Go Canada!

And the medal statistics - from NBC, CBC, and Die Zeit! Interesting ordering :-)

From NBC:


From CBC:


And Die Zeit:

Maple Card

Well, this certainly took long enough :-)

Canadian English

Click cromulent image to embiggen.

More Old Pictures! (Canada 2005)

I am recently looking for an easier way to post pictures... which should not be locked up in my main blog.
Maybe Picasa Web Albums could do the trick? Album after the link (click the picture).

Conference Trip - Alberta etc. 2005

Fait Accompli

After the first trip to Canada in August 2005, I decided to spend some time there.

Given the time frame at my disposal, a feasible approach seemed to be to apply for permanent residency there. Today, the procedure was finished. The last step was to land with the PR immigrant visa in Canada.




Naturellement, everything has changed since then. My dentist friend recently mentioned he envies me for the adventure, but franchement, the excitement subsides with time.

Still, bienvenue au Canada!




Three places were shortlisted as candidates for me to go and cross the border there this weekend... and finally I chose Montréal, to get some European feeling that is missing so much in Baltimore. And really, it is so great to be in a place where you can walk at your own leisure, without fear of being in the wrong neighborhood and get robbed at the next corner. Why can't every place in North America be like this?

In Canadian cities, what one often sees are directly neighboring, little compatible buildings. Often industrial constructions right next to housing, but sometimes just vaguely clashing styles.




In genereal, it's cold.




Still, there is life on the streets.




Inuit art from the (small) collection of the Montréal Musée des Beaux Arts.



Although flying to the North was with a proper jetliner, the return flights were with a turboprop machine. Small plane, really bumpy flight.

Canada 2008 - Return

Ha! The plane got delayed. Not 15 or 20 minutes, but 15 hours. Everybody got hotel vouchers, and then we passengers had to stay the night in an airport hotel.

Soon we'll start.

Canada 2008 - EMBC'08 and Vancouver

The EMBC'08 Conferece logo.


Canada Place, housing the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Center.


Conference impressions (I'm looking at you, Techno!)


Almost Greece.


One of the few self portraits.


Where Canada lives.


What it lives on.

Canada 2008 - British Columbia (Various Notes)

Same as every time, Canada is a strange country.

Continuing the old string of "little things which are different" from my earlier travels to Northern America, Canada has weird light switches. It's the decades-old, Northern-American flick switch whose looks alone betray its middle-of-last-century heritage. But when it comes to modernizing, the venerable flick switch has some tricks up its sleeves. In one B&B, I came across one with an integrated dimmer. The switch looks exactly the same as a "binary" one, but allows continuous regulation of light power. At first I thought the installation is broken, but it turned out the switch is really hiding functionality between an interface which can only be called misleading. Although a positive interpretation might be that it fashions an almost Apple-like reduction in interface complexity, the downside is that this is actually a risky, gimmicky way of treating the user as dumb - or maybe it's just design laziness. It's just a small thing, really, but it is telling a larger story.





On another note, British Columbia is really frontier country. As soon as one leaves the main city centers (Vancouver springs to mind), the level of sophistication in every-day life matters drops like a stone in a vacuum. One important thought I came across is how much of Europe's wealth is a function of its population density, really. While it's true that its more socially oriented political systems may incur a larger overhead of non-productive administration and standardization, this is really a huge boon which - as far as I can see - completely escapes the libertarian proponents of frontier life, small state footprint, and freedom in general; ideas which so pervasively dominate the Northern American lifestyle. These two explanations - population and politics - allow a higher standard of living in Europe. Or at least Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and so on.
In Canada, a lot of energy is expended on both creating ad-hoc or one-off solutions and suffering from them. (The same is true of the U.S. as well.) Germany might look homogenized in comparison, but at the same time it allows a much higher degree of specialization in everything, which in turn results in better economies of scale. The landlady in Furry Creek - a native Dutch - mentioned how she believes the world should be top-heavy with Europe and "all the stuff they have there!" When one doesn't have to invent the wheel all over every time, and when one doesn't need to build new stretches of road to reach every outlying house, the savings add up.





The End of the World - geographically - isn't as romantic as one might wish it to be. The End of the World is located in D'Arcy, BC, just to name one example. The road ends there, and it reaches a "community" of probably mostly First Nations natives, who live in what can only be called utter squalor. Inexplicably, resources-rich, climatically-disadvantaged Canada is consistently, stubbornly building cardboard houses (actually, they're made from layered wooden planks). They're erected in no time, but their insulation - while I couldn't investigate into it personally - must be incredibly poor. Windows are - everywhere - of the metal- or wooden-frame sliding variety, with negligible to no rubber rimming at all. While easy to construct, these houses are just as easily destroyed as well. In a community of no-income, welfare-supported inhabitants (like D'Arcy), these shacks fall apart in the same way the rotten carcasses of automobiles in their front yards do.
The homeless (Natives, mostly, but not exclusively) have reached downtown Vancouver as well. Not that blatantly visible two years ago, whole blocks have meanwhile succumbed to their pressure and are populated by not just groups, but downright hordes of drifters now. If Olympic Vancouver 2010 is aspiring to be anything like Beijing 2008, a large-scale social revaluation agenda is necessary to avoid Canada being exposed to the ridicule of at least their Southern neighbors, who would - rightly so - point out the failure of the social program as opposed to the laissez-faire American approach.





The U.S. are turning Hispanic. Urban Canada is becoming predominantly Asian. This (perceived) majority rapidly wears off as one leaves the urban agglomerations and moves towards the countryside ("bucolic" is not the proper term for Canada's rough, rugged, and wild outback). Furthermore, the Mixed Couple Assumption (white guy, Asian girl) still holds.

EMBC 2008

Message from The Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference Management System

Message originated by Jodi Janiszewski

Dear Mr. Stolka

Congratulations!! Your paper entitled:

First 3D Ultrasound Scanning, Planning, and Execution of
CT-free Milling Interventions with a Surgical Robot, (786)

has been accepted for presentation at the 30th Annual
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in
Medicine and Biology Society to be held in Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada, 20th - 24th August, 2008.

Below are the details of your presentation:

Robotic Surgery 08: Bio-robotics; Surgical Planning and
Orthopedic Biomechanics Contributed paper
[...]

Canada 2006 - Aug 04th Edmonton

After much travelling and much presentation preparation, both the sightseeing and business parts of this trip are slowly over... just returned from the presentation as described in University of Alberta / Department of Computing Science / Artificial Intelligence Seminar:

Surgical Robotics, Navigation, and Error
Philipp Stolka, Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Aug 4, 12:00PM, CSC 333

Lots of people, all eating pizza. Although some looked like falling asleep (I suspect some did), the audience - which probably had no previous surgical robotics-related exposure before - asked some good questions. More, and more interesting ones, than in some relevant conferences even.




Apart from this - some rain, some coldness, how good Dad told me to bring a jacket and a sweater, and EDM's slowly running out of sights.

Canada 2006 - 2nd leg

To everybody left behind,
today is launch of the journey's second leg - from Vancouver to the Rockies, after Vancouver, Victoria, and Whistler are sucked dry. More or less. If everything goes well, tonight should be Lake Louise after a long drive across BC, and tomorrow a leisurely day looking for lakes, glaciers, and mooooses. No Problemmooses, thank you.

Vancouver Downtown:



Waaah - Indigeneous Art:


A Walk on The Beach at Sunset:


... with sea foot:


Seagull:


How to go to Victoria in style:


View of Victoria Harbour:



Problem-Sealions? No, thanks.


How to get around on a 450hp 44 knots Zodiac boat, looking for whales (but no whales there, instead sea lions and sea elephants (saying sth like "grrrrrgrrrrrgrrrrbrrrrgrrr") and sea seals) - not to be covered with shame:

Canada 2006 - July 24th, 25th Vancouver

My view for some 10hrs:



But I had the Max Legroom I had paid for:


Luckily, the jetlag you can see here is down to just 1.5hrs after two nights:






Probably the order in which the BC people place their loyalties:


I am aware this is not extremely impressive, but still - this is the first wild animal I've seen here which hasn't crossed my way before:



15cm away from BZZZZT:


And finally, some (modern, and not very representative) indigeneous art - The Shape Of Frogs To Come: BLAH!