Category: Article

Comments on ENDOMETRIOSIS: EMERGING RESEARCH AND INTERVENTION STRATEGIES

Endometriosis is an interesting disease. Wiley publishes the proceedings of a conference on endometriosis entitled “ENDOMETRIOSIS: EMERGING RESEARCH AND INTERVENTION STRATEGIES” here. The proceedings cover a breadth and depth of topics that were all very interesting.
Here are the things that really jumped out at me:

  • Endometrium are likely to be present outside the uterus of most women; but not all of them have pain. Pain is the thing that makes it a disease from which women suffer.
  • Research demonstrates a impact in fertility of primates; but not humans.
  • The definition of stages of the disease depends on the depth of which the endometrium have penetrated the tissue. This is surprising because it has nothing to do with the amount of pain suffered.
  • The menstrual cycle itself is an amazing thing.
  • A vicious circle occurs where endometrium begin to “fuel their own fire”.
  • The immune system’s failure to “clean up” ectopic endometrium is part of the problem.
  • There are number of things that can be measured in regards to the disease and it’s process.
  • The disease has traits of an auto-immune disease; and women with it are more likely to have other auto-immune diseases.

The papers within that report are the first research I’ve ever read on the topic.

Mounting a Sparseimage with Automator in OS X

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the Mini to an encrypted sparse image. OS X 10.6 used to mount the image automatically but quit doing so and I can’t figure out why. In lieu of that I built an Automator script to mount the share so that CCC could mount the image. That worked until upgrading to 10.7.
My final solution was to add a final step to the script asking the user to mount the sparse image manually.
This site showed how to do so like this:

tell application "Finder" to display dialog "Empty Trash" with icon 2

A Slow Study Group for ML

Hi,
I’m going to work through
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTML/
and
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/
using
http://www.smlnj.org/
SLOWLY over MANY MONTHS.
The reason is that I’ve never learned a statically typed functional programming language, I feel weak on recursive data type definitions, and I am curious about compiler and interpreter construction. So, I’m looking for a way to learn about all 3 at once.
Why ML?

  1. Proven, excellent pedagogical language with great resources.
  2. Smaller than OCaml, F#, and Haskell; so I won’t get distracted with tons of “stuff”
  3. Puts me in a good position if I wanted to use it “for real” that OCaml, F#, Haskell, or even Scala and some other ML in Java languages would be a good follow up path in terms of leveraging the investment.

Basically when I sit down to learn the basics of anything from #2 I feel like they assume you know the basics of ML, and well, I don’t!
Let me know if you want to review problems together.

The rational for returning the identity for expressions such as (*) and (+)

This post in comp.lang.scheme brings up a question that inevitably everyone asks.
Suppose the answer is obvious but John summed it up well:

Well, if you interpret (apply + some-list) and (apply * some-other-list) as left-folds, then a starting point is needed, something to begin accumulating from. The identity is the only value that works correctly, so it’s what gets returned when the list being folded over has length 0. Nobody would write (+) or (*) explicitly, but having them return the identity is the Right Thing nevertheless.
The same argument applies when expanding macros: in a degenerate case, a macro may expand to (+) or (*), and it’s usually not appropriate to raise an exception.

AcroTEX and eqExam for the Truly Impatient

eqExam is just a wonderful LaTeX package for writing things like exams and quizzes. It takes into account most of what you are about right out of the box like whether you are proctoring the exam online or in printed form and whether you want an answer key printed or not. Here is an example of something that I threw together quickly by hacking up one of the example tests.
There are even really advanced things like exporting the answer data for automatic electronic submission; it’s got me really curious how people are using this in the wild.
Setup is really easy, the only caveat is that you must use MiKTEX version 2.8. Version 2.9 seems not to run at this point.
If you have never set up MiKTEX or eqExam before then my directions are attached here. Please let me know how it worked for you if you try them out.
One big question for some of you is why you would use something like this rather than MS Word or Adobe Acrobat Pro and it is a good question. The only answer that I can share is why it is so valuable for me… it is because you get to use all of the power of LaTeX to generate PDF forms and exams. That might sound like not a big deal, but if it doesn’t then you should really dig deeper into LaTeX to see how it could help you to better communicate.

Reflective Tape

Wanting to add some more nighttime visibility I searched for reflective tape and found this:

3M™ Scotchlite™ Flexible Reflective Graphic Film Series 680
Use this durable, flexible, enclosed-lens, retroreflective film to make permanent, multicolor commercial signs, striping, vehicle or railroad graphics. These graphics have a similar daytime and nighttime appearance. The film has positionable, pressure-activated adhesive and a total thickness of .007 to .008 inches.
This enclosed-lens, retroreflective film is intended for making permanent, durable graphics. Applications include multicolor commercial vehicle graphics, railroad graphics, commercial signs and striping. Graphics subjected to fuel vapors or occasional spills can also be made with this film, and it is ideal for large graphics and graphics applied to corrugated substrates. This flexible film has excellent angularity, retains 90 percent of its retroreflectivity when totally wet, and resists cracking in cold climates. Graphics made with this film have a similar daytime and nighttime appearance, and film 680-85 has a black daytime appearance but reflects white at night.The combined thickness of the film and its adhesive is .007 to .008 inch. The adhesive is positionable and pressure-activated, which allows it to be repositioned during installation until pressure is applied to the film’s surface. The adhesive is clear with silver underneath. The film has a 94 pound, polyethylene-coated paper liner. It applies best to flat, flat with rivets, moderate compound curves, or corrugated surfaces. Recommended substrates include aluminum, FRP and paint. This is not a removable product. Heat helps take off the top layer, but removing the adhesive requires a solvent-based remover. Refer to Instruction Bulletin 6.5 for more details about removal.When used according to written instructions, graphics made with this film are covered by the 3M™ MCS™ Warranty – the most comprehensive warranty in the industry. When used with compatible products, produced by a 3M Scotchprint® Graphics Authorized Manufacturer and applied according to written instructions, this film can be used to produce a Scotchprint® Graphic.Reference the Product Bulletin for more detailed information.

That sounds like a great product; just ordered a roll of the 1/2″ tape from Amazon.