Blessed by the Potato

People don’t like to be wrong. I don’t like to be wrong — on the one hand I’m doing all this extra schooling so I can be Mr. Dr. Smarty-pants and be wrong less often, but on the other hand I’m a scientist and science is all about being told you’re wrong and learning from that. Occasionally the social situation crops up where a friend is doing something that I think might be, you know, not perfect, and I really don’t seem to handle telling them that very well. I nearly lost a good friend over something like this “Dude, guess what, I’m doing X.” “Man, it’s your life, do what you want… but I think that’s not going to work out the way you think it will. Seriously, rethink X.” “You’re a rotten friend, I’m not talking to you for a year.” “…but I was right…”

While I can be a bit of a loner, Dottie, a rebel, I do have enough of a clue to just bite my tongue when there’s nothing that can be done even if I am right. For example, I currently think this is a fairly terrible time to go off and buy a house, in a financial sense, yet a few friends and acquaintances have done it anyway, and I didn’t find out sometimes until the housewarming party. By that point there’s obviously nothing to be done. Now I just found out another set of friends is out there looking for a house, and I don’t know what to say, how much caution to give them. So far, I’ve just said “oh, you might want to look into maybe waiting or at least offering below asking — the days of bidding wars seem to be over…” The decision to get a house in particular can be a very emotional one, doubly so if you’ve just spawned and need more space for the rapidly growing F1. I really don’t want to be seen as the one shattering “the dream” with my damned Vulcan logic. Simply keeping my mouth shut to avoid an awkward situation isn’t really an option for me — they’re my friends. And isn’t putting your foot in your mouth in the best-intentioned way what friendship is all about? So how do you go about telling people they’re wrong?

…in person, that is. Of course here in the blogosphere you can just call people to the mat, pull out charts and references, and just generally make an arrogant intellectual ass of yourself :)

[Admin aside: I’ve stepped up my posting schedule the last few days as you may have noticed, and now I’m going to take the long weekend off. Rest those eyes!]

I really, really liked The Dark Knight. If you want a gritty superhero movie, it really doesn’t get any better. On some level I did miss the Joker flourishes: this Joker was very utilitarian, with detonators that were little more than circuit boards with keys, bombs that were just drums of gasoline with car batteries and TNT, grenades that were right off the shelf. There were no smiley faces, no canned laughter… but all in all, a really excellent movie in my opinion. I don’t know what else to say since just about every other review has already sung the Dark Knight’s praises; I can’t really add to that.

Spoiler warning!

Orson Scott Card also liked it, but I have to wonder if maybe one of us is remembering the movie wrong or if they sent a different version to Canada.

“There are two key moments in the film where the Joker poses terrible choices. First is the time when he puts Batman’s true love, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and her new love, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), in another [sic]. Both are tied up, surrounded by explosives. Batman has just enough time to save one of them, but not both.

We are deliberately not told — perhaps even misled — about which one Batman is rushing to save. It is assumed — because of the romantic conventions of American movies and comic books and western culture — that he will save the girl.

But it has been established that Batman believes that Harvey Dent is a true hero, vital to the survival of Gotham City as a civil society. So his choice is, at least in his mind, between saving the city and saving the love of his life.

He chooses the city.

And this is the morally right choice. It is exactly the choice that parents make when they send their children off to war, or into the police force or the fire department. If anything, the love of parents for children is greater than the love mates have for each other. Yet, when the needs of the overall society — the city, the nation — require it, parents make the choice to permit it, even to honor and embrace letting their children go into harm’s way. “

You know, that’s a lovely analysis and all… but as I remember it, we were told that Batman was going to save Rachel. He grumbled to Gordon “Rachel” and Gordon yelled to the other cops “We’ve got Dent!” and then Batman was surprised to find Harvey Dent at the building he arrived at. It was this switcheroo that added to the tension for the boat scene — would the Joker switch the detonators again, so that if the citizens did try to blow up the criminals, they’d just end up sinking themselves? The switch was part of the Joker’s whole “break the rules” thing. Even when the rules are terrible (kill this dude, or I blow up a hospital; choose which one dies), people can get used to rules, to not panic as much even though it may cost them their life one day. So the Joker sets up his terrible choices and devious scenarios, and then breaks the rules anyway. He makes Batman choose between Harvey and Rachel, but switches the addresses. He threatens to blow up a hospital unless a lawyer is killed — but even though the guy wasn’t killed, it sure looked to me like he was going to blow it up anyway, since at no point did we see him check to see if the deed was done. He warned people not to take the bridges or the tunnels, but it was the ferries that were rigged to blow.

“If I were to stay up all night working on a paper, and drank 10 cans of coke (3 full strength, 7 Coke Zeros) to keep me going, would that amount of sleep deprivation and caffeine fuck me up?”

Yes. You would start bleeding from the nose around 7 am. Go to bed.

“Follow-up: at what point does one become too old for this shit?”

28.

Though I don’t write with a mind to what people might want to read and just write/rant about whatever happens to interest me at the time, I always kind of fancied having people read what I say. I know that I really only have about 3.5 readers (the half is the guy who keeps checking in every few weeks just to say “TLDR”), and suddenly I think that might be a good thing.

Right now I’m struggling, really struggling, to finish writing a paper. I like science, I like what I do (err… mostly), and I love the fact that I’m advancing knowledge, possibly standing on the forefront of a major revolution in medical care. Of course, all my work is really for naught if I can’t share it with the world, which is where the publishing process comes into play. Publishing my work and contributing to the body of knowledge of the human race is perhaps the coolest thing I will ever do, but I also find the whole idea patently terrifying. This is not a small or friendly audience I’m trying to address, and once the paper is out of my hands there’s very little I can do to affect changes if a mistake slips through. Just thinking about what potential reviewers might find to criticize locks my brain up in a kind of writer’s paralysis; stage fright of the written word. When I don’t really care what people think when they read my writing, when everything is at least psydoanonymous, and particularly when I can play it fast and loose with the references (how I hate referencing), I can hammer out prodigious word counts. Most of my blog posts go up almost as fast as I can type them out, often without any proof reading even — a few thousand words a night is not uncommon (this post was hammered out in like 20 minutes and has 373 words). When it’s for a serious publication, suddenly I lock up and my output drops to something like 50 words/day average. I just churn the keyboard, writing and re-writing and deleting and staring and thinking and worrying.

This blog is not popular. I think that might be a good thing, or else it might not exist at all.

We’re getting a new MRI unit here at work (actually, an MRI-PET-EEG hybrid imaging system). To make room for it, our old head-only scanner got the boot.

An MRI has a very strong static magnetic field (in the case of this scanner, 3 Tesla), about 60,000 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field (the magnetic field that lets you navigate with a compass). This field is on all the time (no matter how much TV and movie writers want to flip it on and off for plot gimicky reasons), due to a loop of current running through some superconductors (a superconducting electromagnet). To keep the superconductors superconducting, they are bathed in liquid Helium. To keep the liquid Helium from boiling off too quickly, it is in turn bathed in liquid Nitrogen (liquid Nitrogen is warmer than liquid Helium, but the difference is a lot smaller than the difference between liquid Helium and air, so the boil-off happens much slower, and liquid Nitrogen is much cheaper to boot, so it’s easier to keep topping up a large liquid Nitrogen buffer surrounding a small liquid Helium bath than to just keep toping up the smaller liquid Helium bath).

When something happens and we need to ramp down the field in the magnet, we “quench” it, venting the Helium and Nitrogen outside, letting the superconductors warm up, and then the magnetic field will come down as the current loop burns itself out (as heat due to the now non-zero resistance in the coil, and also by shunting the current away). Quenching is a very rare event, because it usually happens only when something bad happens and someone hits the emergency quench button (and we try really hard not to hit that button, as it can take a few weeks to get the MRI working again afterwards), or when a scanner has to be taken down to be moved. So our scanner move let us witness one of these rare events (though when I say “us” I don’t include myself, since I unfortunately forgot and didn’t show up to watch it in person, but I got the picture!). It’s just amazing to see that huge plume of condensation appear outside the vent — the now-boiled and thus gaseous Helium and Nitrogen are so cold that they condense not only the water vapour, but also the CO2 and Oxygen right out of the air.

A bike thief was captured by the UWO police this week, and they gave a few tips about bicycle security in the article describing it. One tip was to take your seat with you if you have a quick-release seat. This is something I’ve seen a number of people do and always wondered about. Why do it? I would think by now with my history I should know that thieves are retarded and random, but do people really steal the seats off bikes? Is there a big second-hand market for bike seats? Is it a vandalism thing? Or is it to make it more difficult for a thief to ride off with your bike if they do try to steal it?

Not too long ago, there was a considerable political stink raised when the NRU in Chalk River went down for maintenance and was found to not have the proper emergency power supplies, etc., in place. The outage caused a significant ripple in the medical community, as the NRU provides about half of the Tc-99m used in the world, the most commonly used isotope in nuclear medicine. Indeed, it was pressure from patients and the health care community that made the government take the incredible step of over-ruling the nuclear safety watchdog.

The restart and upgrades to the NRU are really just stop-gap measures though: that reactor is a bit of a dinosaur, and due for replacement. Long in the works, the twin MAPLE reactors were supposed to be that replacement, but recently it was announced that their continued development was going to be cancelled. They had been almost completed, when it was found that their reaction characteristics were not as expected, and years of tinkering and experimenting were not able to find or fix the design flaw. For now, things will muddle on: the NRU has a license to operate until 2011 and can probably continue operating for a few years beyond that.

But the simple fact remains that Canada has no long-term plan for the supply of isotopes for nuclear medicine. And that means, essentially, that half the world doesn’t have a long-term plan for medical isotopes. One thing we can say for certain is that nuclear medicine is about to become a whole lot more expensive. All along, the costs of the NRU have not, AFAIK, been passed on to customers. Money was not being collected to fund the construction of MAPLE reactors. The Canadian government was essentially subsidizing the cost of nuclear medicine the world over. I’m all for subsidizing it in Canada, don’t get me wrong, but my understanding is that our exports of nuclear material did not fully recover the true costs (granted, including money sunk into research in the 50’s/60’s).

An alternative option for many (but not all) present nuclear medicine scans is the use of PET. PET is not currently paid for by OHIP, largely because it is seen as too expensive, even though it offers advantages for some types of imaging (e.g.: cancer). However, that cost disadvantage is partly artificial: a PET scanner requires a ~$10 Million cyclotron facility within about 2 hours of driving distance, which adds up to a fair number of cyclotrons needed across the province. However, traditional nuclear medicine requires a billion dollar+ reactor, which just happens to be subsidized by the Canadian government.

It’s hard to say at this point what the future will hold for nuclear medicine. Maybe it will get more expensive, as a private group (or another country, like the US) builds a reactor to replace the NRU, and tries to run it at a profit. Maybe it will change quite rapidly over to PET imaging if the end of the NRU is seen with no replacement in sight. Or perhaps nuclear medicine will go away, except for a small number of truly needy cases who might warrant bringing isotopes across the Atlantic.

Well, I mentioned that a distribution cut was priced into QSR.UN, and now that their Q2 results have been released that’s indeed what has happened. The cut was towards the steeper end of what I figured, down to $0.60/year going forward (5 cents per month), and 90 cents for 2008 (including the 63 cents already paid for the year) even that is still at about a 90% payout ratio, so the cashflow looks to be managed. The stock jumped ~5% on the news, but closed up just 2% after a fall in the last minute or two of trading. At $3.50, that’s still a yield of 17%, and I think it will probably move up over the next few days on the news, and my new price target is $4 (going to a yield of 15%). I’m somewhat tempted to buy more, especially if it stays down at $3.50 tomorrow. It would be over-concentrating in a mediocre company to an uncomfortable degree, but I think it could possibly jump 10% or more in a few days as the news percolates out — and if not, I can live with a 17% yield; the question being of course, how sustainable that will be going into the future.

There are some big questions raised here. The world does not look to be ending for Priszm, and the fundamentals, from what I see, indicate that it is a value at this price. However, there is an issue of trust and faith in the management raised now. Just a few months ago they were fairly bullish in raising their distributions back up to $1.20/year — to a level that was immediately recognized by the analysts as being unsustainable. Then they cut it down, to about a 50% payout, far beyond what the analysts were calling for and what the cash flow would dictate, surprising investors. They over-promised, and under-delivered.

We’ll see what the analysts have to say in the morning.

I just got back from seeing Hellboy II, and we had a terrible time. Granted, part of that was not the movie’s fault: my pop was warm and flat, with no ice. Granted, I occasionally order it with no ice so it’s sweeter and doesn’t hurt my teeth, but then it’s usually at least starting cold or at least cool. This was like body temperature. Ick. The popcorn also wasn’t very good, and the theatre’s A/C didn’t quite seem up to the task of a Batman opening weekend — oh, and of course, we had actually gone to see Batman, but even 2 hours before the show they were sold out. D’oh.

So starting off in a foul mood, Hellboy II didn’t really serve as the fun-filled action pick-me-up we were hoping for. It just dragged. And I like good pacing and long movies. Normally, I’d try to do a full review, try to find the good bits, what could be built upon for a director’s cut, but Wayfare came out of it saying “that was the second worst movie I’ve ever seen” so I don’t really feel the need to even try for this one. There were parts, a number of parts, where I was bored. The effects were good, the acting was good, the cinematography was ok, the dialog was not terrible — but it just never came together. It wasn’t trainwreck bad, it was just… empty.

Don’t bother with it — if Batman’s sold out, try Wall-E or go home.

Edit: Ok, I’ve been talking with a few people who did like Hellboy II, so here’s a bit more about what I didn’t like. First up, it was visually stunning, I’ve got to give it that. The creature design was something else. But nothing that happened really ever seemed to matter. Right at the beginning, there was the bit about “what happens if someone does challenge the crown?” and we knew as soon as we saw Nuala, that that’s what would happen (it was a surprise that Hellboy himself ended up being of royal blood and challenging, but that was a strange, minor twist that just added a fight sequence, and didn’t really break the spell of predetermination for me). Once we figured out that she and her brother shared some crazy link, her suicide also became pretty obvious. But in a more general way, in almost every scene, nothing seemed to really matter. The guys in the suits got eaten alive right at the beginning, and Hellboy and crew just didn’t seem to care. At all. They found a troll market full of all kinds of weird creatures, and it was just like “whatever”. Perhaps they needed someone in the role of “outsider” to help the audience relate to the strangeness on screen, another John Myers. The outsider is often little more than a gimmick, but unfortunately they just weren’t able to get any kind of gravity into their situations as it was. Even when fighting the tree-god whilst holding the baby, Hellboy was all like “hey, relax, I do this every day” — there was no sense of peril, no weight to the action. The most human, meaningful scene seemed to be the drunken karaoke one, the one where the characters seemed to be most life-like and actually cared about what was happening. It was at that point where I sort of said “ok, this is some bullshit right here, that this cheesy scene that should be the best one yet, when it should be the first one up for the cutting-room floor if the running time needed to be shortened.” Not that it matters in an action movie, but there was also zero chemistry between big Red and Liz. She spent almost the whole movie being angry and sullen with him, not exactly endearing.

Well, Dr. Horrible Part 3 has been posted. It’s only 15 minutes, go watch it if you haven’t yet, then come on back.

Spoiler warning!

So, Dr. Horrible Part 1 and 2 were I think the best thing ever to come out of Joss Whedon’s brain. Better, for that brief 25 minutes, than even Firefly. I’ve watched each one about 20 times, and everything is just perfect: NPH’s facial ticks, that empty look in his face when he is first asked about Penny, the picture taken through the bushes, it’s just amazing. The songs are catchy and clever, and I was humming or singing them in my head for days afterwards. And there’s a great balance between the musical comedy aspects and the regular acting parts — which were incredibly well done. In just a few minutes of screen time there seems to be real depth to the characterization of Moist, Dr. Horrible, and Penny. Plus it was so incredibly true-to-life (slightly exaggerated of course, but it’s one of the best portrayals of a hopelessly romantic mad scientist I’ve ever seen).

The third and final part I felt was kind of a let-down today. It started off pretty strong, with Captain Hammer being such an arrogant tool that he drove Penny off, which is how I saw this part progressing in my mind. I really liked the very brief part with Penny in the laundromat with two frozen yogurts (what a crazy random happenstance!). But then they put a twist on it and went in another direction completely. Twists and going in a different direction is ok, just to get that out there, but they turned it from a musical comedy into a musical tragedy, which really didn’t seem to fit the theme and feel of the first two parts (ok, not fitting the theme of the first two parts makes the twist more effective when it comes, but it doesn’t bring to a satisfactory ending the story that I’ve practically memorized in the first two parts). Plus the third part seemed to have a lot more singing and a lot less cutsey, clever acting parts in-between. Again, not necessarily a bad thing in general, but I didn’t find the songs as good or as catchy. I might still be singing “with my freeze-ray I will stop…” or “evil on the rise” or “it’s a brand new day” in the shower for the next few weeks, but I don’t think “So they say”, “Everyone’s a hero”, “You’re slipping”, or “Dr. Horrible is here” will get much play, so to say.

I’d prefer a different ending, but nonetheless, it’s the best super-villain musical comedy out there, so I’m going to buy it on DVD once that becomes an option.