I’m now a proud owner of an Apple iPhone 3G. There are tons of reviews out there that you can lookup, but here’s mine with the purpose of getting-shit-done:

Pros:

• The easiest phone on the planet. This has got to be one of the most usable devices I’ve ever used. Everything from looking up contacts, syncing, WiFi is so easy.
• Native syncing with Exchange. Hate duplicate copies of my contacts.
• Inbuilt music player.
• Seamless integration with my Mac.
• Volume controls as physical buttons on the outside unlike the iPod Touch.

Cons:

• The touch screen is “cool” for a few minutes but not usable. I regularly lookup information on my phone while driving — this practice will now have to stop.
• Web browsing on the phone isn’t even marginally useful for me.
• GPS isn’t very good. That’s OK because I got a real GPS unit.
• 50% battery charge in two days. Wow. In a year, I’ll need to keep the phone plugged in at all times.
• Sluggish. Skips music when syncing contacts.
• The alarm module is less useful than my 4 year Nokia phone.

Computational Anatomy is “the use of mathematical analysis to learn how tissues grow, assume new shapes and morph into mature structures.” The first few classes are review of the pre-requisites – linear systems theory and stochastic systems. Having not taken either of these courses, I’m seeing plenty of new material. A lot of it is intuitive, some of it not obvious at all. Overall a Good Thing.

I don’t have a copy of the outline yet, but some of the topics we are going to cover are vector space theory, variational calculus, differential and riemannian geometry, tensor analysis and applications in Computational Anatomy. An example of an application is what I’ve just finished writing — linear statistical analysis to classify the hippocampus in dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.

I’ll be posting about things that I find interesting here. If you’re in the class and want to follow along, a quick way to do so if by bookmarking the tag: ensc462.

Amazing set of screenshots from the palantir blog.

Palantir is building an enterprise platform for analysis of financial and intelligence data. Analysts at government agencies across investigative and intelligence realms are experiencing tremendous analytical challenges managing the tidal wave of information that flows across their desks and throughout their knowledge networks. Palantir Government provides a new way of exploring, understanding, and sharing these large sets of structured and unstructured information across departmental and organizational lines. Similarly, Palantir Financial is a powerful new analytical platform for approaching and understanding financial markets. For decades, traders and economists have struggled with conventional financial and statistical software to explore the financial world. With Palantir, analysts directly explore and manipulate dynamic financial concepts. Properties and connections amongst a vast array of time series, time periods, macroeconomic trends and events, and exotic hedge fund strategies can be discovered, published and shared, unlocking organizational knowledge.

Design firms thehappycorp, IDEO and Ziba design were asked to redesign the terminal, and the above is IDEO’s proof of concept. I like this a lot.

The Crystal Weather Station from Oregon Scientific sports a kick-ass form factor. It has laser engraved 3D icons of sun, clouds and rain in crystal and a radio controlled digital clock. You can even change the display mode between the time and indoor temperature with a wave of the hand.

Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics platform uses elements from Google Finance. You can click and drag a “window” to focus on a period of interest.

British History Timeline

BBC recently released an interactive Flash program to explore British history from the Neolithic (nothing much to see here) ages to today. This is very useful to our history discussions we have often in the lab.

Google Timeline View

At a conference last week, Google releases a couple of new interfaces to its engine. The timeline view plots the frequency of occurrence of search keywords. (I was talking to a friend about nanotechnology last week, and used this feature to show him when the hype peaked.)

Jon Hicks has a quick introduction to various typography terms. Have you ever found yourself wondering what line-width, em and serif were? Or what font is appropriate for headings and content? Then, this presentation is for you. His presentation also has a list of related links.

I was surprised to find out that Lucida Grande is the default font on Max OSX. The default font in Keynote is Gill Sans, so I assumed it was same throughout. Gill Sans is one of my favorite fonts.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

I come across so many things in the world that are just beautiful. I’ll try to post some of my experiences in this newly created category. It’ll mostly be pointers to things other people have created.

[I'll avoid the philosophical question about good science being art.]