the other dogs to notice the ball.

It was definitely nice to see him running off all of that excess energy. If anybody out there with an active lifestyle is looking for an active young lab, I have one for you.

Candy poop dispensers???!!!

I go to Amazon.com this evening to browse around, and this is the first thing I see below the big Kindle ad.

What. The. Heck??

WHLR Barktoberfest

If you and your dog(s) are looking for something fun to do, come out and join Wild Heir Labrador Rescue at Worthy Creatures (formerly Kreature Komforts) for Barktoberfest! Stop by and meet some of our adoptable dogs, play some games, get some dog portraits taken and help support the rescue.

Large telescope, large data

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a very impressive project, both in the size of the telescope (8.4m 3 mirrors), the science to be conducted, the size of the camera (3.2 Gpixels worth of CCD imagers) and the amount of data that will be generated using it (estimated at 30 TB/night). That's a lot of data to manage. And I thought the 15TB/year of data we generate in Radiology was impressive.

The telescope will take movies of the night sky, with each frame of the movie consisting of a 15s exposure. The wide field lets the camera watch large sections of the sky while the large mirror lets the camera detect very faint objects. Multiple exposures can be added together to create the equivalent of a single long exposure image for deep field imaging.

Perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects of the project is that the data will be made freely available as it's generated for anybody to make use of.

Q: Will LSST imaging data be available world-wide for scientific use? A: Our goal is open-source, open-data. Currently US federal agencies and foundations support LSST R&D, and the LSST construction proposal is to a US agency. However, our goal is to make the LSST scientific data available world-wide. To realize this goal, we are working with foreign institutions and governments to share the costs. The ten LSST science collaborations are open to all US scientists, and hopefully soon to an increasing number of scientists in other countries.

This project is going to generate a lot of great data for astronomers to play with once it comes online.

The pack

It was a dog filled weekend.

From left to right: Nala, Macho, Barkley, Simba.

Barkley in action

A few picture of Barkley in action at the dog park.

Macho and Barkley playing Follow the Leader

Running with the Flying Squirrel

Barkley found a discarded water bottle to chew on

Barkley goofing around with one of the other dogs

Art Deco beach

Meat

Spotted on a shirt at Barktoberfest

Meat is Murder. Tasty tasty murder

Connections

There are a ton of apps on Facebook, but I have to say one of my favourites is Friendwheel. I just think it's neat to see how my Facebook friends are connected and how many different groups they coalesce into.

Weekend happenings

Wild Heir Lab Rescue will be at Daniel Island Park Day on Saturday Oct 11. Come on out and enjoy the afternoon with us and meet some of our adoptable dogs!

Sunday join other Lowcountry bloggers at Blognic '08 at Wannamaker County Park. It's a pot-luck affair for the whole family so bring everybody along for a great afternoon outing.

October reading list

Some of the papers on this month's reading list

• Risk of Cataract after Exposure to Low Doses of Ionizing Radiation: A 20-Year Prospective Cohort Study among US Radiologic Technologists, Am. J. Epidemiol. 2008 168: 620-631
• Automatic exposure control in pediatric and adult multidetector CT examinations: A phantom study on dose reduction and image quality, Med. Phys. Volume 35, Issue 10, pp. 4567-4576
• Singular value description of a digital radiographic detector: Theory and measurements, Med. Phys. Volume 35, Issue 10, pp. 4744-4756
• Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dosimetry in medicine, Phys. Med. Biol. 53 R351-R379
• Evaluation of quantitative ⁹⁰Y SPECT based on experimental phantom studies, Phys. Med. Biol. 53 5689-5703
• An easy-to-use phantom and protocol for weekly PET quality assessment: A multicenter study, Med. Phys. Volume 35, Issue 9, pp. 3922-3934

A couple of them would make good journal club entries.

Soggy Park Day

Spent yesterday afternoon out on Daniel Island for Daniel Island Park Day at the WHLR booth. Despite the intermittent rain and general sogginess of the day, there were quite a few people out there (although I'm sure there would have been more if it was a nice day).

I only made it out for the afternoon so I managed to miss the fun of setting up, dealing with the rain, moving everything out of the rain and fire ants. The rest of the afternoon was ok though with a lot of people stopping by to meet the pups and dogs. Had a few ask about fostering which was good. WHLR needs all the fosters they can get.

This awesome dog house (or kid's play house, I suppose, if you don't have dogs) was being raffled off. Because of the low turnout due to rain, the raffle date for the dog house was pushed back to Oct 23. If you purchase your raffle tickets from Lucia's Premium Pet next to the Daniel Island Publix, proceeds will go to WHLR.

Yes, that's grass on the roof.

Barkley waiting in the crate while we packed stuff up at the end of the day.

You can check out the rest of the pictures here.

My first plumbing problem

There's something strange going on with the tub in one of the bathrooms.

No hot water. Cold water comes out nice and strong like it's supposed to, but when I turn on the hot water, there's only a small dribble.

Hot water to the bathroom sink is fine. Hot water to every else in the house is fine. Just no hot water to the bath.

Not sure what's going on, but I guess I'll be learning a little bit about plumbing.

Imaging equipment pr0n

A few years ago when I was at a weekend course at MD Anderson, I discovered that not all medical physicists have had the luxury of seeing the innards of the equipment we're supposed to be experts on. This was something of a surprise to me. I'd been seeing the insides of equipment since my undergrad days and always made it a point to be around whenever I heard the service guys were working on a piece of equipment. I had assumed that most of the people at the course with me also had the same opportunities at some point in their career, most of them being much older than I was. Apparently I was wrong.

Since a big part of my job is keeping tabs on all the imaging equipment, I get to see most of it in various stages of undress at some point or another. This usually happens when the equipment is being installed or being serviced. Every now and then I also have my camera with me to take pictures, so I decided to make a Flickr stream of some of the naked imaging equipment I've taken pictures of.

Illustrating

The last couple of weeks have had me busy working on a couple of lectures I have to give to a group of cardiology fellows at work. In the process of simplifying the lecture material (taking the "One picture is worth a thousand words approach"), I've been making up a new batch of graphics for my lectures using Inkscape, which I'm rapidly falling in love with.

A graphic artist I am most definitely not, so creating the graphics has been a lot of work: trying to imagine how to illustrate the concept I'm trying to get across, Googling info on how to make Inkscape do what I imagined up and tweaking the result.

By most standards, most of what I've created so far is pretty crude and simplistic, but it looks reasonably decent and (hopefully) gets the point across. I'm sure in the coming months, most of my other lectures will end up getting a similar treatment.

A short list of some of the Inkscape resources I've come across

• Inkscape
• Inkscape Tutorials
• Quick guide to Inkscape
• Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program
• Inkscape FLOSSManual

A river runs through it

It's been raining pretty steadily for most of the day. It's been a long time since I've seen it rain like this for so long.

This is what the back yard looks like

The dark strip in the middle is ankle deep water in the swale that drains into the ditch. The water in the ditch is just a few inches from the top, and probably over the top in a couple of spots.

Update: The water comes up to mid-calf now in the shallow spots. The dogs want to go swimming in their new pond.

Sogginess

The rain stopped about an hour ago, so I ventured out in cold wet sandals to get some more pictures of the back yard.

This is where the swale drains into the ditch. Normally during even heavy rains, the water never gets very deep here. Maybe ankle deep at most. Today in the shallow spots farthest away from the ditch, I was in water up to mid-calf.

The ditch that runs beside the house is about 1m deep. Most of the time it never fills up, even during heavy rains. The 12+ hours of rain today filled it up and then some.

This is the other end of the yard, next to the neighbours. This is where the water was mid-calf deep (easily 30 cm).

Looking down towards the ditch. It's a lot of water to drain away.

Zia Taqueria

Made the first of what is likely to be many more visits to the new Zia Taqueria that opened a few weeks ago in the former Fez location.

This place is full of yummy. The atmosphere is casual, and very conducive to just hanging out. Most items on the menu you can order a la carte, or you can choose from a few platter dishes instead. Order placing is kind of a hybrid between a fast food place and traditional sit-down. You go up to the counter, place your order and go grab a seat. After a reasonably short wait, during which you can munch on tortilla chips and salsa, one of the servers brings your meal out to you.

The salsa, while very fresh tasting was pretty heavy on the cilantro. I probably would have enjoyed it if not for my anti-cilantro gene or if there was no cilantro in it.

I opted for the Beef Barbacoa platter with the Borracho Beans and Mexican Rice as the sides and wasn't disappointed. With the New Mexico Red Chile sauce, I could have easily stuffed myself with 3 or 4 more. The enchiladas were stuffed with tender, flavourful shreds of beef, and the chili sauce provided a nice chile flavour without a lot of mouth-searing heat.

The Borracho Beans were just as tasty. Kind of like a bean soup, it had a rich tasty broth and a little bit of spicyness for kick, but not too much. The Mexican rice was a little under seasoned, but was good as well and helped cut the heat from the Habanero sauce (one of 3 hot sauces you can choose from at the cutlery/iced tea table) I added to my enchiladas.

Tables outside provide additional dining space, perfect for the milder fall temperatures these days. Now when I'm craving Mexican, I can save some gas and just walk up the road to get some.

Science Observations

In any society there are many complicated issues that unfortunately get simplified to the point where short-sightedness wins.... Science teaches us to think more broadly than that. If we really had wise leaders, they would take the long-term perspective seriously precisely because we are so prone to ignore it. They should listen to scientists and philosophers much more than economists who tend to be interested in what happens in the next annual quartile.

- Animal ecologist Hanna Kokko of Finland's University of Helsinki, in a Q&A in the Sept 9 Current Biology

Found in the October 25, 2008 issue of Science News.

Why oh Why IE7

Why does IE7 do this

when all the other browsers do this

Firefox Gran Paradiso (20081027 nightly)

Firefox 3.0.2 (Linux)

Opera 9.61 (Linux)

Google Chrome 0.2.149.30

This turns out to be a problem with IE that goes all the way back to IE6 and apparently doesn't seem to have been corrected with IE7. Just Google "css z-index ie" and you'll find a bunch of stuff on it. I'm already using a z-index: 1; CSS property to get the menu to display on top of everything else. Still no joy with IE.

Blargh.

Where have all the pumpkins gone?

Today pumpkins entered in the cafeteria's pumpkin carving contest will be showing up on tables just outside the cafeteria. Each year there are some pretty creative pumpkins, but also fewer of them. Since I started taking pictures of the pumpkins back in 2003, the number of pumpkins each year has gone down quite a bit for some reason.

This year there are only three tables set up for pumpkins, so I suspect the trend will continue. I'll find out in a few hours how many of them there are this time.

Update: 13 pumpkins this year. Forgot to bring my card reader with me so pictures will have to wait until later this evening.

Pumpkins

Some of the pumpkins from today's pumpkin carving contest at work.

See the rest of the pumpkins here.

Random thought: The Universe movie

A movie of the evolution of the universe (assuming an age of ~14x10⁹ years), if condensed down to a time scale of 1 year = 1 second, would run for 443.9 years.

Better make some extra popcorn.

Barkley at play

Barkley has been discovering that it's a lot of fun at the dog park, especially when there are other dogs to play tug with and go chasing after (or be chased by)