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In August of 2023, I finished the first draft of my doctoral thesis. In light of this major accomplishment, I decided it was time to slow down the pace of my life. Going to the park is a calming and slow task, exactly what I need, but I am genuinely incapable of doing anything the slow, simple or easy way. So I am visiting every park in New York City, and placing markers on a map I made in MapBox. I'll also be editing Wikipedia, whose list of NYC parks is incomplete.

Suppose you have two point-sets in 3-D space, related by a rotation and translation – in the presence of some noise, how can you determine this relationship given only the point-sets? This problem is one of registration, i.e. determining which points in each point-set correspond to one another. Quaternions are very useful for representing 3-D rotation, but their use in solving this registration problem is poorly, and sometimes erroneously documented. In this post, I wish to provide a more comprehensive view of how quaternions function, and their role in volume registration, as well as correct one publication's major errors. Image: The product relationships for the quaternion basis elements, 1, i, j and k.

This blog post describes a personal project in which I created a command line program in Python to help me practice Japanese "on the side" while I work. Features include: standard flashcard-style vocab study, japanese text-to-speech for pronunciation, webscraping for "words of the day" and a companion Discord bot! While the program is geared towards my study of Japanese language, it can easily be modified to suit any language with a few tweaks. Image: Fuji-san Station Hotel, Mt. Fuji (富士山) in background.

This is my first blog post on the use of spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) for measuring three-dimensional micromechanical motions in the organ of Corti complex (OCC), the mammalian hearing organ. In this first post, I will be covering the theory behind OCT imaging and vibrometry, and discussing why this modality is so well-suited for the study of cochlear micromechanics. Image: Thorlabs Telesto III SD-OCT system.