Hiatus

After a valiant attempt to keep up a regular posting schedule starting in January and lasting until about March, this blog has been on an unofficial hiatus for a while. I’m making it official today.

I am a new (as in recent) homeowner, I’m trying to graduate, I moved across the country, and I have a baby arriving in two months. This morning I had an epiphany — even though I try to keep anything that’s not immediately important in my Someday/Maybe category (in GTD), all kinds of things had crept in to my active system that were not pressing. A number of those things were blog post topics for VirtuallyShocking. After doing an aggressive move of many items to the Someday category, my active, actionable items dropped from about 80 to 35, and I can see now looking at the list that it will be much easier to retain my focus.

I’ve never been a terribly prolific blogger — this is mostly a diary blog, despite my best intentions to the contrary. In that vein, it will continue. I’ll probably keep up with the hearty Friday posts and occasional updates. Part of the reason for this is that most of the cardiac electrophysiology stuff that I’ve really wanted to blog about, I can’t, because the stuff I’m excited about is stuff I’m working on. That stuff generally needs to remain private until the related papers are published, at which point I’m generally already more excited about the next thing, and not interested in talking about the older stuff.

Hopefully once I graduate that will start to change, and I can build this blog the way I’ve really wanted to.

Hearty Friday – Ott et al.

I have a special Hearty Friday for you today. Recently, there was a very cool paper published in Nature by some people at the University of Minnesota, Harvard, and several other institutions.

The HubMed page is here, the Nature Medicine page is here.

I plan to review this article at some point, but for now, here’s a picture of their recellularized scaffold. That is, they took an animal heart, washed all of the cells out, leaving the fibrous scaffold, and put cells back in, letting them grow back into a beating “heart”. This is snapped from Figure 4 of their paper.

SWPL – Facebook

I avoided reading it for a long time — Stuff White People Like — I was above that. Sure everyone talked about it, but there are so many internet fads these days, one can’t just run after every one and try to understand it. That’s a good way to get shoop-da-whooped.

However, at some point Maryana‘s references to SWPL convinced me to check it out.

Overall, I think the proper name for it would really be, “Stuff American Liberal Yuppies Like”, but I digress.

The point of this long-winded introduction is to lead to this statement: I have to say that the analysis of the social networking site progression in this SWPL post is spot on. I mean, can you argue with stuff like this?

For a brief period of time, MySpace was the site where everyone kept their profile and managed their friendships. But soon, the service began to attract fake profiles, the wrong kind of white people, and struggling musicians. In real world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check cashing store, a TGIFridays, and a housing project. All which strike fear in the hearts of white people.

(For the record, I only every created a MySpace profile to contact old friends.)