Author Archives: Ben

I spent the afternoon at Commercializing Science, a course offered by Harvard Business School. In the early afternoon there was an introductory session for cross-registrants from other Harvard schools, and then later was the first section. The course is remarkable, … Continue reading →

I got a tour, this afternoon, of Langer Lab at MIT. (Labs with multiple Principal Investigators are often given descriptive names (like mine, the Focused Ultrasound Lab), but labs with a single lead professor like Bob Langer are often named … Continue reading →

So I upgraded WordPress to 3.0, and it broke the theme, resulting in a blank blog. I clicked around for a while in the admin interface and eventually activated the new default theme. It looked very nice, not least because … Continue reading →

I finished the Siemens pulse programming course today. Everyone who signed up received a very generic looking Certificate of Achievement for having “successfully completed training for IDEA Sequence Programming: Pulse Sequence Design Philosophy; Real Time Event Programming; Testing Software Utilization; … Continue reading →

I had to get in by 8:30 this morning for the Siemens course, so there was no time for the bus. That left bicycling … through a rainstorm the likes of which I haven’t seen since vacationing with my parents … Continue reading →

I’m spending this week at an on-site training course led by an engineer from Siemens on how to program their MRI machines. I actually wrote a pulse sequence for Siemens machines a few years ago, but without a clear understanding … Continue reading →

Ingredients: 1 pear Makes: 1 serving of apple butter Instructions: Forget to eat pear until it is unappetizingly overripe. Slice and scoop out the good stuff with a spoon. Simmer until thick and brown. Chill before serving.

I just had a lovely dinner out with my grandparents and my second cousin, a surgeon in the Boston area. Over dinner we learned that she, in fact, was the one who pulled out the pea, about which Google says … Continue reading →

PAL TVs in Europe run at 50 Hz. I learned this when I was 12, I think, on a family vacation to England. The jet lag left me watching some very interesting programming on UK Channel 4 late at night … Continue reading →

As I was riding to work this morning through a corner of Brookline, I passed a wild turkey who was walking down the sidewalk like any other citizen headed to work. He or she seemed intrigued by the well-groomed hedge … Continue reading →