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)

Violin-Playing Robot

Okay, dammit. It's not just the banjo players that will be losing gigs. Looks like fiddlers had also better keep an eye on their rear-view mirrors.

I'm almost afraid to look at YouTube these days, lest I see an X-ray-reading robot looking back at me...

Lightning Fast Robot Hand

A friend's reaction to the following video:

I bet this thing could do wicked good banjo triplets.

No kidding. This thing could play a banjo faster than Bela Fleck, which is really saying something.

With a bit more development, it's not just musicians that this thing might put out of work -- surgeons could lose a few gigs too.

As Dr. Wes has pointed out, this thing could also have amazing benefits for the differently abled.

This robot hand would be an especially good match with the brain-computer interface described on the 8/9/09 episode of 60 minutes (the good stuff starts at the 15:00 mark).

This is great technology -- especially from the point of view of a precocious geezer who may need some of it one of these days.

Hat tip to Anita Anderson

The Samurai Journal of Radiology

Sipping from a firehose -- that's what it feels like to keep up with the medical literature these days.

Even an info nerd like myself can't keep up with all of it. However, I do have a few online tools that make my own personal information overload a lot easier to deal with.

NetNewsWire

I've used this awesome newsreader program for years. It currently grabs over 100 newsfeeds and converts them into what I like to call The Samurai Journal of Radiology™. This journal caters to my own peculiar tastes, and includes not just radiology articles, but also a fair amount of infogeek stuff and a comics section.

NetNewsWire is a Mac only program, but shares a lot of features and synchronizes with Google Reader, a non-denominational newsreader that I also use, especially on my iPhone.

These two programs do the following really, really well:

1. they insure that I will at least scan the titles of all the latest radiology articles in my field
   
2. they make it easy to read my literature at any level of granularity I desire: title only, title and abstract only, or full article
   
3. they keep track of what I've read and what I've not read
   

The main downside of NetNewsWire or Google Reader is that they make it way too easy for Type A people like me to become a newsfeed slut. Even though I've trimmed my feed list way back, I still have over 100 feeds that I somehow can't bear to delete. Sigh....

HubMed

Just about all of the radiology journals now provide RSS feeds on their websites. Radiology and the American Journal of Roentgenology also provide subspecialty feeds (such as just neuro or just musculoskeletal), keeping my reading list blissfully free of all barium articles.

However, there are some parts of my specialty that are more fascinating than others, and HubMed helps me keep up with them. Let's say that I have a special interest in one particular dysplasia: the bird-headed dwarf syndrome of Seckel. Not surprisingly, Radiology and AJR tend to have pretty spotty coverage of this rare syndrome.

However, if I type in the term "bird-headed dwarf" into HubMed's search window, it generates a special newsfeed for me on that very topic:

http://www.hubmed.org/feeds/atom.cgi?q=bird-headed%20dwarf

When I point my newsreader at this feed, it will always show me the latest 20 articles on this topic from PubMed, from all of the zillion medical journals in its database.

Very cool.

Fever

For the past week, I've been using a very cool new newsreader called Fever.

Fever, unlike conventional newsreaders, actually works better when you fill it up with a zillion newsfeeds. When you import your list of feeds into Fever, you first sort them into two piles:

1. stuff that you like to read every day
   
2. stuff that you read once in a while

Fever calls these 2 categories respectively "Kindling" and "Sparks". It then distills from them topics that are hot enough to be worth reading using the following principles:

1. if only one person writes about a topic, it's cold
   
2. if two people write about it, it's warm
   
3. if three or people more write about it, it's hot

The greater the number of posts on a topic, the hotter it is.

The downside: You'll need access to a server running Unix Apache, PHP and MySQL in order to install Fever. You don't have to be an alpha geek to get it up and running, but it doesn't hurt.

The upside: Fever has so far done a pretty good job of spotting gems that I would have otherwise missed. Well worth the $30 it cost and the few hours of time I spent configuring myserver and installing it. This alpha geek gives it two thumbs up.