Choking Game: Mum on 570News

My mum was interviewed by Jeff Allan on 570 News. Here is the interview.

 

Science vs. Religion, in a nutshell

My IEEE-EMBS Lecture

You might be wondering what IEEE and EMBS stands for.  IEEE is an international engineering association.  EMBS stands for the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, one of IEEE's many societies.  The Waterloo student EMBS chapter holds invited lectures now-and-then, and I was happy to give one of those lectures today.

I had a choice: I could do the safe thing and talk about image registration, a topic that I've published in, or I could talk about my real passion, the brain. I chose to talk about the brain. The title was "Computational Neuroscience".  The image on the right is the poster advertising the talk.

The lecture went well (from my perspective, anyway).  Addie was nice enough to lend me her kitty stuffy so that I could demonstrate what a neurophysiology experiment entails.

I was gratified to see the lecture hall fill up.  The room wasn't very big, but it felt nice to know that some people were willing to stand for an hour to hear what I had to say.

My take-home message:

Your sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories, intentions, beliefs... are all patterns of neural activity in your brain.

Don't believe me? You'll just have to go to my next lecture.

7 Billion People

October 31, 2011, is the day that UN forecasters estimate the earth's population reached 7 billion people. Man, it wasn't long ago that the population was a mere 6 billion (1999).  Heck, I can even recall 5 billion (1987). And though I don't remember it, I was 4 years old when the earth reached 4 billion (1974).




The CBC "Offbeat Math" page has some interesting ways to interpret how many people that is. One that struck me is that if we were ALL at a concert - standing room only - we'd take up half of PEI. That doesn't seem like that much to me. But if we all stood hand-in-hand, we'd form a chain 7 million km long, nine times the distance to the moon.

Finally, the web page has a video interview with Joel Cohen, a math biologist from Columbia University. He makes it clear that we are prospering on borrowed time. One of the interviewers says that growing world population is a boon to the stock markets, and a dream scenario for investment in general (I can only assume that he's playing devil's advocate, and asking what other people might be wondering). Prof. Cohen repeats his stance, that this rate of growth cannot continue and current prosperity is at the expense of future generations.

Nerd jokes

Here's one for all you mathletes.

This moment of nerdiness was inspired by a T-shirt sold by MathSoc. It had the slightly more straight-forward

That's math for ya'. Full of hidden messages. It would be fun to look for satanic messages like the credulous do when they listen to audio recordings in reverse.

Evangelical Pastafarian

Happy Halloween. Here is the costume I donned for a party over the weekend. Can you guess what I am?

Here's a hint. Though you can't see it in the pictures above, I'm actually wearing a name-tag.

That's right. I was dressed as a Pastafarian, a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Arrr matey!

Aggressive Door-to-Door Sales: National Water Heater Scam

Last night after dinner, there was a knock on our door... great, salespeople. Two young guys. One introduced himself, and said the other was a trainee. He said they were from National Home Services, and were in the neighbourhood replacing outdated rented water heaters.

We had someone similar at our door a few weeks ago, but I can't remember the company. After that encounter, I looked online and decided that I was happy with our current arrangement with Reliance Home Comfort.

That's what I said to the two guys from National... "Thanks for coming by, but we will decline."

Apparently, that wasn't sufficient to send them away. As I was closing the door, he kept talking, "But we're a Canadian company..."  I re-opened the storm door and said, "Do you even know who we rent our water heater from?"  To which he answered, "It's either Reliance or [some other company that I can't remember>]."  I retorted with, "See, you don't even know what we have. Thanks for your visit, but we will decline."

As I proceeded to close the door again, he had a stern facial expression and maintained eye contact with me. Think about it. That's highly unusual, and struck me as aggressive. At this point, I experienced a twinge of fear that these guys could possibly go beyond a sales call, and get nasty... I pictured them vandalizing my property or harassing my family.

I opened the storm door again and said, "OK, I don't want to be rude. I told you we're not interested. Thank you, and good luck."

I finally closed the door.

Try googling "national water heater". Most of the hits are warnings about scams.