My friend Tressa, who is a Philly girl living in Stuttgart, has a band called FATE, and they're trying to get selected for the Coca-Cola Soundwave Tour in Europe. The competition offers talented new bands the chance to play with top acts at top festivals and events. Give FATE your vote and help them to stay in the TOP SIX in the charts. (You can vote at least once per day per computer, so if you have one computer at work and one at home, you can vote twice a day!)

Visit this website (in a new window) and then follow the instructions below.

Yesterday I had Photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) surgery.  

It is a laser eye surgery intended to correct a person's vision and reduce dependency on glasses or contact lenses. The procedure permanently changes the shape of the anterior central cornea using an excimer laser to ablate (burn off) a small amount of tissue from the corneal stroma at the front of the eye, just under the corneal epithelium. The outer layer of the cornea is removed prior to the ablation. A computer system tracks the patient's eye position 60 to 4,000 times per second, depending on the brand of laser used, redirecting laser pulses for precise placement. Most modern lasers will automatically center on the patient's visual axis and will pause if the eye moves out of range and then resume ablating at that point after the patient's eye is re-centered.

The outer layer of the cornea, or epithelium, is a soft, rapidly regrowing layer in contact with the air that can completely replace itself from limbal stem cells within a few days with no loss of clarity. The deeper layers of the cornea, as opposed to the outer epithelium, are laid down early in life and have very limited regenerative capacity. The deeper layers, if reshaped by a laser or cut by a microkeratome, will remain that way permanently with only limited healing or remodelling. With PRK the epithelium removed is discarded and allowed to regenerate. Both This is different from LASIK (Laser-Assisted in-SItu Keratomileusis), the most common laser eye surgery, in which the epithelium is not removed.

PRK versus LASIK

Because PRK does not involve a permanent flap in the deeper corneal layers (the LASIK procedure involves a mechanical microkeratome using a metal blade or a femtosecond laser microkeratome to create a 'flap' out of the outer cornea), the cornea's structural integrity is less altered by the procedure, but PRK can be more painful and visual recovery is slower.  Bottom line, right now I can see enough to use the computer for a ten or fifteen minutes at a time, but only with LARGEST font chosen.

Two MIT alumni claimed 2006 Nobel Prizes, bringing the MIT community's total to 63.

George F. Smoot '66 won a joint Nobel Prize in Physics for work that increases understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars.

Andrew Z. Fire LI '83 shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of RNA interference--gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.

Yeah, yeah... Nobel, Schmobel. 

Did you also know that elephants from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus stopped traffic at MIT on Oct. 5 during their annual march to Boston's TD Banknorth Garden? (That sounds so crappy compared to Boston Garden, doesn't it?  Anyway, that's where the circus was performing.). The 10 elephants, together with 15 horses, 3 ponies and their handlers, followed a route that took them past MIT on Mass. Ave., shown in the photo above, and then along Memorial Drive.

And if that's not enough about MIT, get this: The Doonesbury comic strip is now featuring MIT since Alex, one of its characters, is a fictional member of the class of 2010, just like my nephew Jamie.  The author did a straw poll of his readership to determine which school this character should go to. Here are some details from the Doonesbury Town Hall.

"The... Straw Poll invited readers to choose among three academic futures for Alex Doonesbury: Should she go to Rennselaer, Cornell, or MIT? Voting was brisk. Wait, let us rephrase that: Voting was insane, rampant, ingenious, and impressively ruthless. An MIT student put up "Doonesbury Voting Hack", a web site (adorned with art borrowed from the Town Hall) which enabled would-be-ballot-stuffers to spew out over a million votes in a single night. "We're all running cgi hack scripts" lol'd one MIT blogger, "I've voted 3 or 4 thousand times!" Fortunately the prophylactic measures swiftly implemented by the DTH's crack tech crew kept most of the votes from making it into the poll.

The idea of outing the main culprit was briefly considered (a 5'8", 115-lb. freshman from New York -- it's amazing what you can find out about a person online), but as he left a clear trail and probably didn't expect the hack to be as successful as it was, it seemed enough to deny the MIT network access to our servers. Besides, we had to take his thoughtfulness into account: "Please," he cautioned on the updated version of his hack site, "only keep one instance of the program running at a time so we don't kill the server again."

Meanwhile Rennselaer had also stepped up to the plate -- or rather made their own attempt to move it. As campus blog entries indicate, token reservations were overcome ("It would be entirely unethical of me to stuff a ballot box, or suggest any others use the same, with command lines such as...") and a curl was disseminated, intended to accomplish pretty what the MIT script had done using Flash. The Rensselaer effort was less successful -- still, several hundred thousand votes bounced off our servers. By the time a handful of indy hackers made their run at the Straw Poll, the ballot box was adequately unstuffable.

Cornell blogage shows that students there were watching the fray ("Me thinks the site is being bombarded by a script war between Troy and Cambridge..."), but a higher, or more urgent, course was taken. ("We're at a disadvantage, because we've got finals now and presumably no one has the free time to write a Cornell spamming script.") The Cornell alumni office had early-on taken an above-board interest, alerting alums to the situation and urging them to vote, but this effort did not bring Cornellians to the poll in numbers sufficient for Big Red to catch up. "We're obviously not trying hard enough to cheat," lamented a dismayed blogger. However, students and alums managed to post many passionate, articulate, humorous, and convincing posts on our Blowback [link] page, all making the case that Alex should head to Ithaca. In acknowledgement of this impressive and moving effort, the Doonesbury Town Hall is pleased to award Cornell the Doonesbury Straw Poll Congeniality Award.

As for the question at hand -- Where will Alex go to school? -- the will, chutzpah, and bodacious craft of the voting public will be respected. A careful check of the applicable rulebook indicates that queering the results was not specifically prohibited. And by tradition, engineers, hackers and techfolk will assume that in a problem-solving situation of this nature, there is no box out of which they are not expected to climb. The Doonesbury Town Hall thanks all those who took the time and trouble to vote, even those who voted only once."

As you can imagine, my lifelong boycott of Doonsbury ended today as I perused the archives for the MIT-related strips.  Apparently they brought up MIT as early as 1996 (1)(2), but only brought MIT back into the storyline within the past year. 

I'm so excited...

The same site had a map available to detail your U.S. travels too...