Warming up to the Foleo

When I first saw the press release for Palm’s new Foleo device, I was underwhelmed. If you read any comments on tech sites discussing the Foleo, you’ll see I’m not the only one. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of info out about the thing. However, after some digging, I’m getting kind of excited.

You see, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Seat-back and Laptop Gambit. This is where you open your laptop on an airline seat-back tray, and because there’s so little room, the top of your display has to go under the ledge where the tray table normally stows. Now, if the person in front of you suddenly leans their seat back, it could potentially crush or snap your display in half. Not only that, you’re basically screwed as far as getting work done goes at that point. This is a problem even with my 13″ MacBook.

The Foleo is the perfect size. It’s just as big as it needs to be to accommodate the (supposedly?) full-size keyboard. I still want to know whether it’s possible to check email with it over wifi — the press stuff they’re putting out is obsessively tied to syncing with a Treo. However, I saw something today that got me really excited. this article says you can get to a BASH terminal on the Linux-based Foleo.

This has potential!

Bionic hand goes on the market

The reason I got into electrophysiology was because I was excited about the potential for electronic prosthetics. It seems the first real one has come to market. It’s still primitive in comparison to what I envision — a prosthetic that hooks directly up to nerves and sends and receives signals — but I’m sure that will come in time.

Kudos to these guys for making it happen!

One of the questions that has been asked before, and which this underlines, is, “when will artificial hands become superior to natural ones, and would you voluntarily switch in that scenario?” This sort of concept is explored in the various Ghost in the Shell movies, and the TV series “GITS: Stand-Alone Complex”.

Optical Mapping and Optical Coherence Tomography

In my last few posts, I’ve mentioned optical mapping and optical coherence tomography (OCT). Given just the names it’s not actually obvious that they’re entirely different things. Thus, I thought I should explain them.

Optical Mapping

“Optical Mapping” is short for something like “Optical mapping of voltage on the surface of the heart using fluorescence from potentiometric dyes”. The short version is ambiguous, as it could mean optical mapping of all kinds of stuff, and could in fact be synonymous with OCT. When cardiac electrophysiologists refer to an optical mapping study, what that usually involves is the following.

A heart is mounted in a clear chamber of some kind, and instrumented appropriately for whatever experiment is being done (say, defibrillation). A dye is then injected into the fluid flowing through the heart, typically “Tyrode’s” solution, which is kind of like blood without proteins and blood cells. This dye is fluorescent, meaning that when a certain color of light shines on it, it absorbs that light but then releases light of a different color. The cool (and useful) thing is that the amount of light released depends on the voltage gradient across the dye. It is designed to sit across the membrane of a cell, so by measuring changes in light released, it’s possible to measure changes in the electrical potential across the cell membrane, and to thereby monitor excitation, arrhythmia, and so on without electrodes. Using a fast, high-resolution camera, it is thereby possible to measure electrical activity in the heart from many more points, and at much better resolution, than using a bunch of electrodes. The major downside of optical mapping is that it is essentially limited to surfaces. Electrodes are still needed to probe the depths of the myocardium. Alternatively, optical mapping experiments can be combined with simulation experiments. We contend that if the sufrace activity of the simulation matches the suface activity of the experimental preparation “reasonably” well, the simulated activity within the walls should be a good approximation of what’s going on inside the experimental heart.

Optical Coherence Tomography

Typically referred to as OCT, the easiest way to explain it is that it’s like ultrasound imaging, but with light. In reality it gets a little more complicated. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation. We’re using it to scan the thin right-ventricular free wall of the rabbit heart, and are then going to make and use computational models based on the resulting data. To do that, we have to segment the images (determine what is tissue, what is not), and then analyze them to create a finite element mesh.