who's your daddy?

who's your daddy?
Originally uploaded by RescuedMan.

In Paris for work this week. Despite the endless number of people you keep telling me how charming/ atmospheric/ romantic it is to just be walking around in this city, I just don't quite get it. Maybe being in a part of town surrounded by 70s functionalist architecture has something to do with it. Maybe being here in the middle of winter has something to do with it. Or maybe I need to get out more.

In any case, the quirky continues to surprise as always. Like this giant 100-foot inflatable box of powdered sugar on the side of a multi-storey parking lot.

I somehow suspect the eyebrow raising branding of this wasn't lost on the marketing folk behind this. Although I do wonder if the idiom exist en francais.

Lost in Translation

i wonder what they taste like
Originally uploaded by RescuedMan.

Milled about Chinatown pre-CNY to see what the eye could see. Amidst the heaps of ling ling long long heartlander goods, a few things stood out. Ever notice how an eye hungry for the non-pedestrian gets drawn to odd things like this?

Don't ask me what they taste like.

Noodle Mirror

this is my brain on freeware
Originally uploaded by RescuedMan.

WARNING: HIGH GEEK CONTENT

The ultimate mirror glance! After 30+ years of wondering what the "I" of IthinkthereforIam fame actually looks like, I finally got around to visualizing the surface of my brain , thanks to MRIcro, a really nifty piece of brain imaging freeware by Chris Rorden. That and a 22.5 MB file of my 3T brain scan, courtesy of the lovely and fabulously multi-talented Noo - who also made this picture:

an open mind
Originally uploaded by RescuedMan.

No, I didn't really need to get my brain scanned but getting a free scan was a nice geeky reward cookie for lying still in a dark tunnel for 45 minutes and being Noo's lab rat.

The ever professional Noo thinks MRIcro is pretty basic actually, but since I am only at sandcastle level on the vast beach of neuroscience, I am plenty happy mucking about with it.

Before discovering MRIcro, and desperately curious enough to spend some time reverse engineering the scan file, I managed to hexedit out the relevant sections of the file and spoof a .bmp header to create images of each of the individual slices. But since each voxel field was 16-bits wide with the first 8-bits mostly zeroes, the inital 8-bit grayscale bitmap had a weird squished and striated look.



Re-scaling the width in a photo editor kinda fixed it. But doing it thusly by hand for all 180 slices would have been a fairly maddening exercise so eventually a nifty python script did the job. Using more freeware I ended up making some movies of progressive noodle slices. You might recognize me in the slightly macabre Front Scan.

One of the flicks even had a small cameo role in a wonderful local play.