Rapid Interpretation of EKG's

I just finished Rapid Interpretation of EKG's by Dale Dubin.

Well before I discuss the book - yes, the author is a pedophile. If you click on the link I put for his name you'll see that he is a funny guy, but also into child porn. Anyway, the book is still very good, but don't be surprised if when people see the book they point at it and say child molester.

Anyway, if you don't plan on reading EKGs (or designing a device that reads them) then there are probably not many reasons to read the book. It does provide some interesting information about how the heart works, but almost entirely focused around how that relates to reading an EKG so there are probably better books for just learning about the heart. For the med school types that read this blog I would recommend that you check out the book - it may be too far below your level, but if at some point you do need to read EKGs it does a really good job of showing you what to look for. Normally I wouldn't be pretentious enough to recommend a book on EKGs to bio majors (well ok, maybe you know me too well to believe that), but all the clinical guys at work talk about how good the book is. Every page has a diagram that takes up half the page and then the other half is text talking about the diagram and sometimes he puts in blanks that you are supposed to be able to fill in (the word is just off to the right in case you can't).

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and the rest of this blog post should be completely ignored.

I found a few items in the book particularly interesting.

Maybe I'm just silly, but whenever I saw EKG machines on TV or in movies (why is something on TV but in a movie?) I basically viewed it as a large heart rate monitor. Of course after reading a book on how to interpret EKGs I realize that is incredibly wrong and that you can actually find out quite a bit about a person's heart and if there are any issues from looking at an EKG.

I had no idea that while your heart has a primary timer (the SA node) that sets your heart rate there are actually many backups that can take over for a variety of reasons. The really interesting thing is that it is a system of lots of small parts that follow somewhat simple rules and interact with each other. The simplicity allows it to gracefully handle many situations; however, as a decent sized system there are plenty of ways to throw it off and have the interactions become harmful. This strikes me because it is very similar to what is often seen in engineering, particularly when looking at larger system design (especially in software where the systems can be very large and often have a similar lots of little pieces design).

Much like a large system problems can occur due to a variety of reasons, but as you degrade sections of the system you are more likely to see interaction problems. In particular a person can go into cardiac arrest for a variety of reasons, but the probability and number of ways it can occur is increased when the heart is unhealthy (in particular myocardial infarction, aka clogged arteries).

And of course I have to like a book that says, "The ICD is a technological masterpiece!". (An ICD is an implantable cardioverter defibrillator - and if you don't know what that is then somehow you have been spared from my incessant discussions about what I do at work).

The Confusion and Hollywood

Just finished The Confusion by Neal Stephenson. It is book 2 of the baroque cycle out of 3. Since the book is the middle of the series it is a little odd to write about it since I already introduced the series and I still have another 900 page book before I find out how it all ends up. It's not my favorite Neal Stephenson book (that would be Diamond Age followed by Snow Crash) but still interesting and exciting. Although it is a bit wearing (much like how Eric described the Two Towers movie) since one of the main characters travels around the world and is constantly oscillating between extreme wealth and utter poverty. Anyway, I'll discuss further when I finish the series - this book is definitely weirder than the last but I'm still waiting to see if Stephenson is going to pull one of his crazy seems out of nowhere but pulls it all together endings or not. One interesting thing in the book is he likes to skip some long periods of time that include some significant events and then fill them back in with some back story and go into heavy detail on some minor events. I think it is similar to what Battlestar Galactica occasionally does - such as skipping the year of Cylon occupation of New Caprica and then devoting an entire episode to a single night to build the interpersonal relationships and fill in some of the story they skipped. I guess that all shows do that to some degree, but I don't think that they usually skip segments of time that are as critical to the plot.

Over the weekend I headed up to Hollywood to see The Groundlings, an improve comedy group, with Evan. It was good, funnier than UCB but not as funny as the Laugh Factory. These actors seemed a little more established than UCB - none had majors roles, but they all had minors roles on a variety of shows including Reno 911 and Scrubs. On the way over we passed by Hollywood Blvd and Highland, one end of the red carpet, which was all setup along with the giant oscars which was cool to see, although no celebrity sightings. One thing that particularly stood out to me is that as you drive through Hollywood you see some payday advance places and some homeless people and then a block later there's giant oscars and a red carpet. They do a pretty good job of focusing all the cameras on the strip of road they want you to see - I think it would be really funny if some time a camera man did a 360 and gave people some context as to where this was taking place.

I also saw Reno 911: Miami over the weekend. I don't think it lived up to the show, but was still quite funny.

Dec 10 Follow Up

On December 10th I wrote about going to upright citizen's brigade with Evan. As I mentioned in the post, neither of us were impressed by the show. One girl seemed to run most of the show that night and she was the one who invited both Evan and I on stage. Both Evan and I seemed to think that she was failing as a comedian.

Well that was until Evan called me tonight to inform me that he saw her on 30 Rock. At first, I figured that it must just be someone that looks similar, but he insisted that it was the same person. Then he proved it by following the UCB profile to her myspace page which lists a performance on 30 Rock for tonight! Crazyness!

Religon and Politics

Yes, yes, I know Barack is not Jesus, but expect me to be singing his praises for a while here (Barack, not Jesus). Speaking of Jesus, Barack does have some interesting comments on religion's place in politics (wasn't that a slick transition? I usually don't even bother with transitions on this page). Normally, I have a much harsher view of the place of religion in politics and public policy, but Barack does propose some interesting ideas for uniting the country rather than having two sides think that the other is insane or going straight to hell. (If the video isn't loading you can find it here.)



I was reading through Barack's thoughts on the issues and was very impressed (as you might have caught by now), but I figured that anyone can sound good on their own webpage (well, maybe not everyone - I doubt that if I read Bush's site I would be impressed) so I should read Hillary's page and compare. You might notice that no where on her page does she list her stance on the issues - seems like a mildly important thing for a candidate... I'll stop complaining about Hillary now since if she wins the primary I'll end up supporting her, but Barack definitely wins that round.

BSG and scopes!

In case you were wondering if I need a real hobby (or a life)...

In BSG (battlestar galactica) in the back of the raptors there is an electronic device. Whenever I've seen it I've always thought that they just took an oscilloscope and put it on the table (if you look at the picture in the wikipedia article you'll think I'm crazy, but the picture is of a really old scope - nice modern ones look just like the one in BSG). It's always struck me as kind of silly and cheap, but I was just reading about BSG from the '70s and apparently they used tektronix equipment as their "futuristic" equipment (tektronix is the main manufacturer of oscilloscopes - and if you look at their page you'll see a modern looking scope). So I guess it's probably a reference to the old show rather than just a cheap way of getting futuristic looking equipment (it ruins the whole future feel for me every time I see it since I see those at work every day).

Yeah, I realize this is probably up there with write only memory as a post no one else will care about - thanks for putting up with it.

Awesome, My Ego, And Mildly Amusing

First off - it's not really a surprise, but still Awesome! I would have posted the video but it is still downloading very slowly.

I started contributing some stuff to wikipedia and added a link to my contributions under news and humor (doesn't really fit in the category but oh well), although I have absolutely no idea why anyone would care. The link is aptly named since I realized that really the only reason I have for contributing to wikipedia is to feed my insatiable ego. Some of the electrical engineering articles really are fairly sparse or not perfectly accurate so I've mostly been adding to them since I know a bit more than the average Joe about those topics and can add something without spending anytime doing something silly like research. I just started a couple days ago so I'll see how long this hobby actually lasts. On one of the articles soon after I made some additions someone came along and edited it (didn't remove anything, just fixed up the wording) that was actually kind of cool to see the process work - although I am thinking that if someone will edit stuff I post I should put up any papers I have to write in the future...

This last link is a bit lame but slightly humorous. It's a blog about The Office but from the point of view of an HR expert - most of it is obvious (don't ask an employee to act out lesbians kissing), but at the start of each post she estimates how much Dunder Mifflin could have been sued for.

Almost forgot to mention that I'm so glad that Scrubs is back! Yeah I know it never went away, but so far season 6 had been pretty disappointing and this last episode is the first one to be on par with previous seasons.

Write Only Memory

I was going to post more about ATHF shutting down Boston - on the news when they kept explaining that the signs looked like bombs because they have batteries and wires my head almost exploded. I started making a list of every day items that have batteries and wires, but it quickly got far too long. I did find it hilarious that the news blurred out a series of LEDs that very roughly approximate an alien holding up its middle finger. (Ok I guess I ended up writing about it.)

But, then I read a paper in JSSC that discussed write only memory and I decided to write about it instead. When I was working in the LCS (laboratory for computer science at MIT - now part of CSAIL) there was an ad on the wall for write only memory. I'm pretty certain the ad was a joke (if you don't get it - try to think about how you would use memory that you can write to but cannot read from) (I guess it is a bit like /dev/null which is useful, but I digress...). Then, today I was reading a paper about an electric braille device. I was going to explain how the whole thing works, but the explanation was getting long. The point is that the device actually contains some write only memory! They are cheating a bit since the contents of the memory do go to the actuators that move the little braille bumps, but the memory does not have a read line and they were able to use 5 transistors per bit instead of the standard SRAM 6 transistors per bit.

For those who's eyes haven't glazed over yet - the reason they were working so hard to minimize transistor and interconnect count is they are using printable organic transistors. Of course it has a while before it becomes a product since the transistors degrade after a month (and that's when it is encased in nitrogen - in air it is even faster).