Monthly Archives: January 2010

You’ve probably heard that Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. I must have memorized it in middle school during my NASA phase. From Wikipedia, I can see that Sally Ride flew on STS-7, the seventh shuttle mission, … Continue reading →

I just got my letter of acceptance to ISMRM 2010, so hopefully I’ll be going to Stockholm in May. I was accepted for a “Multimedia Electronic Poster”, which is a bit mysterious to me. It seems to involve a half-hour … Continue reading →

Yesterday I attended Crisis Camp Boston, a loosely organized mixture of aid workers, dreamers, and software engineers. The centerpiece of the effort seemed to be haiti.ushahidi.com, which is a sort of centralized emergency response dispatch. I think of it as … Continue reading →

This weekend was the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. I hunted for Codex, like last year. We didn’t win, but you don’t need to win to enjoy mystery hunt. My favorite puzzle, and the one to which I contributed most, was … Continue reading →

We had a party on the last night of the conference, and afterward I picked another cardinal direction in which to wander. I walked south along Main St., and finally found the interesting part of the city. I walked through … Continue reading →

I walked straight North, last night, from hotel to the State Capitol Building, located at the highest point in the city. Like the temple, the capitol is built from immaculate white stone and lit brightly every night. I briefly wondered … Continue reading →

I made some time last night to wander around Salt Lake. It’s hard to get lost in this city, at least in the central part, because the streets are a widely spaced cartesian grid with its origin at the Mormon … Continue reading →

The conference is at the City Center Marriott in Salt Lake City. We were essentially required to rent rooms here, due to the terms of the conference contract. No one complained, of course, because the grant pays for the whole … Continue reading →

Against the stern warnings of some saner portion of my psyche, I packed everything up last night and headed for Central Square around 11:30 PM. I bought some cookies and gum at CVS, then caught the Red Line inbound around … Continue reading →

Last night I finished Larry Niven’s Ringworld, which I had started on New Year’s Day at 3:03 AM. It’s an incredible work of hard SF, astonishing both in its attention to detail and immense scale. The book is, and deserves … Continue reading →