Wired has a great article about some high-school kids in Arizona who won an undewater engineering contest.

One difficulty they ran into was a leak in their electronics component housing. It was a small leak, so rather than try to fix it, they went for absorption. What absorbs the best? Tampons!

When Luis lowered Stinky into the water for their run, Lorenzo prayed to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn't come up with an appropriate one. The whir of Stinky's propellers brought him back to the task at hand, extracting a water sample from a submerged container.

Yeah, so the reporter probably made the part about praying up, but the tampons were real!

Reefer Madness?

New Scientist has a bit of an article about various studies of the long-term effects of smoking cannabis at a young age. From the article: "those who had smoked cannabis three times or more before the age of 15 were much more likely to suffer symptoms of schizophrenia by the time they were 26 - they had a 10 per cent chance compared with 3 per cent for the general population".

So if any of you are under 15 and don't fancy more than tripling your chances for schizophrenia, stay off the dope! Of course, schizophrenia isn't the only problem for which cannabis use seems to be a risk factor. If you are 'at risk' of psychosis (whatever that means) and you use cannabis, your risk increases dramatically. One study found that "susceptible individuals who avoided cannabis had a 25 per cent chance of developing psychosis. Susceptible individuals who smoked it had a 50 per cent risk". So crazies, stay off the reefer!

Weather Underground

Which method would you choose?

So I didn't realize there was more than one Darkstalkers game, but I was in EB Games the other day, and noticed pre-orders for a new Darkstalkers for the PSP. I checked out the trailer, and one of the playable characters seems to be little red riding hood. Don't worry, your favorite characters will still be on hand. Oh, and it seems little red is packing some heat.

So, I don't know if any of you remember, but I posted some images of my head from an Anatomical MRI. Well, I've been working with this software called FreeSurfer to convert the slicewise images of my brain into a 3d render of my brain. The exciting (and difficult) part of this render is that it knows the difference between white matter (axons and such) and gray matter (cell bodies that do the real 'thinking'). I present you with a couple of views of my brain. (click for the larger version on a yafro page)

Bono: Rock Star? Yes. Head of the world bank?

Ack! I haven't been keeping up with rugby. A quick look at their main page shows everything is going well at 11-0, including a clean sweep of the Texas schools. But here's the big news:
Cal vs Stanford at Cal, Saturday 1:00 pm. I may have another obligation, but if things go according to plan, I'll be there, and I hope you will too.

If you don't know The Perry Bible Fellowship you might want to check it out. Funny. Sick. Maybe not something to peruse at work. I expect at least one of you (I won't say who) probably has at least seen this stuff before.

A bit about what the hell I do at my job:

I'm in charge of a group of 4 undergraduate students (we'll call them my minions) and we're working on a research project. We had our first meeting yesterday, and it went very well. Our project has to do with glare and a glare sensitivity test. As you may surmise from reading that page, there are no well-accepted tests for glare sensitivity in the clinical setting. We think we are on the way to getting something that would work for a clinic.

So what? Of course, that's the question. Well, one group of people who would really like to see an effective glare test are prospective LASIK patients. Some LASIK patients have complained of glare after having the surgery. This test would answer questions like "what are the chances I'd have glare problems?" and "how bad might it be?" I would certainly want to know the answers to those questions before doing LASIK.