Extreme Sheepherding

Awesome use of sheep-as-pixels from Wales.

If I had had access to sheep-sized LED suits while growing up on a West Texas ranch, this is probably the sort of thing my friends and I would have done in the evenings.

Now that I dwell far away from the land of sheep and Mensa-smart border collies, I'd have to find some alternative animal model. Hmmm... I wonder how this would work with medical students and radiology residents...

How Do You Hide a Dollar From A Radiologist?

Financial security tips from Movin' Meat:

How do you hide a dollar from a radiologist?

Pin it to the patient.

How do you hide a dollar from a surgeon?

Put it in a textbook.

How do you hide a dollar from an internist?

Put it under a surgical dressing.

How do you hide a dollar from a plastic surgeon?

Ah, that's a trick question: there is no way to hide a dollar from a plastic surgeon!

But wait, there's more!

To find out several ways to hide a dollar from an ER doc, check out the comments on the original post. My favorite is the suggestion by scalpel...

Kindle 2: Some Features Better Than Reality

Usability pundit Jakob Nielsen’s take on the Kindle 2 and the Kindle iPhone app:

11 years ago, I wrote that electronic books were a bad idea. Has Kindle 2 changed my mind? Yes. The two factors that convinced me were (a) equal-to-print readability and (b) multi-device integration.

(via Daring Fireball)

CPR Will Never Be Quite the Same for Me Again

The latest issue of Dinosaur Comics has a handy mnemonic for getting your chest compression rate just right...



(via Dave Goldman)

Lots of Kindle News Lately

There has been a torrent of news lately on Amazon's Kindle, and I've had little time to write about it. For those who have been living in a cave, here's a quick summary and a few links.

Kindle 2

David Pogue has a favorable review of the Kindle 2. The title of his post sums it up pretty well: "Good Before, Better Now".

For comparison, he also recently reviewed the Sony PRS-700 e-book reader. He liked some of the design features, but gives the nod to the Kindle because of its wireless connection and Amazon's much larger collection of e-books.

I now have a Kindle 2, and will blog later about my experience with it, particularly with respect to how it does with displaying medical images (short version: improved, but still not optimal).

Kindle 2 text-to-speech controversy

One of the coolest features of the Kindle 2 -- built-in text-to-speech conversion -- has excited a bit of controversy among members of the Author's Guild. AG president Roy Blount wrote a recent opinion piece expressing the AG's point of view. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to an author wanting control of one's intellectual property. On the other hand, while the Kindle's computer voice is nice, it's no Jim Dale. Some books are at their best when read by someone as compelling as Mr. Dale; others are just fine read by a Kindle. There's a part of me that feels "Dude, if your performance can be replaced by a Kindle, you deserve to be."

In any event, it looks like Amazon will leave it up to authors and publishers as to whether the text-to-speech function is enabled on a given work on a case-by-case basis.

Kindle App for iPhone

The biggest news, though, is that Amazon just released a free reader application for the iPhone. This app lets one read any book in the Kindle library without having to buy a Kindle.

This is huge.

I've had a Kindle reader for over a year now, and read from it daily. However, the iPhone is always in my pocket, and follows me places that the Kindle never will. In general, the app works really, really well, with only minor syncing bugs.

I'll give a more in depth report on the iPhone app in later post, particularly on how it handles gray scale images (short version: great!).

Several pundits (1, 2) have pointed out that by releasing the iPhone app, Amazon is giving away the razor but hoping to make a zillion dollars selling razor blades. I agree. No one outside Amazon really knows how many Kindles have so far been sold (possibly up to 500,000). However, this number is dwarfed by the millions of iPhone now out there. In one swell foop and with minimal marginal cost, Amazon has multiplied its potential customer base for books manyfold. Brilliant.

I also enjoyed a recent review of the Kindle iPhone app by Glenn Fleishman of TidBITS.

Weird X-rays

A friend sent me a link to some weird X-rays on the Asylum site.

Weird, for sure. Looks like some of the stuff we see in our emergency room.

A bonus story at the same link tells of a Chilean man who carried his stash in form of a cast made entirely out of cocaine covering his own broken leg.

Wow. Gotta give him some points for imagination, if not for intelligence.

I've Been Programming

I haven't posted much lately, mostly because I've been tightly focused on a computer programming project. Let's just say that programming is easily as jealous a consort of one's time as blogging.

I've programmed personal computers ever since my first Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I back in 1976. I got my first Apple II a year later, and have stayed in the Apple fold ever since. Since 1976, I've programmed in Basic, Fortran, assembly language, several machine languages, Pascal, Python, S, R, C, Perl and a few others.

For the past few years, I've been closely eyeing Ruby, a relatively new language, but haven't had the right incentive to dive into it. However, there's nothing like building a cool, new project to learn a new language.

I've spent much of my academic time in the past two weeks writing a web-based text-to-speech application in Ruby. My goal: type in the volume, issue and page number of some article in a major radiology journal and get back an .mp3 version of that article, read by a fairly decent computerized voice.

It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be, even with a few years of web-apps under my belt. Ruby is a fine language, with a fine library of built-in tools, making it easy to scrape a whole web page with just a few lines of Ruby code. For example, the following code is all that's necessary to grab a whole article from the American Journal of Roentgenology and assign it to the variable ajr_html:

urlRaw = "http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/"
   + ajrVolume +"/" + ajrIssue + "/" + ajrPage
ajr_url = open(urlRaw)
ajr_html = ajr_url.read

I have recently become a big fan of text-to-speech conversion. In December, I discovered a new Mac program called Textcast. Since then, I've used Textcast to make one or two hundred podcasts for my iPhone from NY Times articles and various blogs I follow. These have been a major defense against boredom during my work commutes -- sort of like having an NPR station where all the stories are interesting.

The only issue I have with Textcast is that it is optimized only for pages from Safari or NetNewsWire. If I want to use it to grab and convert an article from AJR or Radiology, I need to first do some serious hand-scrubbing of the text from their websites before I can feed it into Textcast. I got pretty tired of this after laundering a few articles by hand. My new Ruby script takes virtually all of the drudgery out of this process.

Now that I've refined my program into a reasonably stable version, I've asked several of my residents, fellows and fellow faculty to do some alpha testing. Once I get their feedback, I'll write it up for one of our radiology journals. Might as well get some academic mileage out of it.