Monthly Archives: March 2009

Hearty Friday – corazón de vaca



corazón de vaca

Originally uploaded by Mart.*


My Spanish is pretty bad, but I believe this is the heart of a cow. A couple of years ago they had some of these strung up at the Heart Rhythm Scientific Sessions, demonstrating how new, thin leads could get into the coronary sinus.

Of course, your ‘thin’ leads look even thinner if you demonstrate them in a cow heart. That and I think having human hearts just hanging there would have been a health hazard. Among other things.

Happy Friday everyone! Have a good weekend.

Ada Lovelace Day – Natalia Trayanova

Suw Charman-Anderson made a pledge to post about a woman in technology that he she admired, as long as 1000 other people signed up to do the same. (Details here.) It sounded like a great idea, so I signed right up. Then I puzzled for a long while about whom I should write.

I considered writing about Anousheh Ansari, a serial tech entrepreneur who has also gone into space (something I dreamed of as a child), but I don’t actually know that much about her, and she’s rather high profile.

Then I realized the answer has been staring me in the face — I should write about my doctoral advisor, Professor Natalia Trayanova.

Dr.Trayanova is a leader in the cardiac electrophysiology field, a field both historically and currently dominated by men. While I have met many talented women with promising careers in the field, very few of them have been full professors, leaders of labs, commonly invited speakers, or HRS fellows. All of these are true of Dr.Trayanova. Furthermore, along with a few other labs ( many of which are ‘related’ to hers ), she has been at the forefront of cardiac simulation technology since the year I was born (1983). She has helped to drive cardiac simulations from mathematical models of the electrical fields induced by excitable fibers in a volume conductor all the way to full-scale models of the human heart derived from medical images, running on massive supercomputers.

I think she is the perfect example of a woman in technology that can be a role model to aspiring women (per the stated goals of the Ada Lovelace Day project).

Happy first Ada Lovelace day, everyone!

Addicted to Spending

Sinclair Davidson has an excellent post up on Catallaxy (disclaimer: I am an occasional contributor there), wherein he extracts key quotes from an article in The Economist. A sample money quote is below:

Keynesianism has conquered the hearts and minds of politicians and ordinary people alike because it provides a theoretical justification for irresponsible behaviour. Medical science has established that one or two glasses of wine per day are good for your long-term health, but no doctor would recommend a recovering alcoholic to follow this prescription. Unfortunately, Keynesian economists do exactly this. They tell politicians, who are addicted to spending our money, that government expenditures are good. And they tell consumers, who are affected by severe spending problems, that consuming is good, while saving is bad. In medicine, such behaviour would get you expelled from the medical profession; in economics, it gives you a job in Washington.