All Clear

Okey, doke. Lesion out and the margins are clear. The dermatopathology fellow was kind enough to give me a tour of my biopsy. It turns out that one *can* use an iPhone for photomicroscopy as long as one's expectations aren't too high.


Here is a chunk of my normal skin at medium power. I took this by just holding my iPhone 3GS up to the microscope's eyepiece. By no means diagnostic, but good enough for blogging purposes.

Once they stitch me up, I'll head over to my office and work on ARRS and AUR abstracts like a crazed ferret for the rest of the afternoon.

The Smell of Long Pig in the Morning

Turns out I'm live-blogging my outpatient surgery today via my iPhone.


I'm having a minor skin lesion removed today in our university's rather slick dermatology outpatient surgery center. The drill here is:

1. Remove the lesion
2. Take a 45 minute break while a dermatopathologist processes and analyzes the tissue.
3. Repeat until the margins of the lesion are clear.

I'm grateful for this built-in break. I came to my appointment NPO (ate nothing after midnight) and I'm hungry.

To make matters worse, the electrocautery unit they use to stop the minor bleeding creates a smell that is disturbingly similar to barbequed pork.

I used my first break to run to the espresso stand next door for a bite. There I spotted a "bacon, sausage, egg and cheese, French toast bagel sandwich" for sale. No shit. However, like a car wreck you can't turn away from, I just couldn't stop looking at it. OK, OK, I bought the damned thing.

However, the unwillingly tasty scent of sizzling long pig was still fresh in my nostrils. Fresh enough, that when the espresso lady asked: "Can I heat that up for you?", I had to say,

"Uhhhh… No!"

A Pilingual Month for Me

Blogging has taken a backseat this month to computer programming. Most of the words I've written over the past month have been in Ruby, PHP or SQL, with English way back in 4th place. I've therefore appropriated Douglas Hofstadter's neologism "pilingual" to title this post.

Besides my usual penchant for screwing around with cool technology, my latest programming has been aimed at several potential papers for the 2010 ARRS and AUR meetings, whose abstract deadlines loom next week.

Blogging here will thus continue to be lean until all abstracts have been safely excreted.

Rap ID Advice for H1N1

If you get H1N1 influenza or any other infectious disease (ID) this year, chances are really, really good that it won't be from a radiologist. If you are auscultated, touched or sneezed upon by a physician, we're not the 'droids you're looking for.

However, there are a lot of other major disease vectors out there to contend with, i.e., your friends and family and co-workers. To protect yourself from them, here are a few helpful hints from Dr. John D. Clarke, medical director of Long Island Railroad:





HT to Medgadget

Maybe There is Hope for Humans, After All

I recently posted about a very cool high speed robotic hand that could beat most humans in a finger race.

However, I was somewhat comforted today when I ran across this video of the real thing, playing guitar at speeds I would not have believed possible.

Rest easy, John Henry -- we're still ahead of the steam drills at a few things.


World Record Guitar Speed 2008 Tiago Della Vega

The Chronophage: a Clock That Eats Time

What a wonderful device...

(thanks to Suture for a Living)