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.