The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

Monthly Image: Male Mammogram

This is not the Monthly Image I had scheduled for today…

A few weeks ago I reported to my doctor that I had a pressure-sensitive lump in my right breast. This happened the very next day:

Left-right Mammogram

It’s a composite of two mammogram images, of my left and right breasts, respectively, with the small white dots marking the obvious targets and the ring above the right dot surrounding a mole. You will be unsurprised to know that the radio-opaque markers came on cheery flowered stickers:

Radio-opaque targets

According to the American Cancer Society, about 2400 men will receive a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2014 and 430 men will die; those guys vanish in the roundoff of women’s breast cancer.

Given such small numbers, what you see up there on the right is almost certainly an unusually tender and mostly unilateral case of gynecomastia, which was the diagnosis relayed from the radiologist after the imaging. Because things are different for guys, there’s an appointment with an oncologist (yes, she specializes in breast cancer) and, perhaps, some biopsy samples in my immediate future.

They triage the appointment schedule based on radiographic evidence. Fortunately, I’m not on the hot list.

Potential oversharing ahead …

Some browsing with the obvious keywords shows that side effects of the blood pressure dope I was taking last year probably triggered my symptoms, with calcium channel blockers and spironolactone the most directly implicated drugs. It turns out that my blood pressure seems OK without drugs (now that they moved the goal posts for my age bracket, anyway), but we devoted half a year to discovering that nothing produced much of a direct effect and the side effects were completely unacceptable.

Protip: it’s probably not worth reducing a male’s androgen levels just to see if his blood pressure goes down. [sigh]

Back to the usual tech stuff …

Returning home with a CD of digital images in hand, I found that, unlike those older X-ray images, feeding these DICOM images (all sporting informative names like IN000001) into the current version of Imagemagick‘s convert triggers a segfault. Rummaging in the repositories produced a dedicated conversion program:

medcon -f IN* -c png

… which grinds away on the DICOM files and spits out PNG image files with the same names prefixed with an ascending sequence number of the form m000-. A burst of Perl regex line noise removes the prefixes:

rename 's/m[\d]{3}-//' *png

Figuring that out neatly diverted my mind from the Main Topic for a while…

Let this be an example to him who would be admonished: ask the Lady of your life for a preliminary checkup. She’ll know how to recognize what you didn’t think to check.

[Update:

The oncologist says I have a classic, textbook case of gynecomastia; if her med students weren’t on break, she’d use me as an example.

About 10% of males taking spironolactone for blood pressure control develop gynecomastia, typically in only one breast. Absent any other signs, there’s no need for biopsy samples or surgical intervention. The symptoms generally resolve within a year after discontinuing spironolactone.

Should the symptoms persist and become objectionable, treatments include surgery or tamoxifen… but I’m not down with that.]

2014-03-15
Snowfall vs. Mailbox

After getting two feet of snow over the course of a few days, the snowbank at the end of the driveway absorbed the mailbox:

End of Driveway Snowbank

I try to gnaw a path closer to the mailbox for the USPS delivery truck, but it was pretty much a losing battle against the DOT snowplows.

Later that day, we carved the top off the banks on both sides to improve the sightlines along the road. After a week, we were once again comfortable making a left turn…

For perspective, after the 2011 Snowtober event, the DOT crew parked the shredder in front of the same bushes you can see in the top picture:

NYS DOT crew grinding branches

2014-03-02
Price Scanner: Connection Refused

I loves me some good error message:

Price Scanner – Connection Refused

A closer look:

Price Scanner – Connection Refused – Detail

If the popup appeared just one pixel lower, you could easily decode the message behind it; perhaps * Out of Service * fits?

At least it doesn’t show an OK? button.

2014-02-16
Oxygen Sensor Wrench Pricing

The price for this specialized wrench used to extract oxygen sensors took a big jump some time after I added a link to it:

Northern Tool Sensor Socket – Absurd Lowest Price

Were it not for the very specific part number that’s certainly not available anywhere else, you could take advantage of their “Guaranteed Lowest Prices” to make a quick $494.

As my buddy dBm puts it: “Such a deal!”

2014-02-10
Powers of Two: The List

A few sheets of fanfold “computer paper” emerged while tossing stuff out. The first page suggests somebody was trying out some simple programming:

Powers of 2 Listing – top

Seven pages later, you can tell an extended-precision library was hard at work:

Powers of 2 Listing – bottom

This being mainframe line printer paper, somebody must have donated it to my heap; I have no memory of ever doing (or needing to do) extended-precision math. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

More than you care to know about Powers of Two.

2014-02-09
Bent Tap: Huh?

The Shapeways bronze-infused stainless steel process reportedly produces objects so hard that they require carbide tooling, so I wasn’t too surprised when this magazine block rounded the threads right off a tap:

Browning Hi-Power magazine – steel block trial fit

The tap turned up while I was clearing off the bench and, seeing as how the upper half of the threads weren’t ruined, I thought maybe I could at least get a bottoming tap out of it.

Step 1: snap off the damaged part. This should be easy, as tap steel tends to punish you when you’re not doing it right. So I grabbed the ruined section in the bench vise and gave the shank a stiff whack:

Bent tap

Now, that is not a nominal outcome…

The tap came from a set of dubious provenance that’s conspicuously labeled: JUNK METRIC. I have no idea where it came from, as it’s slightly younger than dirt. There’s a Craftsman metric set in the same drawer with much better steel (yes, I’ve snapped a few taps) that I normally use; I figured if I was going to wreck a tap on that magazine block, I should wreck a junk tap.

Maybe that Shapeways stainless isn’t quite as nasty as it seems…

2014-01-25
Unsealed Camera Box

Used to be, back in the day, that when you got a box full of shiny new electronics, it bore stickers: “Do not accept if seal is broken” or “Factory sealed” or “Genuine product” or something like that. When you slit the seal, you had some confidence that the last person to look in the box sat at the end of their production line; I’ll grant you that counterfeit stickers have become cheap & readily available, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Nowadays, a shiny new Canon camera arrives in a box with a tab tucked into a slit:

Canon Camera box – unopened and unsealed

The box looked unopened and everything inside seemed in order, but … even though I’d seen this before on other cameras, it’s still disconcerting.

I’m unsure of the story about laminate flooring in the camera box.

2014-01-18