Mid morning I headed to the airport… Which in Houston is an hour away. The city is both deeply familiar and all new. I spent so much of my youth here.
The inside of the airport is all shiny and new, but the outside is still the same as it was 50 years ago when I first started coming here… Can’t believe it’s been that long
Got on the plane and classic Houston… Humidity was so high when the AC came on the whole plane filled up with what look like smoke… It was actually fog. I was sitting next to a really nice woman from Merida Mexico… She didn’t speak any English and she was asking me about what was going on in my pretty rusty Spanish. I told her about the steam… We ended up talking the whole trip, which was pretty good for my language exercise for the day. She was really cool. She was a lawyer just going to see her daughter who lives in Pennsylvania. It was good that we were on here because we were very late getting out because of weather in Chicago and she was going to miss her flight, but so we were gonna try to find her somebody to speak to Spanish too, but it turns out that the wheelchair person who came to get her spoke Spanish so that was great… Also the guy to my right in the seat spoke Spanish because he was from Peru so we all had a pretty good conversation.
It was a two stop return… I had to go to Chicago and then go to Dulles… The flight out of Dallas was super super late and kept getting later… I’ve got Two meal vouchers and but had already eaten so I bought a whole bunch of candy and started handing it out to the people who’ve been waiting for a couple of hours… It was really fun. People seem to like it.
I spent the day hanging out with Billy Mishaun and the kids doing different stuff. First Billy and I went to the center for device innovation (CDI) his workshop for biomedical entrepreneurs. My nephew Chris has a job there now and is crushing it.
Billy has a collection of a lot of his inventions, including this which is a device for central line insertion that he and I built over Covid. It’s the foundation for a company called Obvius robotics.
here are just some of the iterations we went through
there was a team of reporters and a photographer there to get billys survival story. he’s a huge deal in houston.. in the feild. in the world. and his miraculous recovery from such a devastating health issue makes him an even huger thing. .I
there were lots of pics and vids of billy doign stuff. playign gutiar, talkign to chirs, showing his inventions.. it truly is an amazing story
theres a virtual museum in there of billys inventions..
his office is a very fun hot mess
His latest project is to try to get flow videos of a model of the Bivacor heart spinning in an MRI machine . It can’t have anything ferrous in it because of the magnet and it can’t be made out of metal because we need to be able to see it so he’s 3-D printed a version of the pump that has the same internal geometries
Billy and I headed out after the interview to get lunch and to go test this thing in the MRI.… You drove by the old Astrodome. Brings back memories.
We went to a really great sushi restaurant… It’s pretty funny. We walked in and some woman was sitting there and she jumped up sort of standard “you’re alive!”… Everybody knows Billy story here… She’s some sort of a innovation officer at one of these places and everybody is amazed to see him up and walking around and working.
After lunch, we went to Billy’s radiology friends. They had a 1.5 Tesla MRI and we had it for several hours just to goof around. There was an amazing radiology tech there and she had some great ideas on how to get contrast in this device. Basically, we filled it with ultrasonic glue that’s used to image body cavities… We put the device inside the magnet and start imaging… What came out was amazing. Billy and Kris are now working on more complete model that will be watertight and will actually have a motor driving it… Though the motor has to be in a completely different room because of the magnetic field. We had to take off all metal before we walked in there… It’s serious business people are killed every couple of years by walking in with metal chains around their neck or something like that, they get sucked into the magnet.
then we started gettign images.. it was very cool !
From there, we went to the end event… It was fun seeing everybody who got talk, but by the time the tox had really started Billy was running out of steam. He still tires very easily so he went back to the house and did take out. It was nice seeing our friends and me though.
One strange and sad thing as we drove up to the house, we got out of the car and there was a little kitten there… It didn’t look very well. It hadn’t been hurt or anything, but it walked under the car and wouldn’t come out… CSean and Billy and I tried to get it out and even tried to feed it, but it wouldn’t eat or anything… The poor thing didn’t make it through the night. It was a stray and we couldn’t quite figure out what it happened to it… It was really sad.
Berto did take out from a really amazing vegan place for us… super good
wonderful visit.. heading home in the morning. really glad I came down even for such a short visit
Today is Gabe’s 31st birthday ! .. Hard to beleive its already been a year since his defense. He’s done alot in ths past year .. buggest thing is moving to Germany. He’s such an amazing human.. so fun and so smart. Wishing him hthe best birthday.. We love you so much Gabe !
heres what we recorded for him on the tower last week during the full moon .
Today flew down to Houston for EnMed meeting tomorrow. My main motivation to do it in person was to see my brother… Is you remember he had a major health incident back in February 7 but he is doing so great… I just wanted to see him for a bit in person. It was really really fun… Got down to Houston headed to the house. Got to see my sister-in-law, CSean and their kids and Andy the dog…
I love going to their place… So full of interesting people and interesting stuff.
Really glad to see Billy do it so well… It’s absolutely a miracle and amazing
Not much happened today… Just lots of work. I did take some time to photograph my. VoMIT bottle opener that I moved for all of my Vermonts Own MIT (VoMIT) club. .. I was document it for our “show Intel channel at work.… My friend Ty, and I created it for people to share their side projects.
