There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.
The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.
Former epileptic, I've had dozens of MRs and CTs. It's rote for me to see and I never had a visceral reaction and in fact I find it pretty fascinating. The one that I do have that's a standout and quite shocking is my first post-lobeectomy MRI. There's a very noticeable void where my right temporal lobe (+amygdala, cerebellum and hippocampus) were resected. Great conversation starter.
tl;dr my dealer had my car for a week to diagnose an intermittent electrical gremlin.
My maddening intermittent electrical gremlin was with my new to me Mazda3. Occasionally and randomly after in the first few months I had it the throttle would "go to sleep" during normal driving. By that I mean in the process of normal driving I'd suddenly have no throttle response, the car would go to idle, and the only way to get it back was to completely get off the gas pedal and it would respond again as usual. I'm appreciative that worked, but I couldn't shake the idea that if that were to happen during hard acceleration bad things could happen.
My first trip to the dealer yielded a recording in the event log of the throttle shutting off because it saw throttle and brake at the same time, an expected behavior I was told. I assured the mechanic and service manager that I was almost certain this wasn't the case, they had no other explanation, I continued to have the problem and made certain when it happened that I hadn't somehow been on both pedals.
After an email to Mazda's support line with some technical details hoping to get my situation into the right hands, I got a call from the dealer asking to hang onto it until they could replicate the problem.
The service manager or someone else in the shop drove it for the better part of a week, taking real time telemetry while they were in it while I was in a loaner.
Turned out that the problem was the second brake switch hanging on. I found out that there's one switch that talks too the ECU and another that talks to the brake lights, the former being the culprit.
Frustrating as could be, but like a good nerd I found the final diagnosis fascinating. I also wonder and would like to believe that my detailed and informed email to the mother ship made someone pass it up the line until it got into the right hands.
First time I've seen that sketch, but it looks like Popular Science lifted it directly for an article from the 80's that I remember distinctly about Project Aurora.
Having never seen the guts of one before I was surprised to see the difference in wire gauge between the high and low sides of the transformer. In my mind the only difference between the two sides was the number of turns. Huh.
The low voltage side of a transformer needs to handle more current. You could use the same gauge on both sides and get the same voltage, but you'd experience more losses.
if you used the thin wire on both sides you'd get the same voltage but experience more losses
if you used the thick wire on both sides you'd get the same voltage but have a much heavier and more expensive transformer for an almost undetectable performance improvement
For more info on the city stairs that are mapped as streets, Laura Zurowski walked all 739+ and documented with Polaroids and wrote a vignette inspired by each. Lovely writing style and she did a great job of capturing pictures that you'd see if you're on foot, off the beaten path, and deliberately surveying your surroundings.
There's A LOT more traffic across the Fern Hollow bridge than if the end destination were a couple of thousand homes. Average daily traffic ca. 2005 was 14.5k vehicles including transit bus routes with articulated buses that nominally carry 70+ at capacity. At rush hour I've been on those buses and they're regularly SRO.
Google Photos does it for you. Very handy a few years ago, I took a picture of the private wifi password backstage at a bar I used to work at, lost the saved login when I swapped phones. Searched my photos for "Thunderbird" and boom... a picture of text saying "Thunderbird private WIFI password".
I'm a bit disappointed that this doesn't work in Apple Photos. The app does a fairly good job at recognizing photos and doing OCR, but you can't search the text.
Isn't that a bit apples v oranges? I've had a MEG and I'm floored by the technology but would a better analog be a PET? We're looking for two different things, metabolism v saturation but it seems like they're both in the physical or structural realm than the electrical.
One of the main advantages of TD-NIRS is that the signal it's imaging is "electrical".
Modalities like PET, BOLD fMRI, and CW-NIRS do depend upon saturation changes. For BOLD and CW-NIRS, it's the change in blood oxygen saturation.
TD-NIRS images the fast optical signal that is correlated with electrical activity in the cortex. MEG images the magnetic fields correlated with electrical activity in the cortex. IMO, they're pretty similar.
> TD-NIRS images the fast optical signal that is correlated with electrical activity in the cortex. MEG images the magnetic fields correlated with electrical activity in the cortex. IMO, they're pretty similar.
So I guess the way I look at it, is that the field is what is augmented in a MEG, that makes the substrate emit an amplified signal naturally there. While a TD-NIRS injects a laser signal into the skull to measure back reflections... both inject energy into the system, but one is a reflection vs. an emission.
Is this the wrong way to look at it?
And anodyne33, yes, it is 100% apples to oranges. I was abreast of their original aims and MEG was on the table at the time - I had hoped that would remain the aim as it to me appears more beneficial, based on how I view the sensing above.
There's a tremendous episode of Radiolab called Fault Line that talks about the effect of a total resection of the Amygdala. It worked out very poorly. I heard it weeks before I was scheduled for a right temporal lobe resection, including Amygdala and it scared the bejeesus out of me. A quick call to my neurosurgeon's coordinator assuaged my fears.
The bilateral resection caused Kluver-Busey syndrome in the patient that Fault Line discusses.