Sorry for the silence

Been out of town all week. I'll post something witty and to the point later on this weekend, lord willin' and the creek don't rise. Meanwhile, look at this for more government of the dogs, by the dogs, and for the dogs.

Coincidence Engine Working Well

10:00 this morning, I'm eating a croissant at the breakfast table and reading a book about canids of the world. I look up, and a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is running through the neighbors' back yard. It wasn't literally the animal I was reading about at the moment (the bat-eared fox (Otocyon megalotis)), but still ...

Why dogs don't talk to us

Blame the poor quality of the video on the fact that I was just playing around with my Palm Treo and its notoriously poor camera capability, and the poor quality of the voiceover on the notoriously poor quality of my voice. Instead of wasting time with Google's flaky video capability, I'm just going to link to YouTube. Sorry, I didn't want to have to do that, but life is too short.

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I do actually own a camcorder, plus a small digital camera with a video capture option, and maybe one of these days I'll post something made with one of them.

Casualty Stats Question Effectiveness of Future Surge

See the revealing stats here. Bring the boys home!

Odd product of the month

We get all kinds of catalogs. This is from the one that starts every product name with "The," as in "The Completely Useless Backyard Flotation Toy," or "The One Hundred and Fourteenth Atomic Watch We've Listed So Far." Anyway, here's the hands-down strangest thing they offer for sale this time around:

Imagine being the dog on this side of the fence. Or if both pet owners installed these things, each intruding into the other's airspace.

So far, so good

Talked to the doc this week, and he says, "Nothing new ..." in the MRIs. In other words, no new tumors, meaning that the soi-disant transplant did its thing. I say so-called transplant, since the point is less transplanting things (they were my stem cells, after all, sieved out, frozen, and returned to me) than it is giving one a big whackin' dose of chemo, which kills tumors, along with such other useful things as hair folicles, taste buds, digestive bacteria, and so on. But again, it seems -- at least today, 100+ days afterward -- to have been worth it.

Anyway, back to the salt mines, designing process improvements and, (as Maxwell Smart would say) Loving It!

Here, by the way, is what someone looks like, 100+ days after one of these treatments. The beard and mustache are coming back, not clear whether the hair will.

All I've got to say ...

MRI accidents

I spent hours (literally) this week, stuffed into an MRI machine, getting whole-body scans done. Won't know the outcomes until next week, but in talking about it to some of my colleagues, it became clear that they'd never seen or heard of the interesting occupational safety aspects of operating an MRI. The "M," of course, stands for "magnetic," as in "magnetic resonance imaging," and that implies big honkin' magnets, run off supercooled helium, not just line power. So the magnets stay on all the time, and that means you really should keep ferrous materials like, say, office chairs, out of the room. See the pictures below for examples.



The object in the shot on the right appears to be an IV pole; hope it wasn't hooked up to a patient when they wheeled him or her in.

While looking for something else ...

... I found the linked press release on the Ann Arbor government web site. We're the third most "walkable" city in the country, says here. Could be because it's such an impossible city to drive in.

#317 in a series: why I hate Michigan

The picture below was taken at 6:00 PM. At 2:00 PM, there was no snow on the ground.

I hate this, I hate it, I hate it. It's March 21, for Christ's sake! (Although we did go camping only a couple of hundred miles north of here one May 1st and got six inches of wet snow between 4:00 and 8:00 PM. Broke tent poles and everything. But that was aberrent. This has been the norm, this year.)