Digital Diary of Ben Schwartz

A friend from VoiceLab is in the Harvard Glee Club, so I went to their concert tonight, together with the Radcliffe Choral Society and with guests the Spelman College Glee Club.

The performances were all impressive, and Spelman’s particularly so. They had incredible precision, a beautiful sound, and sang entirely from memory, which left their hands free to do very silly choreography.

The repertoire, for all the groups, was basically incomprehensible to me. I don’t know the first thing about art music, and the program was full of atonal, arrhythmic arrangements in foreign languages. I also didn’t have a program (or maybe I was sitting on it), so even when they were singing in English I often couldn’t tell what they were saying. I have yet to develop the skill of deciphering the words from these fugal arrangements.

One moment stands out. The Glee Club was singing “When David Heard”, and I could figure out maybe half of the words, despite the heavily exaggerated consonants. I closed my eyes, to try to help separate out the parts. The music immediately separated, but not into the voice parts. Instead I heard two very distinct layers. One was the chords of the piece, in a flowing block on a vague syllable. The other was a layer of consonants like percussion, sometimes swooping back and forth across the stage, sometimes in a random patter. It was beautiful.

I did my first animal experiment today, on a rabbit. This is a bit of an overstatement, in two ways. First, I never touched the rabbit. One of the lab technicians is the designated animal handler, and he was in charge of the sedated rabbit.

It’s also an overstatement because the experiment plan was essentially: “look at a rabbit”. Specifically, we looked at it in ultrasound at about 5 MHz. We made about 1.7 GB of data, which I’m still copying over so I can start analyzing it. I’m trying to see what the breathing motion looks like in ultrasound, and whether we can see something that looks like liver motion.

It was an odd experience. Also, rabbits are big.

At the bus stop today, a gray-haired policeman rolled up in his Crown Vic and started talking politely to tall thin homeless man. The man sounded a bit deranged, or maybe just intoxicated, but calm. The officer seemed to know him, and I heard exchanges like

Officer: Do you want to go to the hospital? I can get you a ride to the hospital. Why don’t I do that. [pulls out police radio and calls in a wagon]
Man: I don’t… umm…

and

Man: [obscenities]
Officer: Hey. Didn’t you used to have some self-respect? Back when you were in the Navy, didn’t you used to have some self-respect? Not like now.
Man: The Coast Guard.
Officer: OK, the Coast Guard.
Man: [obscenities]

After a few minutes the paddywagon arrived, along with two more officers, and the man was pushed in. He did not seem eager to go, but he went.

There was another homeless person at the bus stop, and the first officer walked up to him and asked him his name, then relayed it to the others.

Others: Should we pick him up?
Officer: Naw, he’s just sleepin’

Today I stayed in my pajamas and did nothing. I wrote a few hundred lines of C to do something complicated and not terribly important. I ate my roommate’s chocolate chip pancakes for lunch.

February is a good month for this.

Bicycle got another flat tire while sitting in my bedroom. Mysterious. Possibly an indication that I am doing something wrong.

This town takes Presidents’ Day way more seriously than I remembered. I biked to work in the middle of rush hour, and yet the roads were completely unclogged. The bike racks were empty at work, and I’m virtually the only one in the lab.

My Monday morning meeting was canceled, which is kind of too bad, since I was all psyched to announce that I have my first complete prototype of my motion correction system. Of course, completion is not so sharply defined, but I have now demonstrated using one MRI+US dataset to correlate ultrasound echo patterns with geometrical distortion information, reducing this to a simple lookup table, and then using that table to correct the motion of a second MRI data set. The process might even be fast enough to work in real time.

It’s more proof of concept than prototype, but it’s working.

For the fourth time in four years, my car got towed. The first time it was because I was parked in a (incorrectly marked) permit-only zone. They eventually determined that they were at fault, and rescinded the fine, but not the towing fee. The second and third time, it was because of street cleaning.

There’s no street cleaning in February, and though there was a “snow emergency” on Wednesday I was sure I was safely parked in a non-snow-emergency zone. Unfortunately, after I parked, someone put up a sign marking the spot as a temporary loading zone. Cambridge law allows you to put up such a sign with 24 hours notice indicating that you intend to park a moving van there. My car was towed, and ticketed, for being parked in a temporary loading zone. It will cost me $130 in total.

With sufficient diligence, one can avoid street cleaning fines by moving one’s car twice a month, but the only sure way to avoid being towed from a temporary loading zone is to check my parking space every single day. For car commuters this isn’t an issue, but I routinely leave my car parked for weeks at a time because I commute by bicycle. The system favors those who cause traffic and pollution. There ain’t no justice.

So basically, the only way to avoid the expense and inconvenience of towing is to add another item to my morning routine. That’s what I intend to do, even though it’s going to cost me either sleep or time at work.

One day, maybe I will have a parking space to call my own.

Not much changing in my life this week. Rehearsal tonight was nice; we sang some new songs that are going to be fun. We’re singing at some Valentine’s Day thing at Faneuil Hall on Saturday at noon.

Otherwise not much to report.