Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches
ethanrosenthal.com
ethanrosenthal.com
There are many similarities between this man’s project and mine. And if I had his knowledge I may have cracked my problem by now and would have new way to detect heart attacks early.
It seems the primary way to detect regional wall motion abnormalities is with speckle tracking, which requires way too much post-processing for a clinician.
A system that segments the left ventricle and finds akinetic regions in realtime from a parasternal long axis view or an apical four chamber view would be pretty nifty.
If you know of a paper or system that does this now then please let me know. I would love for someone else to have solved this, haha.
My email is Davidm.Crockett [at] Utah.edu
Kudos for advancing the human race.
[0] http://iacl.ece.jhu.edu/~prince/pubs/2003-TMI-Yezzi-Thicknes...
What I mean is, rather than developing a segmentation algorithm and then a motion detection algorithm, why not just feed a bunch of frames into a CNN and have it directly predict "heart attack risk"?
Or is the segment-then-motion-detect approach necessary because of its better explainability?
I guess I view the end-to-end approach as being less fiddly than the more traditional computational imaging approach. And it has a bonus. If data is available, you could feed it historical ultrasound data from patients that later had heart attacks. With that, it's possible it will learn other features of an ultrasound that predict future heart attack.
The current datasets are just labeled anatomy at end systole and diastole.
Great questions, and you highlight the need for shared ultrasound data.
For intracranial pressure did you look at ocular ultrasound? How did that work out? Did you have ICPs from actual bolted patients for the gold standard / ground truth? That would be incredibly useful especially in patients on a ventilator who can’t provide a neuro exam.
Pneumothorax seems tricky since really it requires a lung point for diagnosis, and those can be hard to find. Did you simply look for lung sliding? That’s all a physician really needs to make an informed diagnosis.
I love hearing about this. Thank you for the work you do
[Edit] add word toasted.
I make that comparison because if you do a search for hyperfocus, you may be able to find strategies to help you break out.
For me, hyperfocusing can be so strong that hours will pass with me barely noticing. I often say that the house could burn down around me and if I am hyperfocusing, I'd be toast. I don't get it for multiple days as you describe, but it's not unheard of for others. My dad is a metallurgical engineer, and described something basically exactly the same to your experience with programming. He had some lab course involving programming freshman year and stayed in the lab for 24 hours straight obsessed with a project. When he broke out of the 'trance,' he realized that he could never be a programmer full time because it would completely take over his life.
For others who maybe aren't familiar with this feeling, it is most definitely NOT a pleasant feeling. I always come out of that state feeling almost sick to my stomach, headachy, dissociated. Not something I enjoy, and not really something I can direct to be more productive.
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(Note that it may sound odd to describe hyperfocusing as an ADHD symptom -- isn't ADHD about a deficit of attention? But actually ADHD is kind of a misnomer; a better name might be "Executive Functioning Disorder." ADHD is more about being unable to direct or control your focus, and this can work either way -- to make you appear less focused, or severely over-focused. In particular this symptom is not a side effect of medication, and in fact medication can help to break out or prevent you from being sucked in in the first place.)
Slice ripe bananas into a reusable sandwich bag, pretty much in a layer (not a frozen clump) so you can break off a part of the layer, and freeze. Later semi-defrost and throw in a smoothie or protein shake. Never throw away an over-ripe banana again.
it's one of the few sandwich formats that tastes better squished, and it stores very well, so it's kind of the ideal food for stuffing into your bike jersey or ski jacket and eating on the go.
I've found that I can get excellent consistency in coverage by slicing the banana vertically to get long rectangular slices and then laying the slices side-by-side - generally about 4-5 across.
If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I’m not a sociopath.
1. Apply peanut butter to bread. (Copious amounts. I prefer Adam's.)
1. Peel banana and cut length-wise. Place one half across top of bread where the loaf curves. Use curve of banana to match curve of bread. Cut off part of banana that hangs off.
2. Invert other half of banana and place it parallel to first piece, slightly tucked under. Cut overhang.
3. Take the two overhanging pieces, and place them next to each other on the remaining third of the bread.
With a properly sized banana and loaf, this provides almost perfect uniform banana coverage, requires only three cuts, and dirties only one knife.
(Of course, as someone who does not eat banana sandwiches, I have no idea of such an end is even desirable.)
This method is not guaranteed to use all the bread.
Smear peanut butter on the bread, NOW tear up the bread, and apply the peanut-butter-smeared shreds to the (peeled) banana.
Still the same primary advantage as pliny's method, same primary drawback (may not exhaust the bread), but we've solved the structure problem that you raise.
I feel the trend-line here is looking good; with a few more iterations, we may reach the true ideal PB&B sandwich.
I do not understand the whole bread and bananas thing. Do as the wife says and make a slice down the middle. add peanut butter and put the two halves back together, and slice in segments. No bread is best.
1) http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
Despite its obvious optimality, the Homogenous Mush approach creates extra dishes. So, as a lazy undergrad, I used the circles method for a long time. Sometime in grad school I had the long-cut epiphany, and tend to do that most of the time now.
(The other downside of the circular method is that they're more likely to try to jump out of the sandwich, since they have less contact area.)
Oh, and one other solution, which is great for long bike rides: Switch out the bread for a flour tortilla, and throw some honey in the mix as well. Fits in an undersaddle bag and beats the hell out of a clif bar.
Honestly, I never considered slicing that way before so besides an interesting read I also learned a new technique for making these kinds of sandwiches!
Although it's not a straightforward process a series of Vorononoi polygons makes a pretty good Centreline. I think it might work for bananas.
https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/318721/creating-cent...
I'm impressed, but also, I really hope the author is doing ok.
This has been a tough year for everyone.
Lately my go-to PB&* sandwich has been peanut butter and kale. Yes, PB&K. Toast the bread, spread peanut butter on each slice, pile up some baby kale in the middle and smash it together.
No machine learning needed. Sometimes brute force algorithms are best!
To make a really great PB&K or just about any sandwich, if you're in the Palo Alto area visit the downtown Palo Alto farmers' market on a Saturday morning and get either of:
1. The big fat sourdough English muffins from the bakers across Gilman from the produce vendors, or
2. Any loaf from the bakers on the Gilman sidewalk next to the produce vendors, or
Better yet, just get both!
Now a pro tip on peanut butter. We usually get the salted crunchy from Trader Joe's, but it is a pain to stir it up when you open it. The "microwave for 30-60 seconds before stirring" trick helps, but I found something even better.
This was in one of those "71 weird tricks" listicles, but you won't believe what happened next: it turned out to actually work!
Store the peanut butter jar upside down. Then for a few days before opening it, shake it up a few times each day and keep it upside down. After a few days of that, it will be easy to stir.
You can smash a pitcher full of kale leaves and balance it out with just a tablespoon of PB. Not that making everything taste divine is always the end goal, but it was surprisingly difficult to find an ingredient that balances out the taste of kale.
Maybe the banana ratio is too high in that case. I'll have to try it.
Additionally, sometimes I'll take a slice, break it into smaller pieces, and put the smaller pieces in-between the gaps of the other slices. Or I'll be a monster and just layer the slices...
My wife just came up with the idea of slicing the bananas sides off to make the slices square. That way you'd also be able to pack in that banana far more efficiently.
Others also have mentioned mashing the banana and spreading it.
An optimal pb + b sandwich must contain not just circle pieces, but pie slices of circular slices at well. All those gaps left by the circles could be filled with little fractions of circles.
If you really want to use the bread, mash the banana and spread it on one slice, spread the peanut butter on the other and put them together.
I would modify the fitness function to do something like subtract from the score the area of the largest circle which could be drawn over a bread-only section. This would deal with your having a very unsatisfying empty bottom right corner in your last example.
I don’t think they’re really that elliptical in practice. Banana slices are nearly circular.
Dip in honey. Enjoy with a glass of milk or cup of coffee
Boy that sounds like sugar on top of sugar on top of sugar.
Elvis Presley used to rouse his crew in Memphis, herd them onto his private jet, and fly to Denver to get what he called the greatest PB&B in the world.
> If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I’m not a sociopath
Ignoring that you called your wife a sociopath for the moment... I'm one for peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, personally. I've made some danged optimal ones, too, slicing them lengthwise. Pickles are interesting because you can bend them and make a curved cut with a straight knife, and the slice lays flat. And then your packing problem has an added constraint because the slices are beveled. You need a smaller number of slices, so picking the proper thickness is actually the hardest part. Of course, I eat my mistakes, so the reinforcement phase is rather busted.
Slice 1 in your final packing typifies my complaint with slicing on the round: it will fall out of the sandwich. This is especially true with pickles. Lengthwise slices result in a more structurally resilient sandwich.
OTOH bananas do have an easy mode: smash and spread. If your wife was actually a sociopath, that's probably what she'd do. But maybe just don't badmouth your wife; our industry has a misogyny problem and that's an ugly pattern.