Daily Archive for February 5th, 2008

A letter of recommendation

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Gogga
on February 5, 2008
in General blabber
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Recently I’ve been writing a whole lot of these.

I am not entirely sure why, but I have been.  Such are the times now, I suppose.

Anywho.  I found this site and the links it takes you to to be rather useful for me.

Simply, easy, straightforward.  It’s a good way to START you, but always remember…  You have to add some of your own self into these letters, so never copy anything you’ll find online.  It will look dry and uninteresting, trust me.

Cool domain, too:

http://www.how-to-write-a-letter-of-recommendation.com/

:)

LOL! The “kissing” book

Published
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Gogga
on February 5, 2008
in General blabber
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This is a very interesting and creative idea.  At least I find it creative.

Very clever.

The kissing book

Many more pages you can find on the author’s site here: http://hopelarson.livejournal.com/122445.html

To all: try to be THIS creative at least once in your lifetime.

To author (hopelarson): never stop, fabulous work!

To myself: read what you wrote for “To all” :)

iPorn

Published
by
Gogga
on February 5, 2008
in General blabber
. 1 Comment

This is a pretty cool site. Contrary to “p-o-r-n” in its name, this is not really.

Perhaps images like this can be considered somewhat erotic…

Destination — Milano

But personally I find them simply… Interesting and entertaining.

I also love the design of the site. But you decide for yourself.

Here:

http://iporn.nimic.org/

Pulsed Electron Avalanche Knife receives $$ recognition

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Gogga
on February 5, 2008
in Engineering and General blabber
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PEAK technology

The PEAK™ technology offers an alternative to standard RF surgical techniques for tissue cutting and coagulation. Our technology operates in a regime of short-pulsed plasma-mediated electrical discharges. This technology limits heat diffusion and associated thermal damage to sub-cellular dimensions. In contrast, most commercially available RF-based surgical products use continuous voltage waveforms to cut tissue, which leads to significant heat diffusion into adjacent tissues and results in undesirable collateral damage.

(source: http://www.peaksurgical.com/tech.html)

So, apparently this small technology I’ve been including in the intro section of many of my papers just got another hefty boost from investors.

According to this and this articles they just got another $21 mil.

Very nifty toy this is, and definitely something to watch out for quite soon at a hospital.  They seem to be shying away from “plasma” a little though as far as I know the technology is actually mainly based on plasma.  I think I need to go read about this in further detail.  In the mean time, here’s another quote:

The technology, however, originated at Stanford, where PEAK, it turns out, stands for “pulsed electron-avalanche knife.” The technique, developed by a team led by Daniel Palanker, involves using a high voltage electric field to create a plasma, a kind of electrically charged gas, which can be shaped and controlled to make clean cuts in tissue.

Billion dollar sports

Published
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Gogga
on February 5, 2008
in General blabber
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I never thought about this, but the money poured into sports in US is insane.

Reading this article in the USA Today I noticed this:

Lucas Oil Stadium, Indianapolis
Cost: $695 million-plus
Projected opening: August 2008
Projected seating capacity: 63,000 for football
Features: Huge window will provide view of Indianapolis skyline. Stadium design incorporates brick, steel and glass and aims to reflect historic feel of Indiana’s high school and college sports venues. Features retractable roof with two moving panels that meet in peak above stadium center (panels will rest above seating when roof is open).

Dallas Cowboys, Arlington, Texas
Cost: About $1 billion
Projected opening: 2009
Projected capacity: About 100,000 for big events
Features: Billed as largest NFL stadium when finished. Includes 120-foot-high by 180-foot-wide clear glass retractable doors beyond each end zone; video boards hung from arches over field will be 60 yards long (making upper-deck seats more attractive for fans, according to Cowboys); retractable roof.
Online: Stadium “Fly Through” video, more details: http://stadium.dallascowboys.com

Giants/Jets , East Rutherford, N.J.
Cost: $1.3 billion
Projected opening: 2010
Projected capacity: 82,500
Features: Will host 20 NFL games a season as home to Giants and Jets. Stadium look will change depending on whether Giants or Jets are playing. For instance: Its exterior will be lighted by colors of team playing. Stadium will also feature 2,500 high-definition displays and four giant video boards.

Do you see that??!!  $1.3 billion for a stadium…  WOW!

This, apparently, is a very large drive for many technologies.  This is where plasma TVs and the like are going to show off their glory.  This is where the common people will decide to get a plasma or LCD TV because they saw this or that commercial during the game.  This is where huge companies will advertise their useless junk and will pickup hundreds of thousands of customers…

All this is truly amazing to me.  I am formulating some form of an idea in my head on global technology developments and the way people influence and are influenced by advertisements and all the various forms of subliminal advertisements, etc.  I have nothing solid in my head just yet, but it’s coming :)  Stay tuned.

Intersections of discovery

Published
by
Gogga
on February 5, 2008
in Engineering and General blabber
. 0 Comments
She has visited St. Thomas’s Abbey in the Czech Republic, where Gregor Mendel discovered the law of genetic inheritance after he crossed sweet pea plants in the monastery garden. She has had a beer at the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, where, in 1953, two young scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick announced that they had “found the secret of life” after discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. And she has gone looking for the birthplace of modern biotechnology, a deli in Honolulu, where the Cohen-Boyer experiment, which used bacterial plasma to clone large amounts of DNA, was said to have occurred (she determined that it did, in fact, take place in a deli, but the deli is no longer there).

This is a nice story about Dr. Diana Bianchi published in The Boston Globe.

Quite impressive.  As a developing scientist I need to modify the way I think and channel it more toward the logic and lifestyle used by people like her.

In a way, really, even with this blog I am doing something similar — I am recording my own findings in the field not related to my own.  Sometimes I, too, get ideas and execute experiments based on completely unrelated things I read in the news…  We’ll see where I will endup…

Back to the story, however, well…  You should give it a read-through yourself and decide.