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…

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.

Woke up relatively early. Shy’s residence is a block away from Queen Street. We took a small walk around downtown Toronto. The atmosphere on Younge Street is similar to Burrad at Waterfront in Vancouver. Folks who do not want to have eye contact. Cold.

Another interesting fact: unlike Vancouver, streets and avenues do not always intersect. The concept of intersecting streets is a little confusing for a Vancouverite.

Our big item on the itinerary for the day was attending a camp site near Toronto. This was about an hour and a half northwest of Toronto near Orangeville. These were people who had received a major scholarship (~ $60,000) at some point in their lives. It’s good to mix with people from other faculties once in a while (broadens your knowledge.) Most of these guys are majors in one of the soft sciences (politics, economics or international development.) We had some very stimulating conversations. Of course, I threw in my two cents about HIV strains, green engineering and other things I wish I knew more about.

Over dinner, I got to talk to some people about my career plans. As you are nearing your graduation, people seem to be keen in asking questions about your future, whether or not they actually care about your answer. I got a few tips which I think I’ll look into more closely.

I had brought my sleeping bag, so we were able to sleep outside for the night (hoping it wouldn’t rain.) Ofcourse, it did rain and we had to move inside. This would be the start of what would be the week of disturbed sleep. It’s probably worth it.

We didn’t have much to do for the day at the camp site. We left.

At Shy’s place, we watched six episodes of 24 one after the other. Wasted.

Later in the day, we registered at the New College residence at the UofT. My first task was to establish rapport with other delegates. Only two delegates were local, the rest were from Queens, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Université de Sherbrooke, Manitoba, Western, UBC, SFU, UVic, Saskatchewan and ofcourse Toronto. I’ve already seen some of the guys at a previous conference at Calgary, but it was good to meet the rest.

Our first outing was to the CN tower in downtown. It was initially built as a communication tower, but later opened up to the public (I think.) I personally think the tower is worth atleast one visit. The pictures I took didn’t come out that well (poor lighting.)

To further localize and prepare ourselves for the big nights to come, we walked all the way to Richmond Street. This was supposed to be one of the most happening places in Toronto. Had dinner and went to bed early.

Shayan was at the airport to pick me up. My body was quite sore from the travel (about three thousand kilometers from Vancouver.) To top it off, WestJet cuts costs by not serving any meals. People can be annoying too. The girl sitting next to me on the flight asked me if I was going to Toronto as well. No shit. I was hungry, angry and tired. To “forget my sorrows,” we went right away to a pub.

We went to what could be called the biggest pub in the world. For the alcoholics amongst us, the Madison Avenue Pub has 150 draft taps. Four bars, three floors and fifteen minutes later we finally found his friends. Random chit-chat, much of which I can’t remember.

We head back to Shy’s place. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. More catching up to do. Finally hit the sacks at 5 in the morning.

A great way to start a vacation.

(image credits Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing)

I’ve always wanted to visit Eastern Canada. This summer I got an opportunity to do so. I’ve been admitted to a complimentary education course on biodesign at the University of Toronto. It’s a five day course on the topics: Bioethics, Genetics and Biotechnology, Biomimicry, Genetic Circuits and Bioinformatics, and Cybernetics. I haven’t had a chance to go through the course material yet (we’ve already been assigned readings.)

Apart from the course, I’ll get to see folks who have had a positive consequence in my life in some form or other. I’ll be seeing Shayan, Yony and my brother, all of them from a small university near Toronto. I’ll probably also get to see my perima’s mattuponnu’s anna’s … (cousin ) family.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand, I received a travel advisory from my travel agent politely requesting me not to carry any form of liquid on the plane. This is after the recent terrorist plot. I’ve copied the text verbatim so that you folks can join me in the hilarity:

… Mothers travelling with infants & young children can carry milk in bottles ONLY and NOT milk powder. The mothers MUST be prepared to test drink some milk from the bottles in the presence of security staff to prove that the content in bottles is really milk. … Inconvenience caused to our customers is regretted.

Stay tuned.