Russell's Blog

The eye doctor in Davis confirmed that my magical eye bubble is central serous retinopathy. Here's a much better picture (now also on Wikimedia Commons).

That volcano-shaped thing is supposed to be a little pit (that's what "fovea" means).

I'm a bit pissed off that the Zeiss optical coherence tomography machine that the doctor used to take this image evidently keeps the data locked up in a proprietary format, and can only exchange data with other Zeiss products. The doctor says he can't even save a screenshot. The only way I could get this picture was by snapping a photo of the display with my phone.

I'm impressed with the technology, and I'm happy to pay for it. It's much better than the machine used to take the image in my first post about this, and allowed for a quick and unambiguous diagnosis. I just don't want to pay more for it than it actually costs. Ziess is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook here by leveraging proprietary data formats and locked-down data sharing to coerce doctors into buying their equipment instead of someone else's. Except, the stakes are higher for medical products.

About three days ago, I noticed a funny purple splotch in the middle of my right eye's visual field. It looked sort of like the splotch you'd get after seeing a camera flash, so I figured it would go away. Instead of going away, the next day it was bigger and darker. The day after, it was dark enough that I couldn't read with my right eye.

So, I decided it was time to put my health insurance to work -- which was pretty naive of me. Since I'm away from campus, I had to get a referral from an emergency room doctor (Anthem will only accept referrals from the UC Davis campus health center, or from an emergency room MD). Neither the cost of the emergency room visit nor the eye doctor was enough to exceed the deductible, so it all came out of my pocket (and Mimi's pocket). The deductible resets at the end of the year, which is in about a week. Lame.

Anyway, I was worried that it was some sort of retinal detachment, and was relieved to learn that it wasn't. Evidently, I have what amounts to a watter blister under my retina. Here it is :

Evidently, these things are usually stress-induced. Weird.

Also, I thought this was pretty neat. Here's my optic nerve :

Cool, huh?

Update : Well, the bubble got a lot bigger today, but space distortion started to go down. I think that means it's widening and flattening. I read up a bit about this kind of problem, and they are almost stereotypically associated with stress-addicts. I didn't think the last quarter was particularly stressful -- I rather enjoyed it. I've certainly had academic terms where I felt a lot more stress.

Usually, when I notice stress, it means that I'm feeling really unhappy about what I'm doing. The normal effect of that feeling is to make it harder to do whatever it is I'm doing, which I've always vaguely regarded as personal weakness. But if I can push myself hard enough to get blisters under my retina when I'm happily chugging along on my work, that makes my loss of productivity when I'm unhappy seem a lot more rational. I can almost imagine that it's a safety valve to prevent me from burning myself out -- at least on something that sucks.

So, I'm going to take this as a good thing. I've never been able to excel at classes I don't like, even when I found them to be very easy. No matter how motivated I was to "just get it done" (the advice of practically everyone in my life), something always sapped my energy. I'd pile on effort, and find that the effort required for the task seemed jump up just enough to absorb most of the extra effort I put in. But being unhappy and being under stress are not the same thing.

So, if I cheerfully worked myself into a stress-induced retinal blister, that's a pretty good indication that I've found something that bypasses my brain's "this sucks" filter. Now, I suppose I'll have to stop relying on my weirdly strong disgust with things that are boring to protect me from injuring myself. That's not a bad problem to have, actually.

Of course, all of this could be utter hogwash. I might have given myself a mystery eye bubble by reading all of John Scalzi's books in a week.

I've been tinkering with a little data visualization applet for looking at bicycle crash data in Davis, and I thought this map might be interesting to people. This is a image was generated with Google Maps and a heatmap overlay generated with a gheat tile server.

This is for 168 bicycle accidents that happened between 2004 and 2006. I have a lot more data, but 95% of the work in this little project involves parsing and renormalizing it. Evidently, police reports are not written with data processing in mind! I suppose that makes perfect sense. An officer at the scene of an accident probably has things on her mind besides generating a nice, easy to parse data point for future analysis. The priority seems to be completeness, rather than consistency. My parsing code, for example, has to be able to correctly detect and calculate distances measured in units of "feeet".

I'll release the applet here once I make an interface for it (and get the rest of the data imported). Stay tuned.

I've been puzzling over how to go about manipulating the NEF RAW images my camera produces. Obviously, it is better in principle to shoot in RAW than in JPEG, but the tools for editing RAW files under Linux do not seem to be very far along. For example, The Gimp doesn't natively support them. But that isn't to say there are no tools. Rawstudio provides pretty solid toolbox of basic manipulations. I can finally fix up the colors in some of my favorite shots.

Now, if only I had some good way of doing demosaicing, I'd be all set.