Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 1 November 2002

# 6:30 AM

I just spent about an hour stuffed inside a narrow cylinder with my head immobilized, only able to see a blurry projection screen, instructed to imagine carrying out sentences projected on the screen while a giant magnet induced radio frequency absorption in my brain.

Or, in other words, I was asked to be a guinea pig for Shweta's fMRI experiment. The idea is to see which parts of the brain are active when one imagines taking an action, and compare this with the parts of the brain that are active when one actually carries out an action. The theory is that they will be more or less the same.

The experience of being MRI-scanned is not terribly pleasant: you can't move, you're in a coffin-sized space, and the machine makes a horrific noise while it's operating, sort of a buzzing chirp, which is so loud that they give you earplugs to prevent hearing damage. However, it was fun to have done it, and theoretically I will get to print out pictures of my brain and stick them on my wall or something. Also, the setup is thoroughly mad-science: it's a giant magnet, full of liquid helium! With a crazy tangle of hoses to carry various coolants, and big fat copper cables to supply current! You have to walk through a metal detector to get into the room, lest you have some iron on your person that might get yanked around by the field!

# 4:05 AM

Tonight, the ICSI Movie Committee (of one) screened "Dark City", which is a beautifully disturbing movie about memory and identity. I can't really describe the movie without spoiling it; for this reason I am not linking to any reviews. But go rent it, you won't be disappointed. (It is not a horror movie.)

We were invited to come in costume. I had all of ten minutes to put mine together, so I pulled some old clothes out of the back of my closet and went as a 1992 grunge rocker. This costume worked only because of the wonderful hat which my mother made for me this summer: it's all black and brown and blue wool, in a sort of pointy cylinder shape. I don't think any grunge rockers actually wore such a thing, but it is definitely something one can imagine seeing on a grunge rocker.

This makes two movies in one week, which is a personal record for the entire year: I see a movie about once every three months, on average.

In other news, the British Standards Institute has reissued the original C standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (commonly known as "C89"): a hard copy can be yours for only £30. Just punch "9899" into the search box on that webpage. C89 has been superseded by the newer C99 (ISO/IEC 9899:1999) but it's still good to have it available; backward compatibility will be important for years to come.