What's with all the Canadian optical engineers? I worked AV for a big SPIE conference here in San Diego this week, and the bulk of what I did was a section called "The Physics of Medical Imaging". And every third presenter was Canadian. The University of Western Ontario, U. of Saskatchewan, U. of Waterloo, U. of Toronto, Anrad Corp (Canadian), Princess Margaret Hospital (in Canada), U. of Toronto/Sunnybrook (the same as U. of Toronto?)... Is our good natured, Baby-Huey-of-a-neighbor to the north trying to corner the medical imaging market? (Sorry, that should have been "neighbour".) Is this an evil Commonwealthian conspiracy? Who knows? All that's certain is nobody pronounces "mammography" like a Canadian. I also noticed that European imaging engineers -- for whom English is clearly a second language -- tend to say "micrometer" instead of "micron", and they like to emphasize things with exclamation points in Powerpoint. A German guy had a slide that said something like this:

{sigma}({delta}s/s)^2 Non-linearity matric!

I have to admit, I'm jealous of someone who gets that excited about a non-linearity matric. Also good was the Dutch guy (or maybe the same German guy) with a slide to the effect of

Gain variations from pixel to pixel caused by underfill agent -- correctable!

And this one (again, probably the same guy, or maybe one basic European with several disguises):

Slice/Channel crosstalk
[graph] [graph]
Good match between simulation and experiment!!!

Three. Excellent. It's probably good that the conference ended. I was starting to become hypnotized by the jargon. I think if I'd listened to just one more paper about phase-contrast tomography or n-i-p-SiNx / p-i-n-SiNx x-ray image detectors or amorphous selenium or detective quantum efficiency or digital fluoroscopy, I probably would have snapped and applied at the Jacobs School of Eng. I still might. I mean, if I don't perfect fast tomosynthesis for lung cancer detection using the SBDX geometry, who will? Some guy named Fahrig will. And I'll be screwed.

Forget the politics. This is just a crappy, crappy Flash animation. Plain and simple. I'd assume it was a parody, but for the source.

Edmonton in the news! According to Yahoo News, the SWAT team was dispatched today to rescue an abducted woman, but it turned out to be part of a wierd abduction fetish fantasy role-playing game between her and her kidnapping boyfriend. The police complained that "It wasn't so funny for us because we burned up a lot of taxpayers' money dealing with this." I'm beginning to see Edmonton's true colors: a city that mobilized upwards of thirty police officers to patrol crowds and parades when the national Gray Cup football game was held here a few months ago. A city that instantly dispatches officers just because all evidence indicates that a woman is in mortal danger. As an American, I must ask: even if these "effective police strategies" are saving lives, and even if the city is faced with the threats of brutal gang attacks and a serial killer who abducts women from off the streets, is it really worth annoying a non-victim? If this were the US then the "abduction" would already be an episode of Cold Case Files.

The wisdom of scarcity: I applied for a resources grant to get my new chip design fabricated. Evidently requests were made for for almost 3 times the available fabrication resources in the upcoming run. Their rationing strategy is interesting: I have been granted space, but my grant is 40% less than requested. On the basis of a few paragraphs describing my project, they apparently concluded that I should be able to do it much smaller. I guess they missed the paragraph about how this was going to be the first decoder large enough for real applications. My granted space is just over half the minimum project size for the US fabrication service. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this tiny space except make another stupid small decoder that won't demonstrate anything new.