Ganesh Swami

I just came back from an awesome 10-day trip to China. We visited 5 cities: Shangai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Xi’an and Beijing. We drove to Suzhou and Hangzhou from Shangai, flew to Xi’an from Hangzhou and took the overnight train to Beijing from Xi’an.

Only a part-time job

The highlight of the trip was The Great Wall. I was completely blown away — it was nothing like I expected!

The Great Wall

The experiences are far too many for me to write about, so I’ll let you see my photos instead.

Not. Dead. Yet.

A couple of months back, I got a chance to go to Stanford for a conference. I took the opportunity to visit a couple of my friends in the area. It was a blast!

Though I doubt if they’ll continue to remain my friends: I put almost 400 miles (ugh…metric units) on his car in two days! Living in Mountain View, we visited San Francisco twice, Berkeley once, Stanford twice (or thrice?) We went around almost all major tech companies in the valley.

I’ve heard about a lot of tech companies being in the same area, but I didn’t expect them to be so densely concentrated. As my friend says, “you can change your job without really changing where you park your car!” So true.

One of the things I really wanted to do is to have authentic Mexican cuisine (none of that Taco Bell crap.) We went to two places: La Fiesta in Mountain View and another one I can’t recall in San Francisco (it’s by the beach.) My friend remarked that he has had better, but I’ll have to start somewhere. I’ll be in San Diego and Austin (i.e., closer to the Mexican border) later this year, and I guess I can re-fulfill that wish again.

One of the things that really irked me was how often people pull out their car. Here in Vancouver, I always walk a couple of blocks to the corner grocery store or for breakfast or anything for that matter. For breakfast, we pulled out the car, drove on the freeway, and landed at House of Pancakes. For lunch, we pulled out the car, drove on the freeway, and landed at a restaurant. For buying a razor at Safeway, we pulled….you get the picture.

Day five started out with a visit to the rehab department at Mount Sinai Hospital. One of my previous projects Voiceture used a glove that could be used for rehabilitation purposes as well. The most impressive project was the use of a new kind of polymer that shows an effect opposite of piezoelectricity, ie stretches or compresses based on electric pulses. This could then be hooked onto the nerves to make artificial limbs. Lots of cool ideas to think about.

The second half of the day was spent at the Much Music broadcast station. This building broadcasts about 50 television and radio stations. Lots of cool technology being used here.

All of day six was spent at a biomimicry session. I’ll make a separate post on this later.

Day seven was time to pack up and go home. By this time, my brain was being overloaded with information. That is all.

Today started out with a tour of the IBBME building in the morning. This is a 100 million dollar building built specifically for cross disciplinary collaboration between Engineering, Dentistry and Medicine. To start off, we were given an introductory presentation by Professor Christopher Yip. We were then taken to different sections of the building where each graduate student gave us a brief description of his work. Two really cool things I saw: a polymer that can be used to cure bed sores (this is considered a medical device rather than a drug by the FDA, leading to a much shorter time-to-market.) The second was stem cells that were differentiated to be from the heart. You could actually see the cells beating under the microscope!

The second half of the course was a session by a recent biomedical engineering graduate of the UofT. She works for Baylis Medical Company as a research abd development engineer. Baylis is mainly into high-technology cardiology, pain management, and radiology products (pulled that from the website.) She gave a brief overview of chronic pains that occur due to the extra growth of nerve cells onto the spinal disc. Until recently, you had two kinds of treatments in the market. Completely non-invasive, but ineffective treatment used infrared rays. This had to be done quite often. The other extreme was opening up body and cutting out the nerves, but this was super invasive and expensive. The middle ground was to burn (literally) off these extra nerve growth.

Part of the talk was a design competition. The task was to come up with a design that would burn off these nerves. She showed us Baylis’ first prototype device, and designs used by competitors. There were ten teams in total and all of them came up with an over-engineered solution (including mine.) My team, which consisted of Mahkameh Lakzadeh and Hamed Valizadehasi from the University of British Columbia came up with a product called the AccuHeat. The design Baylis is current producing happened to be our first design we rejected because it was far too simple. Clearly, school wasn’t teaching us enough.

We then had a tour of downtown Toronto by bus. This bus takes you through the streets of downtown and the host tells us a bit of history about each significant landmark. Did you know that the Hudson’s Bay company was the oldest company of the British Commonwealth and Canada (until it was bought by an American company.) Or that Dave Chapelle’s show was house-full at 350 dollars a pop today? Or that five (or six) of the biggest hospitals of Toronto are concentrated in one block? So much fodder for Toronto trivia…

We also had a boat cruise from downtown Toronto. I had a major problem taking pictures in the dark. Darkness is caused by the scarcity of light (if you didn’t already know this.) To account for this, we either increase the aperture, or increase the exposure time. Increasing the exposure time only works if the image is static, which is definitely not so in a moving boat. The result is a bunch of blurred images. It was a fun ride, and the only complaint I had was ridiculously expensive drinks on board. That’s where the disguised orange juice comes into the picture…

After that, I took a bunch of guys to the Madison Pub which Shy showed me on Friday. All the walking had made me really tired, so I left early and went straight to bed. ZZZ…

Today was the first official day of the course. Breakfast was part of the deal, but you had to wake up early. Coffee tasted like shit. No, I’ve never tasted shit.

The first talk was by Prof. Ross Ethier on biomechanics. The most interesting part of his talk were the details of hemodynamics (blood dynamics) projects from his lab. He compared mouse hemodynamics with that of humans to study arterial diseases based on blood flow patterns. Contrary to intuition, the blood flow patterns in mice are completely different from that of humans. If you’re familiar with fluid dynamics, you’d know that one of the key characterizations of fluid flow is the Reynolds number. This dimensionless constant marks the boundary between laminar and turbulent flow. The constant for mice is atleast a magnitude different from that of humans. Doing a literature search on pubmed for “mice hemodynamics” brings up more than 3000 articles, most of them incorrectly drawing parallels between mice and human. Needless to say, scientists in biomechanics were quite unhappy with his findings.

Atherosclerosis is a common disease affecting the aeterial blood vessel. What’s interesting is that there is no non-invansive way to check for plaques in blood vessels. We only come to know of one from the symptomns, which are usually a myocardial infarction (heart attack) or a stroke. By then it might be too late - tissues/cells in the heart/brain die from the lack of blood.

The second talk was by Prof. Stephen Davies on genetic circuitry. He built analogies between TTL and protein networks to build very simple logic elements such as NAND gates. That was the gist of his talk - the rest was rushed and I couldn’t follow it.

The third talk was on tissue engineering. The lecturer was a biologist and used words that I’ve never heard before. All I learnt from the talk was that stem cells are cells that haven’t been differentiated yet.

Our next stop was MaRS, an incubator for startup companies. If you didn’t already know, an incubator is a place where you’d rent space, network, receptionist and other things that a company needs. It was pretty cool is see about twenty companies in a small alley. The latter half of the visit was networking with Dr. Tony Redpath, the Venture Group Advisor at MaRS. I had so many questions for him that I had to skip lunch. BTW, if you’re looking for something like the Vancouver Enterprise Forum in Toronto, try the Toronto Venture Group. They have regular breakfast meetings.

We then headed out to the Steamwhistle Brewery. This is one of the local beers from Toronto. The guide took us through the entire brewing process. Another piece of trivia, beer in brown bottles hold the cold far longer than plain or green bottles. Brown is Good.

That is all.