• Save your mental resources; distractions also take energy.
• Attention is a limited and valuable resource
• Take control

• High self-esteem/sense of self-worth
• High goals
• Persistence
• Strong self-confidence
• Determination
• Optimism
• Enthusiasm
• Strong physical drives
• Integrity/honesty

To push your brain to its optimal function, the brain must be

• fully hydrated. Drink water a lot.
• Balance diet
• Do not eat too much; but, little and often.

• The brain loves to explore new thing and makes sense of the world
• The brain likes to make connections
• The brain thrives on patterns
• The brain loves to imitate
• The brain does not perform well under too much stress

Ref: Power Up Your Mind by Bill Lucas, London, 2001

I think in many things American is so lucky; in the past, they have so many great leaders. One, I really admire, is Benjamin Franklin. Do not know much about him, I read his autobiography when I was in Japan. A week ago somehow crossed my mind to buy the book again. I missed a few good stories in there.

The one, I missed, is Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Goals; a table that shown his planning along a day. According to the table, he started his day at 05.00, and begun with a good question: What good shall I do today? He did some regular stuffs until 08.00, then work from 08.00 until 12.00.

Stop for lunch, and evaluated his day from 12.00 until 14.00. Then worked again from 14.00 until 17.00. From 17.00 until 22.00, he evaluted his day with a question: What have I done today? besides brought things back to their place, did some conversation and had some mucis, and went to bed.

I think that is a good way to run a life.

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• Relaxation precedes perfect concentration
• Mental freedom. Avoid three devils: hurry, worry, and fear
• Seek a quite place
• Definite schedule

I hate to see both word together, but they often appear that way. When I visited the city last time, the security was tight. Every hotel has security guards that check your car and scan everyone. But imagine if they have to do the same thing for years, as a matter of fact they did, without any thing peculiar happenning. Doing those things for years would wear them down, which is quite normal.However, I did not say this is the case for the last bomb.

Another thing, they did scan every car: visually check inside each car; opening the car trunk, running a scanning tool across it; and done. If one purposely want to attack, it is not hard the by pass the security system. Off-course, it is also difficult to increase the security level because that will make the system unconfortable.

It is quite a tricky problem.

Unlike many engineering materials, muscle responds to a load in a completely different manner. An engineering material, for an example: steel, will elongate when a load is applied, and at the same time, the stress will increase. For the case of muscle, the stress will increase but the muscle will not elongate until a latency time is reached. The above figure shows a typical response of muscle when a constant load is applied; such a test is called a isotonic test. The more peculiar phenomenon is that the latency time is different depending on the magnitude of the applied load. Furthermore, the muscle elongate shorter when the load is bigger. How does such thing happen? How to implement such a phenomenon in FEM?

FeG

I just realized many books in the finite element method like to provide a list of computer codes. I guess that authors of those books believed that without those code, teaching the finite element method will be less effective.

But I wonder whether they understand that to understand the encripted and verbose compute codes are extremely hard. That is one reason that I prefer to write the code than to read someone code. Why not those writer employ a pseudo code approach?

I should write a book with this approach.

Just read a section of Introduction to Biomedical Engineering. The section focuses on the role played by biomedical engineers. There are three roles:

• as a clinical engineer in a healtch care system, who works together with a life scientist to provide their engineering expertise;
• as a biomedical design engineer in an industry, who designs tools and instruments;
• as a biomedical scientist in a research institution, who develop a model to further study a biological process.

Whatever the role you play, the biomedical engineer should become a true partner of a biological scientist.An the ultimate role is one that provide benefits to the society at large.

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