Travel

Everything went very smooth so far.

Yesterday's kidney scans (the "Christmas Kidneys") at the hospital went smooth. The kidneys looked good, the image data too, they were not rotten, and the last-minute fiducial insertion went alright too. Dropped them off in the lab fridge, cleaned up my desk, left office as last person on Christmas Eve.
There are only two groups of people still on campus these days - Asians, and lost individuals like me.

Then I drove home, the parcel I've been expecting arrived a few hours later, and of course immediately I commenced a heart transplant between QiLin and the new, still nameless arrival. Not very surprisingly, the backplanting of the OS X 10.5 from the new guy into QiLin worked immediately, like a charm, like a Mac. Somewhat more surprisingly, the forwardplanting of the old OS X 10.4 into the new guy worked less smoothly, but 30min and an install DVD later everything was green again. Awesome - same desktop, all my data, old bigger and badder.

Packing - although NP-complete - was surprisingly simple too.

Getting up, calling a cab worked too. I start understanding the black fellows' language.

Found the bus stop, one bus (at the right time) left without me after informing me that this is not the right one. Which is a bit disconcerting, when everybody at the busstop enters and leaves, only you stay there. Even more when everybody else is Chinese, and you're the only Westerner.
Luckily, it was not raining, it is comparatively warm at 45degF, and my little Chinese ("bu tai leng le; mei you ren; wo zhu zai deguo") was enough to stay friendly with the ticket seller who stayed behind.

The bus came, lots of space, smooth ride, and phone has reception. So I thought, yes, let's try Internet tethering to my new toy. It worked! 3G to WiFi-hotspot to Mac worked immediately. The connection was not too great, but it worked... until I found the bus itself has WiFi onboard. Woot! Internet on the ride. This is America, and 好好 共产党的 客车!

Paris in Winter

So, it is winter again! And again, I'm going home for Christmas, after three months in the New World. Christmas here doesn't feel like Christmas, actually. It is cold, there are some decorations... but there is no Christmas life. Maybe just not for an outsider, but still. Let's see whether my romantic idea of the Old World is really true, or whether I already suffer from nostalgia after this short time.

And! I had to promise MC that we're going to Paris for New Year's Eve. Not Paris, Texas, but Paris, France. So I googled what is this "Paris, France"... and look here. How confusing. Poor Frenchwomen!


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PS: Ha! One wouldn't believe what a problem the above post created. So... "Paris in Winter, Take 2":

And! I promised my gf recently that we'd be going to Paris together for New Year's Eve. Paris, France! With Eiffel Tower and all. The last time I've been there is so long ago... and it was with my school class. So this time will probably be nicer! Anyways, I'm looking forward to going there together.

Crisp Baltimore

Baltimore is a city of contrasts. This set of images reflects this fact.

View from JHMI towards downtown.


Somewhere in downtown.


The Baltimore Correctional Institutions.


Same as Venice, Baltimore has its own Ponte dei Sospiri... a bridge where the delinquents have a last chance to see the daylight. However, Baltimore's version has no real windows.


A nondescript parking lot.


The Inner Harbor area. This place had been completely desolate thirty years ago, a crime-infested slum dump. Then the remaining inhabitants got relocated, the area razed to the ground, and new development was started. Nowadays, it is a nice tourist spot, although not really enticing to visit regularly.

Shortest Path to Oneself

Today's quote, from an article in the Scientific American:

“The shortest path to oneself leads around the world.”
So wrote German philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling, who believed that travel was the best way to discover who you are.

So what has all this earned me?

Baltimore By Night

Baltimore by night has a charm of its own... as long as you don't stray from the safe areas.

The Homewood campus (probably the Decker Quad, but I really can't remember the names).


View of downtown from near Johns Hopkins Hospital.


The JHMI basement lab, in a lamentable state of near-dissolution due to construction.

As the Rich Get Poorer, Teenagers Feel the Crunch

From the New York Times, December 12, 2008:
As the Rich Get Poorer, Teenagers Feel the Crunch

Since the 1990s, many affluent children seeking admission to selective colleges have been discouraged from paid work, and steered instead toward volunteer service projects. Rebuilding homes in New Orleans or teaching English in developing countries, seemingly better résumé fodder, supplanted after-school or summer jobs scooping ice cream or answering phones.

“There’s been such a push to demonstrate to colleges that they’re involved with activities and charities that it’s almost too pedestrian to say that work is part of what I do,” said William S. Miron, the principal at Millburn High School.

Life and Death of a Kidney

The kidneys ended their lives in this place - a slaughterhouse in Mt. Airy, some 35 miles out of Baltimore. It seems that when it comes to food and health, America acknowledges there might be drawbacks to individualism, and restricts slaughtering to only a few places.


The warm kidney were put on ice and later went on to be soaked with physiological sodium chloride solution (I learned that's the name of plain NaCl solution) to rinse them.


I specifically ordered kidneys for research, not for food. This means they came with all their plumbing still attached.


However, their plumbing was not useful for our research. We need to circulate contrast agent through them, so I worked for most of the day to graft some valves onto them. During this comparatively menial task I learned that kidneys have only three tubes connecting them to the outside world - renal artery, renal vein, and urethra.


Once set up, they were ready to undergo internal rinsing. There is an astounding capability to hold water in those kidneys. I could flush four or five of those syringes into them with nary any visible change. However, it became apparent to the touch that something is accumulating inside.


There are still more to work with.


Each of the kidneys has a different personality, which you learn to appreciate after groping them for the better part of a day.


One of them even conveniently sports some kind of lesion, maybe even a tumor. Which is great for us.
Although not visible on these pictures, they are by now filled to the brim with contrast agent (a suspension of titanium oxide in slightly gelly agar-agar). This is very white, pretty fluid while still in liquid phase, and very prone to find its way out of a pressurized environment, which I learned the hard way. When injecting it into one of the kidneys, the tubing became loose and the pressurized syringe-kidney system exploded in the lab, sending white goo everywhere up the walls and over the table.


This is kind of midway for the kidney phantoms: the CT room at JHMI. They are scanned here so we have something to compare with the later ultrasound images. This comes in a later installment.

Brave New Web 2.0

PJS is now on Facebook!
http://de-de.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1276365338

It is not really clear what the benefits are, though.

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And on another note, these are 1.5 kidneys. They (and the six other kidneys) were still warm when I got them this morning.

Stroll in Mt. Washington

Today in the afternoon I strolled around Mt. Washington. The weather was pleasant, I couldn't concentrate on work, so I took my camera (yes, let's mention it again: the R1) and went downhill.

This might look like a Frank Lloyd Wright, but isn't. It's just a corner shop.


The parking lot of the United States Postal Service location in Mt. Washington. These vehicles are small and need to be evacuated from the flood danger area onto the bridge right next to it whenever it rains.


This might look like a cathedral of the modern times. But in reality it is the afore-mentioned bridge.


I wonder if they ("aber wer sind denn die?") had to pay royalties for this clever slogan. God giveth, Man taketh.


Man really taketh. This is in one of the posh upscale Mt. Washington interior design stores, selling antiques. Each of those undefinable pieces of ancient machinery (those on the small table, not the R1) cost between one and three thousand dollars.


Here, PJS taketh a picture.


Oh, and one unrelated quote at the end. It is not only unrelated, but even a lame re-post from long ago, but I feel like repeating it again:

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up. If you're an idiot, you fall behind soon and never catch up.

(courtesy of Techno)

Trivia

So the other day I was, like, trying not to forget programming, and dabbled with some hardware.

"Well, yesterday I've been working on this very simple demonstration prototype, really simple stuff, and I hope to have it ready by tomorrow."
"... Wow, that is nice. We should publish this!"
"No, come on. This is really trivial stuff, and it's not finished yet. It might be publishable if I had the theory behind it that I am still looking for."
"Ok, then it need not be a journal paper. Let's make it a conference contribution!"

Random Impressions, More of them

Just some random images from Baltimore.


San Martin Drive Parking Lot.


Short autumn, near Homewood campus.


Baltimore Museum of Art. Entry is free; the collection really is on an international level.


My room.

A Book Is Not

"A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

Jorge Luis Borges

Patent Entitlement Syndrome

For many years, a certain syndrome has plagued the ideas that my brain sometimes hatches in its unattended moments. Every year or so, a great (grandiose, Earth-shaking, momentous) inspiration descends into it and settles and moves around. At some point I decide to devote some more time to it, and let it ripen. Finally, when it gets formalized, I do some research and, lo! It has already been invented.

Invented not like 50 years ago. Usually, just a few months have passed since this idea becoming patented. This has happened to the eye-tracking LCD windshield sunscreen... well, this is the only other example that comes to my mind right now (although there have been many, I swear!) apart from the one I want to get at as the main point of this post.

Another such idea that burst forth, Venus-like, from yonder neurons were the kangaroo jumping stilts. Well, by now everybody knows them. But six or seven years ago, that was not the case. One nice morning in Hannover, the idea formed... and well, they became popular shortly after. However, sadly through no part of mine.

Anyways! Life goes on. So finally, I felt the urgent pull of a sense of entitlement to my own invention (ok, even if independently invented, patented, marketed, and popularized by somebody else) and succumbed to the urge to own my own pair of Powerisers.

Standing on them, looking down on creation, one feels... a sense of... well, actually a sense of lack of stability. Although, it needs to be added, they work surprisingly well. The fearsome part is letting go of the handrail, but actual walking or even running is astonishingly simple. Jumping too, I guess, but that is left for later, I'd say. Plus, one needs to pay extreme attention not to get the stilts tangled up with each other. Extreme. Outrageous.




On the first image, I am trying not to crush any small nations or hopeful startups under the stilts. On the second, the dynamics might be lost on the spectator - but I am actually airborne!

Sankt Nikolaus

As my landlords are Swiss, they know and celebrate Sankt Nikolaus on Dec 6. Which was, like, today. A whole bunch of adorable Germans, Semi-Germans, Semi-Bolivians, and other South Americans was invited over. Almost all of them are in some way affiliated with either Johns Hopkins, Waldorf, or both.

Plus, I totally stunned them by being able to distinguish 下 xia4 and 上 shang4. And, uh, 变态的 90° aberrations of them.

(PS: Hm... in fact, on Friday there was a presentation at the JHU by a professor from the University of Würzburg, about the visual system of Drosophila, aka common fruit fly. This fly, believe it or not, is able to distinguish between and remember T and inverted-T shapes. This probably places me on the same level. Or, more precisely: In terms of recognition of those shapes, Drosophila and I are equivalent. Duh.)





The other week, first Advent was celebrated - but in a slightly, uh, pagan way. In fact, the Waldorf community has its own succession of, uh, kingdoms of creation, or something... minerals, plants, animals, and man.
The first Advent corresponds to minerals. Which means, there was a meeting (with lots of other people) around the table in the background, everybody (or every family group) brought a candle and lit it, while also placing something belonging to the mineral kingdom on the table: A stone, a shell, or a bone.



Furthermore, there is snow. White Christmas for all, and joy to the world!

Gasoline

I am not driving around enough. In this way, I cannot make full use of my rights as an American resident, one of which is the right to waste.

Today, I filled up Sandwich again. There was enough space for 17 gallons (some 68 liters) of Super Premium (which is the high-end gas variety, although at a mere 93 octanes), and it cost the outrageous price of 35$. This is only because I did not choose the cheapest station, where one gallon would have clocked in at less than two bucks.

Phallus Land

Probably everybody has heard of the conspiracy theory that the United States are built on a Freemasons' scheme to take over the world, with proof being the pyramid with the All-Seeing Eye on the dollar notes, the George Washington Monument being what it is, and lots of other easily uncovered issues (just read any Dan Brown novels).

As everybody knows just as well, this is complete and utter nonsense. There is no such conspiracy. The United States are not a plot to propel some obscure lodge to world dominance, they are not God's Own Country, they are just like any other country.

However, there is something else, something noteworthy but usually well-hidden. In spite of it prudish appearance, the U.S. are surprisingly lewd. The U.S. are a boiling cauldron of hot, unadulterated, barely-veiled -- sex. Its often-discussed affection for violence is just a ploy to divert the world's eyes from its real sinful addiction -- the phallus.

The phallus is actually everywhere in contemporary America. Probably it is even hidden to the eyes of its own population, but to an open-eyed, open-minded foreigner treading the soil of the New World for some time now, it is all but covert. In fact, one cannot turn without being blatantly, constantly being reminded of the true fetish, the one object of affection, the very culmination of American spirit: The Phallus.

What follows is a gallery of the obvious, a presentation of the unavoidable, a scrupulous uncovering of that which lies in the shadow of the public unconscious.


The George Washington Monument -- probably the longest stone Phallus of a Nation in the world.


The Capitol -- the Phallus of Democracy.


Leftovers from Halloween -- probably a phallo-pagan festival.


Cars in the driveway, the ultimate American phallus.


An American Squirrel, nibbling away at phallic corn.


One of the house's cats (a free pet, so to speak), lewdly looking out of the window.


And: A kendo session (which I am planning to attend in the future), probably a crypto-celebration of the phallus (plus, look at the porn-bar moustache of the guy at the right!).

And finally, the pinnacle of phallic dominance over day-to-day life, the porn-movie-industry foray into the housewife's drab existence, the vacuum cleaner -- the name of a vacuum cleaner in the house (with a 1950's look of "electricity makes the American housewife's life joyful!", incredibly massive, electrically driven - it really moves its heavy vacuum head back and forth, automatically, in a rocking, almost sensual vacuuming motion, back and forth, back and forth, with an integrated headlight), the Name to end all other household names, the Name which could not have been imagined by any marketing director's mind with a straight face, the monstrous Name of this American vacuum cleaner:

"The 14-inch Agitator".