I used to work in the Nishi lab; now I'm in grad school.
6/21/2009
The rush of time feels like a lion's charge, I am batted about by great paws. The claws, fortunately, remain retracted, but there is no guarantee of this.
Taking a break, wandering on the internet, I find an interesting writeup of Sanford Palay's life in research. This quote spoke to me:
By 1952 important technical advances had been made in preparing tissue for electron microscopy. As Sandy pointed out in one of his later publications (1992,1), "Palade had introduced his Veronal buffered osmium tetroxide for optimal fixation of tissues. Borysko, Swerdlow and colleagues had introduced a satisfactory method for embedding tissue in butyl methacrylate, and Harrison Latta had invented a way to break plate glass into useful knives for thin sectioning."
How exciting it must have been, to have this technique finally start to work. I think it's reasonable to hope that the current crop of innovations in electron microscopy imaging methods will converge in a similar fashion.
5/19/2009
Classic:
user: "Test suites are your friend."
Paul Graham: "You are my test suite, friend."
5/3/2009
My friend Dan complains I haven't written anything here in a while. So, a quick note on transparency.
3/4/2009
A good epitaph: "He didn't dabble, he plunged."
2/11/2009
The morning's web browsing conjunction: This post on Slashdot, That xkcd comic.
2/6/2009
Some thoughts on the professional numerology of my field.
1/10/2009
Good New Year's todo list from Frank Rich.
10/26/2008
"In strategy it is necessary to treat training as a part of normal life with your spirit unchanging."
(Good quote from something I'm looking at right now.)
8/22/2008
When a man of a certain height, and a certain dignity, reaches a certain age, he may come to seem craggy. In other news, today in line to buy my coffee, I noticed the person ahead of me was none other than E.O. Wilson.
6/22/2008
This from the New York Times:
"Lane Departure Warning (LDW) reads the lane markings on the road and, with some help from its buddy, Lane Departure Prevention, drags the brakes on the opposite side of the car to pull you back into your lane and away from yet more things you might crash into."
It seems our vehicles are starting to turn into Braitenberg Vehicles.
I first encountered Braitenburg in a robotics class at Brown (with Leslie Kaelbling), where his book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology motivated our little proto-Mindstorms projects.
Ten years later, in my new world of EM reconstruction, I learned that Braitenberg is actually one of the anatomy greats; an anatomist who thinks (well) about function.
6/19/2008
6/17/2008
4/28/2008
4/21/2008
3/20/2008
In other news, went to CSHL, embedded some 2p Ca-imaged mouse brains, and am going to PSC tomorrow for a day. Very unnatural? Then, per Paul Graham, that might mean I am not as extreme as my friend Ken Hayworth. But I don't want to think that. So, let me believe instead that pg's assertion is not commutative.
3/3/2008
2/7/2008
There's no learning
You will meet
Something there about the futility of thinking too hard and regretting too much.
1/16/2008
By contrast, selling his Harley, which he would have paid off this year, was pure torture. He had owned a Harley since he was 20, and weekend cruising with pals was his favorite recreation.
"The buyer said he wanted to take it away in the back of a trailer," Mr. Evans recalled, "and I said, 'That won't happen.'"
"Instead I drove it to his house, threw him the keys, came home and got drunk."
12/1/2007
I interviewed with him at Caltech when I was applying to grad schools, back when he was only 82 or so. My interview with him was completely different from any of the others. Instead of interviewing me one-on-one, in an office, he brought me into a small lunchroom into which all of the members of his lab were packed. And then he asked me why I thought organisms age, whether or not there was a single common mechanism shared between species, or if it was a more statistical process of various bits and pieces of machinery breaking until a catastrophic system collapse occurred. And members of his lab started chiming in with their thoughts. It was intense and interesting, and I liked him.
11/24/2007
...do not build yourself up on false hopes...do not even attempt to undertake this project unless you are resolved to spend a great deal of time upon it. But if you have a year or two to apply yourself to all that is necessary, I would hope that we might see, by your efforts, if there are animals on the moon.
Perhaps relatedly, today Slashdot has linked to a little article in MIT's Technology Review, covering Sebastian Seung's talk at Society for Neuroscience.
Christiaan Huygens also worked on designs for lens fabrication, somewhat less abstractly than Descartes. A note on one of his diagrams resonated with me. Huygens ended up grinding all of his lenses by hand.
11/16/2007
11/2/2007
There are scarcely a dozen men in the world trained in his techniques and zealous or well counseled to apply them. This is due in part to his very great success, for he went so far ahead of neurophysiology that for many years we could make little use of the knowledge he had given us.
Today our electrical techniques are diminishing his lead, and we are beginning to apply all of the anatomical information he has bequeathed to us concerning certain structures. We are rapidly approaching so intimate a knowledge of their functions that we have - for the first time - a right to ask the neuroanatomist for more details.
Fifty years later, I find that my current purpose is to help fulfill this request.
10/24/2007
10/23/2007
9/30/2007
9/22/2007
9/15/2007
"I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk. Protection of property rights, so critical to a market economy, requires a critical mass of owners to sustain political support."
This is interesting. Really interesting. He didn't just set monetary to optimize the economy; he set monetary policy to increase mass home ownership, expecting that these home owners would then elect politicians who would create laws in support of home ownership; and these laws, as a by-product, would strengthen property rights generally; and this general strengthening would contribute to the optimization of the economy.
Circuitous to say, but plausible enough.
8/7/2007
8/4/2007
Here's an overview
Why don't we remember our dreams?
The author of an interesting hypothesis on the function of the appendix argues against conducting experiments to test the idea:
"And in any case, why would you want to spend money to find out something that is not likely to help cure a disease?"
A remarkable attitude. One wonders if the quote is correct.
The great metaphors of our times: "At this point it's becoming painful to watch. GNU Emacs is getting all the superdelegates. That warmonger VIM is sitting back and laughing at us. But XEmacs just won't quit!" -- Yegge on XEmacs/GNU-Emacs
Another quote: "I know every muscle. I know every nerve and every vessel in the hand. But there's so much I will never know." -- David L. Bassett.
Fun pg quote: "In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."
Slashdot posted this skateboarding dog link for other reasons, but to me the video is interesting because it shows amazing plasticity of behavior. As the dog gets up to speed, one pair of legs supports his body, while the other pair propels him and the skateboard. While coasting, he seems to shift his weight to steer in one direction or another (see especially at ~11 seconds). Nothing humans don't do routinely; but still, pretty big modifications from the normal motor patterns used by a four legged vertebrate to get around. And somehow the dog has learned to do it.
For some reason these lyrics from "Calvary" on the Levon Helm album "Dirt Farmer" resonate:
From your troubles
Or you're sure
To make them double
Your destiny
Every man
Is Calvary
As often happens, the 'zinger' comes in the last sentences of this otherwise straight-laced NY Times story, on blue-collar job loss in Ohio:
Semour Benzer has passed away.
Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest, by D. Graham Burnett, contains a good quote from Descartes, to a technician he hoped would build a machine for grinding hyperbolic lenses. Descartes correctly surmised these lenses would eliminate spherical aberrations; lacking the understanding of chromatic aberration that would come from Newton, Descartes thought a spherically correct lens would enable a new, superior class of telescope to be constructed. Here is the quote:
First time I've laughed out loud at a comic in a while: xkcd 1337 part4.
Warren McCullough (of McCullough-Pitts network fame) had this to say about Ramon y Cajal in 1953:
Whew -- intense episode.
Updated superorganism page (see 9/30 post).
Good paper: "The emergence of a superorganism through intergroup competition", Reeve HK and Holldobler B 2007 PNAS 104(23):9736-40. A bit more here. (Placeholder page; now I am going to take a walk and have a look a the setting sun.)
I always laugh at people who pack too much, but here I am the night before Janelia, wondering how many hard drives I can lug around, and if I shouldn't copy this set of files "just in case" I need to access them....
In lab, acquiring data for Janelia Farm conference on EM, I see, at end of an article on Alan Greenspan's criticism of W's fiscal policy, this justification of the low interest rates which may have led to current housing bubble troubles:
Feynman as amateur pushes some buttons...
Once in a while it's good to make something random. Today I wrote an AppleScript that goes through my email and generates a dot file for rendering by GraphViz. Each email generated two types of node: a node of the 'from' field, and a node of the 'subject' field. I rendered the from fields as text inside ovals, and the subjects as little yellow dots. This lets me see who talks to who in my email world.
Note that these are the last 1000 emails I received, not emails I sent; so, these are people talking to or cc'ing me. When multiple people are connected to a little yellow point, that means they had a discussion thread around that topic. (Except where people happened to choose the same subject, in which case a spurious link is generated.)
It's a neat view of things and of course could be messed with indefinitely, but now I have to help Heather with the art shed she's building. (And I really should be working on the gigacam control software...)
7/31/2007
From tomorrow's New York Times, we have an update on a story I've been following for a while, Retired General Is Reprimanded in Tillman Case:
Pat Tillman became a storybook figure when he decided to forsake a multimillion-dollar career in the National Football League, where he had been a star defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, to enlist in the Army after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
After his death in a remote canyon near the village of Magar, the Army announced that he was killed in combat by Afghan militants, although many officers knew that he had been a casualty of friendly fire.
[A] report by Gen. William S. Wallace concluded that [head of special operations for the Army] Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger failed to follow procedures requiring him to notify the Tillman family and top officials about the investigation into the possibility of friendly fire and then lied to two sets of investigators about when he knew that Corporal Tillman's death was caused by shots fired by fellow Army Rangers.
[Army Secretary Pete] Geren agreed with the report's recommendation that General Kensinger be censured and that a review board consider reducing him in rank to a two-star general.
This is incredible to me. The general in charge of special operations forces for the United States Army lied about why a soldier died to the soldier's family and to multiple subsequent internal investigators; the Army agrees that he lied; and basically, as far as I can tell, this guy just ends up with a slap on the wrist; the Army is going to 'consider' reducing him by one rank!
It's hard for me to understand this.
And how does the guy's family feel about this stern action?
Mr. Tillman's family has been withering in its criticism of the military. His mother, Mary Tillman, offered a pre-emptive dismissal of Tuesday's actions, telling a columnist [that] a possible demotion of General Kensinger and other actions would be a "complete donkey show."
A show by asses, or for them?
5/21/2007
Interesting how the path of degradation in a gracefully degrading, man-made system can itself be fruitful:
Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, completed their original three-month prime missions in April 2004. Both are still operating, though showing signs of age. One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. That churning has exposed several patches of bright soil, leading to some of Spirit's biggest discoveries at Gusev, including this recent discovery.
5/20/2007
Episode I (of I?) is out.
5/18/2007
Reid lab, 1:30am. Seven members of the lab here, three 2-photon calcium imaging experiments running, everyone here will be awake for another three hours if not longer. Nothing to see here, move along. The sheer unremarked normalcy of it is what seems, in of itself, worth remarking upon in this venue.
5/11/2007
Have you ever tried to put a t-shirt on while brushing your teeth? It's not easy.
5/8/2007
As seen on this Greg Palast blog:
Palast wrote in his book, "Here's how the scheme worked. The Bush campaign mailed out letters," particularly targeting African-American soldiers sent overseas. When the letters sent to the home addresses of the soldiers came back "undeliverable" because the servicement were in Baghdad or elsewhere, the Replublican Party would, "challenge the voter's registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted."
The Republicans successfully challenged "at least one million" votes of minority voters in the 2004 election.
If this is true, it is one of the most disgusting things I've heard about our politicians in some time. And by extension, ourselves. I feel like my country is like a leper who has just begun to notice his foot is rotted and close to falling off.
4/25/2007
Many times the most interesting part of a New York Times article comes in the last paragraph or two of the story. Usually, it's a strange twist or detail that the authors throw in, that gives a sense of their perspective on what 'really' happened.
The last two paragraphs of this story, about a football star who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, and whose death the military lied about, provide an example:
The committee had wanted to hear from Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, the now-retired three-star general who was in charge of Army special operations and came under the heaviest criticism from military investigators for misleading information about Tillman's death.
Kensinger's attorney sent Waxman a letter last week saying that if Kensinger were called to testify he would refuse to answer questions, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
4/4/2007
Best April Fool's joke I've seen this year, mostly because it was a good hack of liberal froth (mine included) over Karl Rove's use of non-White House servers for email, and it brought up an interesting idea:
"Ten, or even five, years ago, the idea of "technology" in the popular consciousness meant hardware and software packages. Tools on a desktop, to help run your business. Today, we understand that the idea of technology has come to mean networked layers of influence, information and even innuendo. These are also tools, which bounce from a million different points of origination, helping run your business."
3/16/2007
I spend a lot of time using Windows and Mac these days. I like things and don't like things about both. But I just had a thought: maybe the partisans of each side are people who feel productive if a task takes a few too many clicks ("I'm working hard, now! Even if it is mindless repetition."), and who feel savvy and cutting edge if they're looking at good graphic design ("This is slick. I use good tools! I'm smart because I choose good tools."). Respectively.
Though I don't know too many Windows partisans any more, and I like OS X better.
3/7/2007
This post is just for Google, in case somebody finds the following information useful: Unibrain Fireboard800 ubcore drivers do not currently work under Windows XP Pro x64. Here is an email between Unibrain and me about this.
2/26/2007
A pretty useless article in Time Magazine entitled The New Map of the Brain leads with a pretty good one liner, pertinent to my life, certainly: "Trying to map the brain has always been cartography for fools."
2/23/2007
Heather got up from her debilitating cold in the middle of the night while I was reading about NSObject, looked in on me with squinty eyes, and asked, "Davi, have you ever seen an amoeba?"
I thought about it for a second, and said, "Yeah."
"You have?"
"Yeah, in high school. They're cool."
And with that she shuffled off back to bed.
2/18/2007
A journalist vents about his difficulties in accessing reality in Iraq, and in the process shows a bit more of it than is usual.
And here we have a barely corroborated first-person account of life as an American detainee in Iraq. In the beginning of the article, the former prisoner describes how he was too afraid to check the box on his release document saying he had been abused. Later in the article, a spokesman for the prison said "Every use of less than lethal force, to include use of Tasers, is formally reported by facility leadership, ensuring soldiers are in accordance with proper use. Touching a Taser to someone's tongue is not one of the approved uses."
To me this has the whiff of a bureaucracy that believes its own b.s. Bureaucracies like this are comical when depicted in Dilbert. Not so much here.
Broken bureaucracy is also screwing our returning soldiers, as described in this Washington Post article on outpatient life at Walter Reed Hospital. The article depicts veterans with PTSD and multiple amputations living amongst cockroaches and rats with drug dealers outside, who are forced to navigate a medical bureaucracy that makes our civilian hospitals look like bastions of friendly efficiency. The article describes one social worker who spent a year trying to get money to improve things, only to be stymied by "a Psychiatry Department functionary [who] held up the rest of the money because she feared that buying a lot of recreational equipment close to Christmas would trigger an audit." He resigned in frustration.
This again reminds me of our national response to Katrina.
1/27/2007
I wrote a couple of letters today. Who knows what they'll achieve, or if they're any good? But these days it seems better to participate than to spectate, even modestly.
To the New York Times:
To the Editor:
Re "The Bait-and-Switch White House" (editorial, Jan. 27):
You assert that there is "no limit" to the Bush administration's "disdain for the powers of Congress" and its "assault on the rule of law." I fear the other ways this White House might be unlimited. I can readily imagine, sometime in the next two years, watching Dick Cheney justify an administration use of tactical nuclear weapons in the War on Terror.
We cannot afford to simply wait out this administration. Who knows what else it will do? Somehow, we must place limits on this new, malignant form of the executive branch.
Davi Bock
To my representative in congress, Barney Frank:
To The Honorable Barney Frank:
I support your co-sponsorship with John Murtha of a resolution calling for immediate redeployment from Iraq. Thank you for you work on this matter.
In the face of troop surges, aircraft carrier mobilizations to the Persian Gulf, and escalating conflict with Iranian forces on Iraqi soil, I urge you to exert whatever preemptive restraint you can upon this administration under our system of checks and balances. This is higher priority than your rightful initiative to investigate disbursement of appropriations for the Iraq war. Your cosponsorship of H.J.RES.14, "Concerning the use of military force by the United States against Iran"is a step in the right direction. However, it fails to delineate whether the president is authorized to engage with Iranian forces on Iraqi soil.
Thank you for considering this letter.
- Davi Bock
1/10/2007
It should be clear that each of us has a distinct reality, which is the product of, and a substrate for, natural selection.
11/26/2006
Disgusting, yet entirely plausible. As seen on reddit.
In other news, I woke up at 4am and did not fall back asleep. I got up at 6am and walked to Dunkin Donuts, had an egg and cheese bagel and a coffee, and then walked around Brookline. I wandered aimlessly. I stopped and looked at things that caught my eye: a flyer for some New Age Christian guy, the homey interior design of Chobee Hoy Associates, the disheveled appearance of Temple Sinai, the mosaic pattern on the flaking bark of a tall sycamore tree, the erosion of the limestone corners on a church steeple.
Aimless wandering, entering a mode where small things can intrude into the stream of thought, where the stream itself is just a thin trickle. A rare event in my increasingly unidimensional-seeming life. I dream of EM cameras!
11/8/2006
At this moment (1:24 AM), it is just possible that the Democrats will take over the Senate in addition to the House. I am working late building infrastructure to support a 2x2 array of homebrewed transmission electron microscopy cameras.
9/20/2006
Katrina-like incompetence in the Green Zone. These people were criminally inept.
9/11/2006
We are the ecosystem.
8/16/2006
Why I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and you should be too.
8/11/2006
Examining this page, it becomes apparent how often our collective attention can become fatal.
6/25/2006
You can see me driving the busycle around here (click on the 6/7/06 link). Ah, fame.
6/9/2006
The world is a very strange place. Here, we have multimillionaire hedge fund managers decked out in designer "hippy" clothes conducting business and cricket at a convention called Hedgestock.
Choice quote, regarding the band (which had Pete Townshend as front man): "'Ringo Starr's son was the drummer, and he was fantastic,' Jeremy Polturak, with Solent Capital, said."
6/6/2006
Noah's suitcases. Gah.
Today I have my qualifying exam. I defend my proposed research in front of an exam committee. The committee's members are free to ask me anything they like, about my proposal or otherwise. Once they pass me, I will be cleared to begin my thesis research. I'm feeling a little uptight, though everyone assures me that of all the stresses of graduate school, this one is comparatively minor.
Looking forward to getting back to work on data generation, and to enjoying some of this summer.
4/30/2006
Working day and night gathering preliminary data for my qualifying exam. A sustained push unlike any since finals during the semester at Brown when I took four tough science classes at once and decided to get A's in them all. Both events reek of insanity; yet the odor this time seems somewhat more wholesome. Or at least more self-generated.
Also, good contemporary protest songs at neilyoung.com, "Living with War" album. I like "Let's Impeach the President." Also "America the Beautiful."
4/25/2006
Priceless Bush quote on NPR today: "Ethanol is good for drivers."
4/19/2006
Let me just say that I appreciate the fact that Apple apps (Mail, TextEdit) often have Emacs keybindings.
4/10/2006
3/15/2006
Also it seems my host city has always had traffic problems.
3/14/2006
Sixth grade was an incredibly charged, painful, exciting time. I became aware of girls, of social viciousness, of my own position in a swirling hierarchy, and all the rest. A lot happened in sixth grade. But here I am, a (putatively) grown man, and all of that happened twenty years ago. And other things, even more significant, happened fifteen, ten, five years ago. I remember watching Star Wars at the drive-in theater, laying on a blanket on the hood of a car, seeing Obi-Wan tell the Storm Trooper that these were not the droids he was looking for. I liked the flying car they were in. That was 28 years ago!
So what? Well, a large span of time has passed, and yet I remain resolutely fixated on the present and its immediate neighbors. I do not particularly feel the weight of my past on my present. I just live here and now, for the most part. All that other stuff that happened, well, it happened. But it's not like I sense the amount of time it took to happen. Now, extrapolate: when I am 80, it will pretty much feel the same as it does now. There will just be a larger backstory.
And that time fifty years from now is coming, and its arrival will be as strangely sudden as the arrival of this time now. I anticipate my own bewilderment.
2/27/2006
2/14/2006
2/2/2006
1/26/2006
1/24/2006
So what am I doing here? The fact is, I am working harder than I ever have before, and am more into what I'm doing than I've ever been before. I don't know if it will last, but I am doing it for its own sake. I have faith that the work I'm doing has the potential to contribute to our understanding of how the brain works in a fundamental way; and even more importantly, I like doing it. (It's similar to how I liked playing with Legos when I was a kid, except more intense.) The difficulties and risks intrinsic to the career I'm headed toward are outweighed by the satisfaction I am getting from my work. Maybe someday I will have to pay the debt (of opportunity cost) I am incurring now, and sweat bullets trying to get a job as an itinerant teacher at community colleges, or be unable to pay for my kids' braces -- but it is good now, very good, and worth the poor odds.
(And maybe someday I'll read this post with rueful nostalgia...but the present is good.)
1/9/2006
1/4/2006
12/19/2005
Vice President Dick Cheney defended the program on Sunday as necessary and legal.
"It is consistent with the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief," he said in an interview that will be broadcast Monday night on the ABC program "Nightline."
What action, then, would be inconsistent with the president's authority? Behold the certainty of these children of privilege, so sure that the state would never do harm to anyone good.
12/9/2005
Sykes in Montserrat that reached a cafC) on the Marais waterfront in
Paris. Where someone would answer a call for a blackbird. I remember.
Someone did and we followed him. Youre not going to like this. Alex
Conklin is about to earn the prick-of-the-year award. He put us on to
Sykes, didnt he? Yes. Do tell. The message was delivered to the home of
the director of the DeuxiC(me Bureau. My God! Wed better turn that over
to the SED branch of French intelligence with a restricted chronology.
Im not turning anything over to anybody until we hear from Conklin. We
owe him that much-I think.
This piece of spam is approaching the status of some sort of weird digital sculpture. And it taught me a new word, escutcheon. Just the thing for a dark, snow-bound December day.
In other news, an addition to the parkour post of some time ago.
11/21/2005
11/3/2005
Hi,
In other news, I am recovered from a debilitatingly vomitous bout of food poisoning, possibly from leftovers in my fridge.
In still more news (I think this is the first time I've posted twice in one day), it has now become clear that the world will have to be a very different place before I ever run a Windows machine again. There are too many companies and criminals who can make too much money undermining these machines. Witness these two articles, citing Sony (article 1) and Blizzard (makers of the video game Warcraft; article 2), for doing very sneaky and privacy-gobbling things to Windows users. Once in a while Slashdot is good for something...update 11/10/05: see this post from the EFF listing afflicted CDs.
10/29/2005
"Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson's name from the C.I.A. and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the C.I.A. to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence."
'Faith-based intelligence', that's pretty good. In other news, at some point in the recent past my new niece.
10/24/2005
10/17/2005
10/6/2005
However, classrooms of chanting acolytes -- even well-funded ones -- are not known for their productivity. Doing must be done, and soon.
10/4/2005
9/25/2005
9/5/2005
9/4/2005
9/3/2005
9/1/2005
In other news, frustration in the lab, and to some extent, at an impasse. Or at least a pause to take stock of approaches & think of what to do next. Up in Maine last weekend with Heather at my landlords' cabin in Maine (which they built themselves), up near Acadia National Park. Beautiful. Hard to come back to Boston, as usual.
8/25/2005
8/19/2005
8/1/2005
7/30/2005
Now, this level of diligence is fairly unprecedented in my life. Is it transient? Sustainable? I don't know, but the strange thing is it doesn't feel like work.
7/17/2005
One good thing though is that with the web, I can quickly pick up the gist of abstruse jargon -- e.g., what the hell is a "Hidden Markov Model"? Just now I was able to find out the gist in five minutes. When I was a teenager + college student, getting the gist of something was much harder. I was confronted with big expensive books I couldn't understand, or courses with ten prerequisites. The new era is much kinder to the generalist (and dilettante).
7/14/2005
The night before last I dreamt I held my own brain in my hands, and could slide the cerebellum and pons up and down the brainstem and upper spinal cord. It was grey and flecked with dark bits, like the dark background resulting from a nickel/cobalt+diaminobenzidine horseradish peroxidase stain...and last night I dreamt that I looked at my own skull, from the behind, and the back half was removed, so I could see the back surface of the bones at the front of my face. I scratched off with a fingernail some of the plaque I saw accumulated on the backs of my teeth.
Tomorrow I am going to Grey Fox bluegrass festival with Heather, where I will drink Labatt Blue and walk around with bare feet and most likely take great pleasure in my entity-hood.
7/2/2005
In other news, I've gotten my first data of my rotation in the Reid lab. (Injection of DiI into mouse vitreous, two days post-injection, labeling optic tract, LGN, and superior colliculus. 4x.)
6/16/2005
6/14/2005
Few senators reported gifts in 2004, but some were unusual. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, received a 10-inch .50-caliber handgun made by Smith & Wesson worth about $950, enough to require a special waiver from the Senate Ethics Committee, records show.
The gun was a gift from a college friend. Mr. Leahy was an award-winning marksman in college, and, though he is mostly blind in one eye, continues to count target shooting as one of two primary hobbies, said his spokesman, David Carle.
"The other is photography," Mr. Carle said.
There's something about this that just pleases me: the image of my home state senator -- the half-blind Deadhead, the stalwart of quiet and reasonable liberalism, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the target of Dick Cheney's curses and swears -- taking careful aim and firing shots out of his hand cannon down at the range. Vermont has had in recent times a disproportionate influence on our nation, and a beneficial one I think.
6/10/2005
6/5/2005
5/26/2005
In other news, I am a liberal sucker. My hope that John McCain might take up the cause of prisoner torture is misplaced, as a recent New Yorker article (May 30, 2005) makes clear:
McCain emphasized that he agrees with the Bush Administration's decision that the Geneva Conventions be applied in this selective way. And he made it plain that he was unwilling to constrain interrogators, in certain situations. ... I reminded him that torture doesn't work, because eventually the victim will do or say whatever his torturers want, as McCain did when he signed a confession in Vietnam. "Yes," he said, "but in that kind of situation, thousands of lives at risk, you have to do something, try whatever you can."
Thanks to the New Yorker for bringing this position to my attention.
5/22/2005
Regarding the shape, it may be considered as the path for nerve impulses, and as such, the purpose of the plurality of cell processes would be to multiply the associations and establish the solidarity and continuity of cell functions.
-- Texture of the Nervous System, Vol. III (Springer-Verlag, 2002; p. 483)
I should point out that in quoting Cajal, I join the legion of mildly self-important neuroscientists who, by invoking the eminent Ramon y Cajal, seek an to exude aura of erudition. But so what? He was a great scientist. Pictures of him and some of his drawings can be seen here. While I'm on the topic, a very nice page from another great anatomist, Valverde, can be found here. It has good figures and interesting quotes.
5/20/2005
Dear Senator McCain,
You were a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and by all accounts acquitted yourself heroically. An article in today's New York Times ("In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths", NYTimes 5/20/05) describes the systematic use, by U.S. soldiers, of the same sort of tactics that were used on you.
I donated to your campaign in 2000 because although I disagree with some of your positions, you stood out as a man of integrity and commitment to doing the right thing. At that time, I was concerned about campaign finance law, and I still am. This current issue is in many ways more important to me. It is about basic human decency, and it is about the rule of law in our own democracy. These were not isolated incidents, they were systemic. If there is no high level accountability for the continued unlawful, unjust, and inhumane treatment of our prisoners, what exactly are we fighting to defend? Our material existence, or the set of principles which we hold most dear?
Hopefully enough people feel the way I do that the staff members who (might) read this letter will elevate the matter to your attention. I think you are one of the few people in Washington who has the credibility and clout to do something about this. To be torturing others as we were once tortured dishonors the memories of our own returned, and missing, prisoners of war.
Thank you,
Davi Bock
5/17/2005
5/9/2005
The New Yorker has a 3-part series on global warming which has shifted my attitude toward the topic. First part, second part; third part is only available in press. (I will update this post once I see otherwise.) Update 5/17/05: These links are dead now, too bad. Read 'em if you can find 'em.
5/3/2005
5/2/2005
4/26/2005
4/20/2005
4/8/2005
4/7/2005
3/22/2005
3/21/2005
3/17/2005
3/7/2005
2/27/2005
2/23/2005
2/17/2005
1/27/2005
1/22/2005
1/13/2005
1/6/2005
12/24/2004
12/21/2004
12/15/2004
11/28/2004
11/11/2004
11/2/2004
10/28/2004 10/28/2004
10/26/2004
10/21/2004
10/18/2004
10/7/2004
10/5/2004
9/25/2004
9/23/2004
Unrelated: I noticed today that although people in our culture make visual records of every other stage of life (including in utero), we tend not to take pictures of our friends and relatives who are dying. (At least, I thought these observations were unrelated...but now that they're together on the page, I wonder.)
9/20/2004
9/14/2004
But I am provoked to write because today, there's another round of orientation, this time on the main campus in Cambridge -- and having escaped all that, I am sitting in Widener library updating this web site. The library is mammoth and marble, and only accessible to people with Harvard IDs. Sliding plexiglass panels fold gently out of your way once you swipe your ID. The room I'm sitting in has 30 foot high ceilings and wood-paneled walls and 2 foot diameter marble pillars -- and this is the frickin' computer room. OK, so this is the lavish heritage of my chosen institution, the kind of thing people think of when they think, "Harvard". Well I'm over on the Longwood medical campus anyway, I don't deal with this stuff much. But it's still here. Pretty good, in its way.
9/8/2004
In stark contrast, today was the first day of classes. Three hours of lecture. I learned that I've forgotten what capacitance is. Somehow the fact of this new life is snapping into focus now, producing an ineffable feeling. Like, here it is. A long-anticipated life, begun. Walked home in the rain, mostly in the woods along the Riverway. This thin band of trees and footbridges and mucky river is my corridor to school. Turn on the iPod, and you can't hear the nearby commuter traffic as much. It's a nice walk, about 40 minutes long. I'm grateful not to be driving to Woburn for the programming job anymore.
This weekend, they're taking us (just the neuro students) to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod, for an orientation weekend. Get to know other students in the program, talk a little science, do some drinking together. I guess I'll jump into the ocean, too.
9/6/2004
9/2/2004
8/26/2004
8/19/2004
8/17/2004
8/16/2004
8/10/2004
8/3/2004
In other news, I got a gmail account, which makes me feel good, even though I don't need it now. (Update: this post made a few people think this is my new email address. It's not, my email address is dbockATdavibock.net (substitute @ for AT). The Gmail account is just cool because it's well implemented, and it comes with 1GB of online storage.)
7/29/2004
7/28/2004
Hill-rolling consists of finding a very steep, grass-covered hillside and
running down it as fast as you can and diving head first, and doing a roll. My
left arm hits first, and gets a bit scraped -- and then you roll on your back,
then bounce off your right leg, which also gets a bit scraped. And you spring
up, run forward, and do it again, until you run out of hill. Not exactly
brilliant, I know, but fun as hell. Sort of like X-Games for rednecks.
Anyway, I was doing it on a patch of hillside that was fresh-mown hayfield, so
I guess there was poison ivy right where I landed during one (or more) of the
rolls, and I couldn't see it because the field had just been mown. The poison
ivy rash started where the scrapes were from hill-rolling, on my left arm and
right leg. And I guess I scraped off the top layers of skin, and really jammed
the poison ivy oil in there, in the dermal layer, and that's why the reaction
was so strong.
I discovered and refined hillrolling technique on snow-covered sledding hills, and only later extended the discipline to include snowless hills.
7/20/2004
7/19/2004
Unfortunately, the skin on my left forearm has become porous as a result of poison ivy (acquired during one of my now traditional bouts of Grey Fox hill-rolling; the left forearm is the first body part to hit during the roll, and some skin gets chafed off -- so I think I must've rolled right through some mown poison ivy on the hillside). I had it bandaged today while working on the emu web site, to avoid dripping clear orange ooze everywhere. I changed the bandages twice during work, and took them off during the drive home. I had to hold my elbow off to the side to keep it from dripping all over my lap while I was driving. My right knee and leg are also oozing some. Yuck.
Also at Grey Fox I took up sphere play, and brought home an overpriced acrylic ball to continue messing around with it.
7/12/2004
7/10/2004
7/7/2004
6/28/2004
6/22/2004
6/16/2004
6/10/2004
6/8/2004
5/28/2004
5/11/2004
5/6/2004
4/22/2004
The main organizers of the talk went to Palestine this winter, and produced a pamphlet based on emails home during their visit. One of them (Hilary Martin) had this to say:
I have always believed that in spite of the polarization in this conflict, each side so directly affects the other side that they are essentially inseparable. I do believe that working to resolve human rights abuses that are committed by Israel is synonymous with working for a stronger and more sustainable Israel.
This seems pretty right-on to me.
4/15/2004
4/11/2004
4/9/2004
3/24/2004
In unrelated news, I still haven't decided where to go to grad school. Though I dislike giving astrology people any more grist for their selective mill, I think my Libra-ness is showing.
3/16/2004
3/14/2004
3/13/2004
3/10/2004
Clouds.
Here I am at the recent Cold Spring Harbor Labor Laboratory conference on neuronal circuits.
I am capable of reasonably abstract thought, and my peers are in their thirties. I am in my thirties. Several of them are 32, however, and I am 31. But their turning 32 has triggered some abstract considerations. At this point in my life, I know what it is like for twenty years to have passed since, for example, I was in the sixth grade.
What fun! What joy! I have configured a dual-core dual-processor Opteron system to dual-boot Windows XP 64 and Fedora Core 4 SMP, and the latter drives a 30" Dell LCD at full resolution. What fun! O joy! Well, actually, it was quite painful and took 2.5 days. Getting closer to being able to use the thing, however.
I've made a bookmarks file for personal use. Placeholders for things I don't understand and want to explore further 'someday' (perhaps even to-day).
Disturbing elements on the web.
The dictionary that came with OS 10.4 is handy but in the last three days it has twice lacked an entry. Boustrophedonic I can understand, but bloviate? Gimme a break.
People sometimes think that because I am going to a name-brand school for an advanced degree in a field prefixed by "neuro," I am somehow destined for a good lifestyle, a life on the fast-track to someplace prestigious and comfortable. They are surprised and mildly suspicious when I tell them that as far as I can see, this is not the case. In fact I am at the bottom of a pyramid scheme, in which many more job applicants (newly minted Ph.D.'s) are produced than there are entry level tenure-track positions. Graduate students and post-docs do work, which professors publish and use as the basis for the next round of grant applications. A lab is therefore essentially a small business, with employees who last between 3 and 6 years. After you graduate, you do a post-doc or two (3-5 years each), which is sort of a twilight zone where you are not allowed to receive grants, but you are expected to function as an independent researcher. If you do well in this phase, you are brought on as tenure- or non-tenure-track faculty at a research institution, where you are given some period of time and/or money to get started. This is called "getting a job". Once you have a job, you are on your own. The university gets a cut of your grant money (roughly 40%, I believe) and you get a place to do science. Therefore the university is essentially a start-up incubator for small businesses (labs). If your business fails, you are asked to move on. Getting a chance to start up a small business (lab) is hard: there are many more post-docs looking for jobs than there are tenure-track openings. This seems to be because graduate students are cheap, and generate the scientific product of the lab, so more are trained than are needed in the long term. If you land a job, it's very difficult to get funding, which is almost entirely handed out by the government. In this context, "difficult" means that even if the funding committees think your proposal is worth funding, there is a greater than 50% chance you won't get funding, because there are many other proposals that are even better than yours. (See this recent article by the president of Rockefeller University, and this bitter diatribe.)
Complimenting me on a nice picture of ferret LGN I took, Elio Raviola said in his thick Italian accent, rolling the r's: "I am beginning to think that beneath the smoke there is some rrrrroast beef!"
On yesterday's Fresh Air interview, Bruce Springsteen says of being a rock musician: "It contextualizes your strangest behavior." This is to some extent also true of the science world. People are pretty tolerant of slightly aberrant behavior here. Makes it relaxing, actually.
Illegal NSA spying on Americans, ordered up by the White House. From an article in today's NYTimes:
These days, spam often goes to extreme lengths to evade spam filters. The resulting contortions occasionally produce a sort of strange beauty. I received a piece of spam that looked like this when viewed as HTML:
All in all, life is pretty good. We just got bumped from our very swanky temporary office into a back room in David Hubel's lab. He is a Nobel laureate, who worked out the receptive field properties of visual cells in lateral geniculate and cortex. I look to my right, and see a sheaf of portfolios laid on their side. One says, "Monkey LGB J. Neurophysiol., 1968, 29, 1115-1156 Original Drawings". Now that's pretty damned cool.
A delightful Clay-ism arrived in my inbox today, notifying members of the lab that a previously scheduled event would not be occurring:
Due to group vagueness and extraordinarily high entropy, lab meeting/lunch will be some other time.
-C
From Maureen Dowd's latest column:
I'm headed down to Kentucky today to meet with a potential collaborator for my project. I got my first EM data last week (~13.5MB tiff file, ferret lateral geniculate nucleus, retinal ganglion cell terminal shown at center of picture). Dan's characterization (below) isn't so far off, though not so much drinking at this point. The project is young, and has a lot of moving parts...the word inchoate comes to mind. There are several big-name labs around the world beginning large-scale EM reconstruction initiatives. That puts some pressure on me + my group of people to stake out a strong position relatively quickly. It feels like a technology startup -- I guess, in a way, it is.
These days, my energy is divided between
work, Heather, work, thinking about work,
decompressing from work, drinking, and work. I have
been forced to accept the help of my good friend Dan
Levin in keeping the content coming on this web page.
He is one of the most enthusiastic (and demanding)
consumers of my web page, but probably not the only
one who reads it. Time will tell if having his
version of my thoughts on this page is a good idea.
He actually wrote this, every word. For more on
self-reference in language, art, mathematics, etc. see here.
A birthday note, #31. A heady sort of day, and not because of the birthday, but because of the science...say it all together, class: "serial EM, serial EM, serial EM!"
So what's so special about this Captain Ian Fishback, that he gets an audience with McCain + Senator Carl Levin? (Continuing to watch McCain's response to torture by Americans.)
Today I rode with Heather on the busycle in the Boston 375th birthday parade. It was the busycle's debut. They worked around the clock for 2 days + nights to get it ready. I didn't think it was going to come together in time. A whole team of volunteers worked on it. It made everyone who looked at it smile, it was amazing to see that many smiles in the city of Boston. At the parade's end, we took it into the 'wild', as we pedaled our way back to where the trailer was to tow it. All these people on tour buses took our picture, and people on the street and on stoops and in their cars whipped out cameras and cell phones to take our picture. It was far out. Pretty neat. I was proud of her.
Amazing Quartz Composer compositions here.
Quartz Composer is extremely cool. Here is a little thing I whipped up. Requires OS X 10.4 and you must have developer tools installed. Here's a screenshot which doesn't convey the behavior: the spiral of spheres bunches up and whirls around as you click the mouse, and each sphere rotates about on its center. It is also possible to map live video images onto these spheres. Here is a movie of this (4.7 MB, H.264 format which I think may require Quicktime): interactivity plus neat fractal/feedback eye candy produced by pointing the video camera at the screen.
Today was the first time I saw Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, manifesting the primate that lurks within us all.
Donated money through iTunes to American Red Cross for New Orleans succor. The convenience of buying stuff on iTunes is ridiculous.
Showing Elio Raviola ferret preparation (HRP injection w/ Hamilton syringe directly into optic nerve, as it approaches chiasm), describing "rope basket" appearance of chiasm from last preparation, he says: "There's nothing like looking at things, you know?"
Lassitude breeds lassitude.
Bob Herbert of the New York Times writes about John McCain's involvement in an effort to restrict prisoner abuse. I'm pleased to read it, especially given my earlier disappointment with McCain.
Something strange is happening to me. It happened again today. I worked in the lab until 11pm on a Friday night. I talked on the phone for a while. I ate some food. I sat and browsed on the internet. Then I started browsing for resources on math, because Shawn and Nathan (two guys in my program) and I are thinking of doing group reading of Theoretical Neuroscience by Dayan and Abbott. Shawn and Nathan know more math than me, so to try to catch up a little, I began to check out wikipedia's pages on differential equations and partial derivatives. They're pretty good pages, so at 12:50am on a Friday night, here I am listening to the Eagles "Life in the Fast Lane" and reading about math stuff.
Back from Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, back to reading + thinking about science again. A good release. One hill roll, one bottle of scotch, several rainstorms, several barefoot walks down a dark steep slippery path on a moonless night (during one of which I saw for the first time foxfire), and (so far) one patch of suppurating poison ivy rash. Scuttlebutt has it that the owner of the land it's on is ill, so next year might be the last year it happens. This is not good. When I heard it, I felt for a moment that during these times, only good things are ending, and bad things are beginning.
For some reason it hits me once again what strange entities we are. My materialist outlook is solidifying: we are ensembles of atoms, proteins, tissues, organs; a musculoskeletal system dynamically interacting with gravity, compression, elasticity, load -- light passes through the transparent coating on the surface of one part of each of our eyeballs through a viscous ooze to hit astonishingly optimized proteins whose conformation changes upon absorption of a photons -- we see the world. There is a bleakness, an aridity to this viewpoint. What is the purpose of any endeavor? We are a system like any other living system: sieves filtering out some of the energy passing through us to organize entities much like ourselves, producing the next generation. The logical difference between us and a gnat is nil. Yet there is something astounding, too, which is our self-awareness, the richness of our experience of life. This part is a blessing: how is it that we should have come to this? Somehow we emote, we suffer, we enjoy. We can look at sun on the leaves of a tree and feel pleasure. This is astonishing, enough that I can almost sympathize with those who feel that there must be some spiritual or holy generator of it all. And here I am, a 30-year-old man (of some sort), thinking the thoughts normally infecting 17-year-olds (of some sort).
What does a Supreme Court Justice, retiring after 24 years, think when the President of the United states tells her, "For an old ranching girl, you turned out pretty good"?
It struck me this morning walking up the stairs at school that I am getting comfortable here, it's becoming normal. I am sharing a very swanky office space with a few other people -- large window overlooking the med school quad, about 20 feet above the ground -- temporary digs, but for the moment, very comfortable and quiet, a good place to read and think, & try to make some sense of the rodent dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus. Better than the lunch table I was parked at a few days ago.
I saw Mickey Hart at the Flynn in Burlington a few years ago. While everybody was sitting down, Pat Leahy and his wife came in and everybody gave him a spontaneous round of applause. Today I see the following at the end of an article in the New York Times:
I've discovered that Apple's shiny new search technology, Spotlight, is somewhat broken.
Small update to the stonehandling macaque page (at bottom). I am beset with a nasty cold, which I believe has increased my understanding of the aged and infirm.
I am done with classes. This is very good. My last final was due on Monday. I stayed up all night Saturday night, slept 5 hours Sunday morning, stayed up all night Sunday night, worked all day Monday, and barely handed the thing in on time at 5pm on Monday. Then I went and had some beers with people at the Squealing Pig to celebrate. Between the sleep deprivation and the celebration, I occupied a position in the continuum of consciousness that I seldom visit...but in any event it is VERY GOOD TO BE DONE WITH CLASSES. There.
Everybody loves Ramon y Cajal. Well here's what he had to say in 1904:
Here's an email I sent John McCain today about this article in the New York Times. I was pretty worked up.
It's 4:36 AM and I am looking forward to the day (Real Soon Now) when I have no more mandatory coursework to wade through. But until then, it is finals, baby, all finals. Take home, critical analysis of various papers, plus write an NIH grant on developmental neurobiology. Woot, as they say. Woot. Hm I also posted to Slashdot tonight in a way that annoyed myself. Sleepy I am. Be seeing Star Wars I will. Ah yes the unweaving of the geekish mind late at night, like a ball of dried straw rolling slowly down a dry road out on the plains, leaving bits of itself behind as the straws gently let each other go. Some of the bits drift into a mud puddle by the road, to begin the process of fossilization: these are the traces of thought here scrivened out on emacs over ssh to my host server, eventually to enter the Google cache, and then the wayback machine. Hm I hope the final I'm working on now is a little more cogent. It's certainly less interesting. (Oh and look: the wayback machine has my first thought of a personal site, fleegix.com! That's a nice discovery. Butterflies go free, very nice.)
On Thursday, I had what may have been my last required class of my life. Very nice. Though I should point out that one of my classmates has yet to hit 21 -- interesting to think I could have gotten all of this out of the way ten years ago...it is the nature of my program to be constantly humbled. The real challenge is to accept this calmly and get on with working, rather than to flail around trying to maintain my ego by demonstrating prowess. I thought I was over that sort of thing but I think I may not be -- the demonstrative urge just manifests in subtler ways. Insidious stuff. In any case, I am now back from a trip up to Vermont to visit friends & play music, and am now beginning finals in earnest. They are all take-home, which is better than the memorize-and-regurgitate routine of in-class exams. But I have two weeks of intensive reading and writing in front of me before I am finished with the semester, and with it, the coursework portion of grad school.
Continuing the streak of random, useless, interesting, + strange things to look at on the web: pennies.
People with fast internet connections should consider looking at these simulations of oscillating droplets in free fall. I'd really like to show the movie I made of 2000 55nm electron microscopy sections (from the raw data in Winfried Denk's EM paper, but it's a 650 MB file. And that's at half-size; the full size movie would be 7GB. If you know me, ask me, and I'll show it to you. It's worth seeing.
Did the Indians ever see such agility?
I got a strange message on my cell phone not too long ago...
(3 MB mp3)
Concentricircles drawings.
I've written up some longstanding ideas about pair bonding in humans.
I giving a brief talk tomorrow on my rotation in Rachel Wilson's lab. In the course of preparing for that, I scanned in some hand-written and -drawn information, including a schematic for the olfactometer I built, as well as a protocol for recording extracellularly from Drosophila antennal sensilla. Here are the drawings.
Reading the autobiography of a famous electrophysiologist, Alan Hodgkin ("Chance & Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and War", University Press 1992). Choice quote (at least to those who know a little about electrophysiology), from a letter he wrote in 1938:
"I spend my time working with single nerve fibres from crabs, which are only about 1/1000 of an inch thick. Well, the squid has one fibre which is about 50 times larger than mine and Cole has been using this and getting results which make every one else's look silly."
An hour of reading, compressed ~120:1.
A cinematic dream I had last night. I wrote the account as I woke up, and quickly, so the writing is a little rough and raw.
Good article on Google founders + process of their IPO. Choice quote:
"Most young people starting companies are afraid," says Joe Kraus, who at 21 was a founder of Excite. "They're afraid of failing. Afraid of getting it wrong. Afraid of missing their chance. Afraid, especially, of saying no to John Doerr. But these guys weren't afraid."
Goddamn right.
Coupla sentences came into my head today:
An' ye know not when he striketh, 'ware the old lion.
And
The brain is like flypaper for scientists.
It's also worth pointing out that my nephew is taking shape.
Science occupying my mind these days (besides coursework): cellular resolution functional imaging (publicly available taste here -- for more, you need a subscription to Nature) with 3D electron microscope reconstruction of neural connectivity (very cool movie here -- be patient, it's a 41MB download).
The author of the imaging study, Clay Reid, is currently teaching our "Neurobiology of Central Nervous Circuits" course.
I've written a speculative essay on stonehandling by macaques, and us.
I bombed up to Vermont with a door ajar in subzero weather....the door sealed shut with bunjie cords, cardboard, spare clothes, and plenty of packing tape. Plumes of exhaust streamed horizontally along the tops of tractor trailers, like steam-powered locomotives of yore, as I passed at 80 mph, the wind howling outside and me wearing a heavy down jacket, blasting Radiohead, the Dead, and eventually just jabbering to myself in a thick, assumed Vermont accent.
If it does not generate predictions which may be tested, it is in the realm of art and not of science. (Both can be beautiful.)
Learned a new word today, from an article by Ian Frazier in this week's New Yorker: otiose. (The Random House Unabridged has a more nuanced definition: "1. being at leisure; idle; indolent. 2. ineffective or futile. 3. superfluous or useless.") What a great word! Useful in conveying that 20-something-dunno-what-I'm-doing-with-my-life gestalt.
I like it that rms exists. Here's a recent choice quote from him: "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master--and if you use the program, he is your master." He goes on to say, "Different masters have different aims; some masters are nicer than others. However, comparing one master with another is a distraction from the real issue, which is liberty. Liberty means is not having a master. With free software, you do not have to worry about what aims the master has for developing the program, because you are free to decide for yourself." (source)
My freshman year roommate Dagan sends this link which shows people doing things I only do in recurring dreams.
From Thinking In Pictures, by Temple Grandin (an autistic feedlot designer): "Manipulating my biochemistry has not made me a completely different person, but it has been somewhat unsettling to my idea of who and what I am to be able to adjust my emotions as if I were tuning up a car." (p. 118)
From Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson: "For just when Daniel had convinced himself that his soul was a disembodied consciousness in a stone tower, perceiving the world through narrow slits, he had been given oysters. They were of the best: Roger Comstock had sent them. They made his body happy when he ate them, and affected his soul much more than seemed proper" (p. 796)
Recall from The Monkey Wrench Gang the character of George Hayduke. Well it has just come to my attention that a haiduk is a runaway serf who robs his oppressors to survive. Ol' Abbey was a funny sort.
Ween is a word. Bush must fall.
Rebuttal to my post of 10/26, courtesy of Manny Ramirez, as quoted in the New York Times: "'I went through a lot of drama during the winter, but I keep my mind positive,' Ramirez said after Game 4. 'I told my wife before the season started, "Hey, baby, this is going to be my year. This is the year." And we did it. We're the champs.'" There you have it.
It really is amazing, what that team did. Lose three games, win the next four. Then, win the next four again! Mazel tov. (3:28 am)
Nobody in the doctoral program in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School wants to bomb the neuroanatomy exam. Perversely, if enough of us do, then we don't. However, the HST medical students who comprise the bulk of the class are memorizing machines, and some of them seem very smart as well. I was capable of great feats of memorization in college, but without the lash of fear (and possibly encumbered by a brain that's a decade older), I find myself responding to the request being made of me with something close to bitter laughter.
OK so the Red Sox just won game 7 against the Yankees, coming behind from a 3-0 deficit. Just now, after the game, driving home from Ken's (about 20 people there eating junk food and yelling at the TV), from Cambridge over the BU Bridge to J.P., many Bostonians milling on the street, waving their arms, drivers swerving around and blasting their horns, a collective pleasure. It's 12:45 AM, I have a midterm tomorrow, and no regrets. Update: choice quote from an article in today's New York Times, from one unhappy New Yorker: "The worst would be losing to Boston fans because they're such ignorant, bitter people. They're so used to losing, all they have is hate."
A very strange thing is happening to me, unprecedented in my lifetime: I have been listening for eleven innings to Game 5 of the Red Sox/Yankees series (of 14 innings so far), while I color in my neuroanatomy coloring book. I am not a baseball fan, but I'm paying close attention. An unpredicted assimilation of me by this town...
And now David Ortiz has just won it. Longest game in post-season history, a good game to inaugurate an interest in baseball.
I turned 30 yesterday. Here's a strange movie of 'trained flies'.
The program absorbs ~80% of my waking time and energy. Today I stuck drosophila down a pipet tip so their heads stuck out the tip ends. Then I played with how to hook up micromanipulators to the pipet tip, and a converslip, so as to lift their antennae up with the coverslip. Then I'm going to record from the antennal sensilla, which transduce odor. I did this instead of studying for my classes or doing homework for them. In real estate, this is called 'deferred maintenance'. The fact is, I have fun working in the lab, and this a large part of why I've come to grad school. Classes, in contrast, are like attaching my brain directly to a fire hydrant and then holding my nose so as to keep the water and brains from gushing from my nostrils. Not so nice.
I started my first rotation on Friday, in the Wilson lab. First task: build an olfactometer. I don't know how to do it, but I'll learn.
Richard Feynman and the eminent descriptive neurobiologist Jeff Lichtman have something in common. Citing Yogi Berra, Lichtman says, "You can observe a lot by watching." Feynman says, "It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing!"
People ask me about the relevance of the research I'll be doing to issues of human disease. In response, I've come up with a metaphor: neuroscience research is like a sphere, and only the surface interfaces with 'real world' problems. I haven't decided how close to the surface I will be during grad school. But just now, I was standing in the kitchen of my coop, looking out the window. And next door there is a home for Alzheimer's patients, and from my window I could see the patients beyond the fence, as they went out for a walk in the home's well manicured back yard. And there they were, slipping away. That's the kind of thing that makes you want to live on the surface of the sphere.
Neuroscience program orientation at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory last weekend. Good science talks, smart people, lots of beer. Mopeding on Martha's Vineyard + playing frisbee. (Update: here's a pic of the mopeders, minus Eiman.) Bioluminescent organisms in the ocean at 2am, as well -- very beautiful to swim underwater in the dark with eyes open, watching glowing green sparks flow across one's eyeballs.
Yesterday was administrative. They gave us these nice little briefcase-style canvas bags with the Harvard logo and the text, "Harvard Medical School / Division of Medical Sciences / Ph.D. Programs". All the Harvard branding around here (on notebooks, sweaters, umbrellas, chairs, etc.) turns me off, but somehow I was happy to get this bag -- and not entirely because I had looked at one just like it (sans branding) the day before, and almost bought it. After receiving our bags, us 13 neuroscience students sat in a big room in the New Research Building, with students from other Ph.D. programs in the med school -- Immunology, Virology, and Biological and Biomedical Sciences, about 80 people all told -- and listened to a panel of various honchos discuss "big" versus "little" science, over bagels and fruit and so forth. Then we were given more food, and filled out forms. Then we sat in another room and listened to mind-numbing, OSHA-mandated lectures on lab safety for two hours. Then we all dispersed and went home.
School starts tomorrow. Should be sleeping, but instead, just watched Steve Jobs deliver the 2004 Mac World Wide Developers' Conference keynote. Neat to see a bit of the famed reality distortion field. Some good technology coming for the Mac, too.
It is with great relief that I announce the end of the horror. Last week, Kimmy sent me some pics from our days on Buell Street, in Burlington, which helped to get me through the end of the emu gig.
Really starting to wonder about this whole urban living concept. The emu work is almost done, however.
Tripartite analogy: (Kerry: Apple) :: (Bush: Windows) :: (Nader: Linux)
That is, Nader's great, but if we can't that to work, we really just need anybody but Bush.
Absolutist mantra of the day: "No amount of money is worth spending one's existence on a worthless endeavor."
Sarah planted sunflowers which provide shelter after two days of rain.
Emu dividends lead to delivery yesterday of a 12" Powerbook; new era of creativity and productivity heralded. (Hah. But I am surprised by my pleasure at its arrival -- I thought my days of computer infatuation were over.)
Late night thoughts of a seesaw fly sorter for Drosophila. Before I began thinking about that, I thought about how if I ever became very rich and powerful, I might make a rule for myself: no meetings shorter than three hours, under the premise that if it's not worth three hours, it's not worth any time at all. Update, 9/2/04: posted drawings for fly sorting.
Some pics of the security around the Democratic National Convention.
My aunt Sandie, concerned about some strange aftershocks from the poison ivy, inquired how I got it. Here is a clip from an email I sent her, describing hillrolling in more detail than previously.
Well I've made pictures available from today's suppuration. But BE WARNED these are very unpleasant. Only look at them if you can stand it.
The seething masses demand an update! I'm just returned from the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival and must report that I had a blast. Many ridiculous, strange, and exciting occurrences. One highlight moment: a massive thunderstorm rolled through on Saturday evening, while I was sitting about five rows from the stage as Earl Scruggs played (he's a bluegrass legend, one of the co-inventors of the fast and hard three-fingered banjo picking style people associate with bluegrass, in his 80's now). They got postponed after a song or two, and rather than run off to my campsite I took some chairs off a tarp near me, crawled underneath it, and camped out. It was cozy and warm, and I was very tired by that point, so I laid down on my bunched up t-shirt and started to snooze. (I got roused by people almost stepping on my head a few times.) A little bit later I heard some music coming from the PA, and thought, "That's nice, they're just playing some music for us while we wait..." But a few minutes after the music came on, an announcement came: "Well, just to let you know, Earl and friends are having a session backstage, and we're miking it out to you." I sat up and looked and I could see the fiddler through the door to the backstage, and they were playing in a much more old-fashioned way than what they'd been doing onstage, more like a regular bluegrass session than a slick production -- and Earl Scruggs was absolutely laying down some amazing picking. That was a highlight.
A few days ago it occurred to me that "functional friendliness" is a form of persona, enabling one to proceed smoothly through the world (like riding in a Cadillac -- all suspension, no road feel), but also preventing people from connecting. As if maybe it's not eyes, but pain, that actually provides the window into the soul.
Addendum: let me point out that the web site I am helping to build (see below) is dedicated to the sale of EMU OIL. This is very strange.
Well, I'm in Boston, living in a temporary room in the Centre Street Coop. First night there: street lights glare, city sounds blast, and this is in a quiet part of Jamaica Plain! Although it's not 150 acres in Essex Junction VT, it's okay so far -- as good as gets for Boston, I think. The people seem very good and the building is beautiful. I'm also in my second day of doing contract work for Business Innovation, the consultancy my old boss and buddy Dave Owens from Sapient days is now helping to run. I'll do this for July and August, if all goes well, and then start grad school in the fall. Phew.
...Can't....help...post...baby pictures! Here's a picture of my nephew with me and my mom at a recent family gathering.
June 2004 party at my place! INFO HERE.
Last night I woke up from a deep sleep with the 'realization' that the purpose of sleep is to give your brain a chance to compare what it had learned during the wakeful period with what it knew previously, and to update longer-term knowledge on that basis. I had a vague image of two predictive networks taking arbitrary 'sensory' input (our dreams?), and comparing predictions -- and the longer-term network modifying itself when the short-term network had a high-confidence prediction that deviated from the long-term's. I thought about turning on the light and writing the idea down, but I figured if it were a good enough idea, it would survive the night. And I went back to sleep.
All grim considerations of war and empire aside...why can't our president be as cool as theirs?
My hands get dirty once in a while, but perhaps not often enough.
Negative: humiliation. Positive: humility.
Humus: ground. Grounded.
I walked out the door this morning, and what should I see, but a red eft?
Like ticks with heads buried deep in dog skin we huddle into our corner computer nooks in the waning of the work day!
Last night I went to a talk, slide show, and video series on the living conditions of Palestinians living in the occupied territories in Israel. It was eye-opening, and troubling. It reminded me of a cycle of abuse in a family, where an abused child grows up to abuse his own children. Israeli Jews have 'grown up' to corral Palestinians into ghettos reminiscent of those created by the Nazis; and this is not a comparison I make lightly. I feel shame at how little we as Jews have apparently learned from our own persecution. Unfortunately, some of the talk's attendees seemed to verge on being apologists for Palestinian suicide bombers who target civilians, women, and children. This is moral infancy. Understanding the genesis of an evil act does not excuse it.
Readers' comments (or, one reader's comments) on cuteness have been duly noted, as promised. Update: The controversy continues...
I've decided to go to the Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Harvard. In related events, I made a movie yesterday documenting the disintegration, over the last winter in Vermont, of a ceramic bust I made in high school twelve years ago.
A strange, homeless hacker named Adrian Lamo has a good interview here (slashdot cache here). He bums around and engages people randomly, and hacks into corporate servers. Now he's in some trouble. His self-description reminds me of this quotation of George Fox, the founder of the Quaker religion. Lamo himself describes his pursuits as more religious than nefarious. Wired also has a profile, which reminds me of how many of Philip K. Dick's stories were written in "fortnight-long, amphetamine-fuelled frenzies".
Watching Richard Clarke testify before the 9/11 commission, I am struck that another consummate, high-ranking insider (in addition to Paul O'Neill) has lashed out at the Bush administration. I consider both Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill to be members of the mainstream 'other side', unlikely to kiss-and-tell, always ready to compromise for their vision of slow and steady progress. Long-term associates of both men have expressed surprise at the vehemence of their condemnation of their erstwhile boss. Yet there it is: they are so appalled by the hand that fed them that they have turned away. (In related news, Burlington's wag about town, Peter Freyne, points us to americanprogress.org as a useful site for those of us who want to keep up on the increasing number of ways that Bush is Bad.) Update: Felix gives this disgusting link, to Rumsfeld caught with his pants down. Also the 9/11 commission link seems not to be working; here's a link to the Google cache.
Christin Bland (of 2/11/2004 fame) has been overwhelmed by the cuteness of the last several posts and demands that her puppy Charlie be allowed to join the sickly sweet miasma. Any comments about whether her puppy or Nadine is cuter will be duly noted.
Now I'm at Portia's house -- sitting with an iBook connected to the internet via AirPort, connected to UVM via ssh -- it's pretty amazing to edit my web site sitting in a sunny room with Joachim and Nadine, Portia's new puppy.
Currently at my nephew Ringo's 1st birthday party...the party's over so here's a pic.
The spate of old friends getting married continues. Dan, Yenk, now Portia. I am going down to Boston this weekend for Portia's 30th birthday, and my nephew Ringo's 1st birthday. And my genetic father, Lon, writes, "The goofball picture looked exactly like me (even aside from the 'goofiness')." What am I to make of all this? The world keeps revolving, and my head is starting to spin.
I still haven't decided where to go to grad school, but I've updated the west coast interviews page with a link to a response from a faculty member at Caltech, David Anderson.
3/5/2004
I've gotten in to all the grad schools I applied to (Harvard, Brandeis, UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, and Caltech). Wow.
Okay, so I'm faced with an enormous opportunity, which reminds me: while I was at Caltech, looking up the phone number for a Supershuttle to the airport, I saw a very provocative quote in the Yellow Pages. The phone company had put it in as space filler to make their page layout work. Here is the quote and my (as yet) unclear response to it.
3/3/2004
I have created the first-ever Daniel Levin fan page.
Also, I've jotted down a few responses to the west coast interviews. Nothing coherent, yet. I'll try to write something comprehensive once I decide where to go.
2/18/2004
Hugh says that the problem with people who are heedless of the dysfunctionality of those around them is that they are also oblivious to their own dysfunctionality, and therefore lack a mechanism by which they can grow and improve.
In unrelated news, I'm headin' on out.
2/13/2004
First (and last?) draft of an essay about the difference between passion and obsession, and why it matters to a nascent neuroscientist.
2/12/2004
Today is my 1 year anniversary of not smoking. I miss smoking quite a bit, and may take it back up again. But for the time being, the cons (health risks, endurance loss, losing a bet with my boss) outweigh the pros (exogenous stimulation of dopaminergic pleasure/reward system in solitude or in like-minded groups). A few days ago, I found my last box of American Spirit Blues, which I'd kept handy while quitting, in case I succumbed to temptation. I'd kept them in a box of junk in a damp basement all summer, so when I opened them up, I was confronted by a box full of blue-green mold. Ah well, no more cigarettes for me.
Thanks to Kristin Combs for triggering my quitting.
2/11/2004
Christin Bland is number 1. She is astonished that information can be posted to the web so easily. "I am not astonished," she rebuts testily.
2/9/2004
I'm applying to grad schools in neuroscience: UCSF, USCD, Harvard, Brandeis, and Caltech. So far I've gotten interviews everywhere, I've gone to interviews at Brandeis and Harvard, and been offered admission to Harvard. I'm going out to interview at UCSF, UCSD, and Caltech the week starting Feb. 20. It's a heady time -- several years' worth of work coming to fruition as the next step begins to manifest. Yet I am still a goofball.
11/12/2003:
Here's a picture my dad wanted a copy of. It's a plate of PC12 cells I stably transfected with a plasmid encoding a mutant amyloid precursor protein that causes early-onset Alzheimer's Disease in a Swedish family. The plasmid is designed to coexpress Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein (EGFP), which is the glowing green you'll see in the picture.
| email: dbockATdavibock.net | page last modified 6/21/2009 |
| (substitute "@" for "AT" and you'll be all set) | home |
