Author Archives: Brock Tice

Bad Matrix Joke

Amanda was telling me yesterday of the difficulties of studying medical school material. She said she wished she could learn her pulmonary physiology like in “The Matrix”, wherein via a computer all of the information could be loaded in. Possibly the most clever joke I have ever come up with on my own *cough* occurred to me as she mimiced Neo getting information loaded into his brain, head shaking and so on. When she finished I chimed in, “I know Lung Fu!”

Get it? Pulmonary Physiology? Lung Fu? Geez I crack myself up.

HRS Interviews – Molly Maleckar

While I didn’t have much luck with interviews at Heart Rhythm 2005, I did get two. Here is a transcription of the first, with Molly Maleckar from my own lab.

VS: So I’m here interviewing Molly Maleckar of Tulane University. Molly, how many times have you attended NASPE or HRS conferences?

Molly: Well, actually, technically when it was still NASPE, I attended the first one a few years ago in Washington, DC, this is actually my third time at NASPE/HRS, my third conference.

VS: And would you please try to summarize what you work on in the lab?

Molly: Sure, I’m here presenting a study which is about determining the defibrillation threshold from the upper limit of vulnerability, defibrillation shocks, but my main work has to do with developing a model of infarction so we can study arrhythmogenesis in the post-infarcted heart.

VS: Okay, and what do you see as maybe the upcoming hot foci in the field right now?

Molly: I think that our lab really has a leg-up because disease models right now are really what’s happening. People are doing a lot of experimental work and have been for probably the last ten years in terms of ion channel kinetics and gross effects on the defibrillation efficacy of post-injury heart situations, but they’ve really — mechanistically there’s not a lot of insight, so I think our lab has really got it down. We’ve got ischemia 1a, 1b, the infarction, and I think that that’s really where it’s going.

VS: What about mechanical [mechano-electric] feedback?

Molly: Also extremely important, of course I didn’t think of that since I’m not working on it, but also Wendy in our lab does that — that’s the next step. The ideal would be to have a computational model of the human heart, post infarct, with a little bit of heart failure thrown in there [with mechano-electric feedback]. That’s probably fifteen years away, maybe ten, maybe less, but definitely those are also very important things to look at now.

VS: Alright, thank you Molly.

Molly: No problem.

Next, maybe tomorrow, I’ll post my interview with Martin Fink of UCSD.

I haff no monny left, I’m brock

Amanda forwarded an email to me that her friend wrote. The part regarding me is below:

Hey, those were neat pictures. Your boyfriend appears scholarly. I like the smirk. Seems stocky too. I’ve noticed that a lot of my respect for other men comes from sort of ‘judging the book by the cover.’ You know, guys that can do things for themselves. Strong, Assertive, Reliable, Competent, Calloused hands, and no egos. The thing that throws me off, and always has is his name. Brock. Brock. Bee Are Oh See Kay. Hi there, my name is Brock. To me, that has
always been a specific sound effect. Specifically, a new tennis ball. “Jeez! Hey buddy, watch out for that ball!!!” What?? BROCK!!! Or an Asian getting accustomed to American music. “Ya, I like Brock and Broll.” Put a firecracker in a hole in a tennis ball, KA-BROCK!! Or a vegetarian refering to a wholesome green on a friendly, familiar basis, “want cheese on your brock?” Or a gambler in Las Vegas with a lisp, “I haff no monny left, I’m brock.”

Firefox = IE?

There’s an entry over on referenced by The Post Money Value implying that recent security issues make Firefox the security equivalent of IE. All it takes is 5 minutes of browsing with both to show you that even on the base level, this is not the case. Will there be security holes found? Sure, no software is perfect, and there are a lot of clever people out there that know how to find holes in it. Redesigning the internet won’t fix it, as this will always be a problem where interconnected computers are involved.

There are tons of ways to run things securely over the internet — part of the problem is that it’s too inconvenient. Take encrypted email, for example. A lot of people send sensitive information over email, not realizing that it’s the digital equivalent of a postcard. Anyone along the way can read it. I was asked by a professor this January to email my social security number to him. I of course did no such thing. I brought it to his office on a post-it note, about which he complained. If he had been able to accept encrypted email, I would have sent it to him.

We’re talking about a guy that teaches Networking and also Operating Systems. I have a final exam today in the latter. Even still, for whatever reason, PGP encrypted email is too complicated or (more likely) too much of a hassle for him to use on a regular basis. There’s the further problem that one has to have people with encryption set up to send to, or it’s pointless. I have my computers set up for encrypted mail, but there’s noone to exchange it with. Part of the reason that this is the case is that it’s complicated.

In order for something to become a global phenomenon, like email, it’s necessary to make it easy for most of the population to use. This means that rather dumb and lazy people must be able to use it. Therefore, it must be easy and simple to use.

No matter how much software is re-engineered there are still these problems. Security is complicated, and people don’t like complication. I can tell you that by not being tied into the operating system, Firefox already has a leg-up on IE. This is not to mention all of the additional features and plugins available on Firefox.

Some of us are living in a world where spyware, viruses, and scams using holes in our browsers plague our computers and sap our time as we try to root them out. Others use programs and operating systems wherein this is less of a concern, where we can just use our computers. Seems kind of silly to spend all that time and money on antivirus and antispam software, when it’s really not necessary. Regardless of metrics on time to patch, I can tell you that comparatively, Firefox falls into the latter category, while IE falls into the first.