Virtually Real

Anti-Climax

2011-12-18T17:18:00.000+05:30

Balding mol. biologist: Ok, I am telling a joke. Punch line. Long winding, grammar-less, in-coherent list of words.

Gut biologist: So ?

w3Br@t: Every time he tells a story it strengthens my belief we are living the big crunch age, headed for the big bang moment.

Pee Hech Dee

2011-12-14T21:10:00.002+05:30

I can't help it but I can destroy it. And probably tell you how it works.

Adiga

2011-05-24T14:10:00.000+05:30

Any language can be Kannada when madified.

python-engulfed-a-spreadsheet

2011-04-12T20:22:00.004+05:30

Stumbled upon this site during one of my synaptic-driven-fishing-expeditions. It starts with a fairly corny:

Don't just record history, change it!

Ever wished that your spreadsheet/plotting program could support python-ish statements ???

Your wish has been answered:

http://fishsoup.net/software/reinteract/

The screenshot blew me away...and then came the screencast!

Watched the demo and synapticised reinteract instantly.

MyGDict

2011-04-01T23:42:00.002+05:30

A GAE Based Dictionary Like Object!

http://mygdict.appspot.com/

Keywords: dict dictionary dict() object gae google app engine web based service free url get put key value

HOWTO: Nokia BH-505 Bluetooth A2DP Setup for Ubuntu

2011-03-23T15:16:00.009+05:30

For Ubuntu 10.04LTS

sudo vi /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf
Un-comment:
AutoConnect=true
[A2DP]
Comment out:
HFP=true
sudo vi ~/.asoundrc
Type:
pcm.btheadset {
type bluetooth
device 00:00:00:00:00:00
profile “auto”
}
Save and close.
Replace 00:00:00:00:00:00 with the mac-id of your BH-505 (How do I find that out? Read Further.)

Figuring out the MAC ID of Your BH-505

If already paired:
hcitool con
If un-paired
hcitool scan

Cheers!

Background Correction

2011-03-11T00:07:00.008+05:30

10000000/365

2011-02-26T18:40:00.003+05:30

What computation is 50000/7 or 5000/24 or 3/min ?

EH

2011-02-18T14:07:00.003+05:30

Q. What is EH?

Ans.

Ethyl hesitate.
A class of ethylated odorants to which Drosophila show repulsion.

Beam That, Scotty.

2011-02-02T21:40:00.000+05:30

Captain and his team materialize on the surface of an M class planet. Tricorders are armed and the exploration begins. How reliably does Scotty's machine do its job? Accuracy to a millimeter may certainly not be acceptable. Atomic accuracy might just suffice. Surely the transporter buffers have limited memory storage capacity and also since captain is always in a hurry the time to accomplish a teleportation is also limited. Let us allow for the essentials like DNA in every cell and mitochondria to get the deserved atomic reproducibility. What about the RNAs floating around, proteins which already exist and the lipids? Does that glucose molecule too which is diffusing in the cytoplasm not deserve that extra attention for a guaranteed re-materialisation? For we would not like our Captain's exploration team to feel faint headed less they encounter an anomaly. In addition to the list of chemicals theres information about relative locations of all those chemicals; probably the largest burden on the buffer. Luckily for the Captain his ship encounters the Caretaker who gives them the technology to achieve all of the above ! But there is a catch. The transporter can reproduce copies of the subjects to the atom but it can only do so with a precision of 99.99%. Would the Captain have been happier with more decimal nines? How much precision is really enough? Captain's science officer also indulges in basic research in her spare time. Thats how a fruitfly finds itself sitting on the Doctor's starfleet uniform just over her shoulder while she hunts for possible life signs on that M-class planet. The Doctor sees the tiny creature as it grooms itself and is about to dust it off but doesn't and confines it in a biohazard bag instead. That is the moment a thought occurs to her.

Does the fruitfly too deserve that extra buffer space during the transit? Thought experiment begins. She decides not to take chances with genetic material and its immediate byproducts. She jumps straight to the neurobiology of the fly. The fruitfly brain has about two hundred thousand neurons. A tiny fraction of the neurons that the Captain's brain probably does. A fruitfly has a rich repertoire of things it can do. As a larva it can crawl and dig through soft substrates. It can see, can discriminate tastes and can learn. When it just emerges as an adult out of the pupal case (a feat itself) it extends its proboscis for the first time in its life; gulps in air so as to generate power to inflate its wings. An adult can do all that a larva can do and more. It can walk and fly. It can sing a song and find a mate. Can it really get by without overworking its neurons? Single neurons that release more than one neurotransmitter. Tiny varicosities form a complex network with others inside compact neuropils. Potential synaptic connections within nerve bundles themselves. Dendritic release sites and the accompanying extremely local feedback loops. Lack of clear distinction between axonal and dendritic ends of most neurons. And of course glia-neuron gap-junction-like connections every so often. This makes the Doctor wonder how the fly itself keeps an index of all these details and maintains them so but allows regulated plasticity to happen at certain "allowed" sites. Thats the fly's own problem. What about the transporter? How much leeway can a fly offer the transporter before it alters its physiology radically? Complexity of the nervous system of the fly surely would challenge a beam engineer. Most of the species the good Captain encounters that are teleportation-capable are humanoid species. The complexity of the insect species, no matter how advanced they may be, probably keeps them using this starfleet technology. The transporter is still just a copy machine. If it comes to reverse engineering the logic of the entire flybrain then that task might turn out to be even more daunting than generating an atom-by-atom copy of the fly. How will we ever have a complete algorithm for how a fly really works?

Introducing, Comet.

2011-01-18T00:00:00.000+05:30

Arduino! happened tonight. Witnessed the first Hello World being executed in less than 5 min. Python in (electronic) disguise. And then there are "the shields". Maybe someday I will graduate to using an atmega8 on my own hand-crafted board. On the other hand, why bother? While the money stays nice! :D
A 7x7 LED panel next. And when I have my Mega a bigger n x n panel. A single fly sorter - "FlyValve". Next pit stop - A PER Sorter. Nothing less!

Something

2010-12-31T07:44:00.000+05:30

JLT.

Neo F. Darwin

2010-11-23T19:12:00.000+05:30

cH@oS: Check out these OSes. They were once competitors of the MS. And they were not too bad.
ElSudCampeador: What do you mean??
w3Br@t: Its called Natural Selection.
cH@oS: Hey that's not it!
w3Br@t: What do you think, God made MS ??
ElSudCampeador: Un-intelligent design.

evil laffter

Turning on, The Wall

2010-11-23T19:08:00.000+05:30

cH@oS: Faces the wall, up close. Toggles a switchboard endlessly.

Evolve

2010-11-11T21:18:00.001+05:30

From dawn to dust.

S.I.

2010-09-29T09:53:00.000+05:30

Its hard to maintain ones standards. So just keep low standards.

Greenpeas

2010-09-03T23:58:00.000+05:30

Grass on the other side is probably AstroTurf.

Totem

2010-09-03T00:13:00.000+05:30

w3bR@t: You know what! Scotty suggested we should get a dart board for the new sports complex.
ElSudCampeador: Hmmm :) Like they have in Quark's.
w3bR@t: Yeah :) Its a cool idea man!
ElSudCampeador: It was initially my idea.
w3bR@t: Sala! Tune toh Scotty ka inception kar diya! :D
ElSudCampeador: No, I just told him.

loud laughter

Add-on

2010-08-17T21:34:00.000+05:30

If King Arthur had a pop-up blocker installed he would have never found Excalibur.

G.A.B.A.

2010-08-12T15:22:00.001+05:30

More inhibited than a GAD1>trpA1 fly at 30C !

The Sixth Smell

2010-07-01T00:21:00.001+05:30

Smell lies in the air of the beholder.

- Ajeeb Babu

Damned bug!

2010-03-16T15:40:00.000+05:30

IndexError: list index out of range exception!

all the time

Albendazole

2010-03-08T18:23:00.000+05:30

Too much of Maggots! Took a de-worming pill last night.

On mysosin V, allegedly

2010-02-22T17:26:00.000+05:30

Yankee (a Drosophila muscle scientist): Sab myo hai.

Reflex

2010-02-08T23:31:00.000+05:30

Q. How does a cute tamilian girl tell a cockroach to get lost?
A. Arthropoda.

Botany

2010-02-02T14:26:00.000+05:30

Its great to be a good taxonomist because there aren't many good taxonomists around.

Damn!

2009-12-19T18:31:00.000+05:30

All's due to bloody oxytocin!

Malibu

2009-12-11T22:08:00.000+05:30

Dr. Majumder: Didn't have enough cash for the rum. Bought this wine instead. A free glass on Madeera.
w3br@t: Cool man.
Dr. Majumder: You will inherit my glasses.

*laughter*

Lin Al for a Penny

2009-11-21T11:55:00.000+05:30

Postulate: Geek is a subspace of Rn.
Conjencture: Sheldon, Leonard, Koothrappali and Howard are a basis of the geek subspace.

Half Done

2009-10-20T22:07:00.001+05:30

Klichhedd

2009-10-12T23:51:00.000+05:30

kill!

2009-10-09T02:12:00.000+05:30

Dog works in mysterious ways

2009-09-18T23:28:00.000+05:30

If a dog can fetch, don't expect him to spell fetch too.

just Proud :D

2009-08-31T23:38:00.000+05:30

The Stem Cell Series

2009-08-24T18:34:00.000+05:30

What did the dorsal stem cell say to the ventral stem cell?
ans. "I'll be back!"
What did the neuronal stem cell say to the non-neuronal stem cell?
ans. "Mind it!"

Sources: Various. :D

Your neighbourhood is what?

2009-08-20T01:53:00.000+05:30

Aaj mere pass flies hai, mere pass assay hai, mere pass bose hai, mere pass java hai, mere pass python hai, mere pass jsp hai, mere pass matlab hai, mere pass badminton hai, mere pass UT hai, mere pass stipend hai, mere pass cycle hai, mere pass GKVK hai, mere pass stamina hai, mere pass laptop hai, mere pass dost hai, mere pass seinfeld season 4 hai, star trek ke first 29 episodes hai, mere pass ...
tere pass kya hai ? pause

Eta pagol ! Ma ki tere eka?

Real Orange

2009-08-20T01:41:00.000+05:30

What is a crush anyways? I don't get it.

White Condensate

2009-08-17T14:37:00.000+05:30

Cloud 9 is the ninth puff.

Emergence

2009-08-02T21:28:00.000+05:30

Pauli's exclusion holds, even in loos.

Windsor Pub

2009-07-13T23:51:00.001+05:30

Stony stony night.

Beat root

2009-07-13T23:48:00.000+05:30

Everytime you "skip" a beat does it mean you will never get it back!

White, small and cheap

2009-06-27T11:44:00.000+05:30

Who stole my mp3 player ?

Ehthereality

2009-06-19T13:18:00.000+05:30

Mind ain't mystic, it's non-deterministic.

iWant Plus (new and improved)

2009-06-19T12:00:00.001+05:30

a. an Arduino

b. a 3GS

c. an FZ16

iWant

2009-06-19T11:55:00.000+05:30

Bought Bose earphones. Been using them for sometime now. I hate wires. Bluetooth (my M9) doesn't deliver that kind of output. A solution is needed. Bose + mobility, a seamless experience. When?

Geometric algebra

2009-05-09T18:05:00.000+05:30

Elsudcampeador: When Einstein was scribbling zeroes into an equation some guy comes along and puts a dot in two and grins. Thats the difference between a true genius and laymen.
W3br@t: Plus laymen get laid, often.

evil laffter

Recurse()

2009-04-08T22:12:00.000+05:30

Assignment 8.2
Question
"

A typical neuron needs ~100 nearly simultaneous inputs to trigger an action potential. It connects to about 10,000 other neurons. Why might this situation lead to epilepsy? How does brain circuity avoid it?
Hint: Let x% of neurons be active, in a network with y% probability that any given neuron connects to any other given neuron.

Answer: By trying to actually answer this question. By settling for a qualitative (gyan) solution.

Dream in the Shell

2009-04-07T00:10:00.000+05:30

Saw the movie Ghost in the Shell. First one followed by its sequel. Wouldn't it be really cool to have some test of physical reality? Just a thought.

Overdose

2009-03-04T23:14:00.000+05:30

Dev D.

import Geeksta.*;

2009-03-01T11:41:00.000+05:30

Scene: A mol. bio. gurl is bent over cutting out a gel to make it 'permanent', for scanning later on.

Mol. Bio. guy: (glances down from his high bench) Lets make a double helix.

Mol. Bio. gurl: Lets restrict it to just a simulation.

Mol. Bio. guy: My place.

Royal stag nacht

2009-02-28T09:21:00.000+05:30

Yesterday night was crazy.

15 mins ago...

2009-01-06T18:39:00.000+05:30

Cheers

2008-11-19T23:15:00.000+05:30

Lecture halls too obey the Beer-Lambert Law.

2008-10-25T00:29:00.000+05:30

Time to put gimp on windows. Will now boot ubuntu only after its newest release. Hate doing it though. Gimping is such a debian thing.

Inbox

2008-10-10T20:28:00.000+05:30

Frequency of checking your mail = f ( joblessness ) + C

Scene III

2008-09-01T22:50:00.000+05:30

CS has its own uses.

Behind the scene:
Kir2.1
Yankee
PT
Duds

P.S. Grrr...

Nasty over Curly of Oster

2008-08-22T20:49:00.000+05:30

Arrogance of a fruitfly worker is a trait determined by the genotype of D. melanogaster.

Culture Curry

2008-08-22T20:47:00.000+05:30

Cultured neurons is maggi.

Fly Interrupted: Scene II

2008-08-20T18:20:00.000+05:30

Act I

A balding biochemist in his thirties. Lab. door shut behind him. Descends down the stairs. A racquet in his hand. A fellow worker asks about his bike keys...

Biochemist: Shit man! I've to put teflon coating on the bike. But my cloning did not work.
Fellow: You don't deserve a teflon coating.
Biochemist: Hmmm

Both walk away from the institute building heading for the badminton court while they praise the b'lore weather.

abbr. lol: Laughs Out Loud

2008-08-19T00:30:00.000+05:30

How many times do you actually lol when you lol ?

Chick Flight

2008-08-17T22:01:00.000+05:30

A pretty chick will always be found accompanied by another hot chick. This is to minimize drag and maximize lift.

P.S.: Sympotein hangover.

Boomer

2008-08-07T22:33:00.000+05:30

Yet another fly lab scene:

Act 1:

ElSudCampeador: (chewing gum) Hey webrat want some gum?
Webrat: (euphoric) Wow! Chewing gum. Sure. (gleefully accepts, starts chewing).
Chaos: What man (grunts), you will wow at anything. Even chewing gum! (evil laughter)
Webrat: Well not at every kind of chewing gum; for instance me wont wow at glia.
Chaos: (dumbfounded) Hee. (back to his photoshopping, brain 101. Glial screen)

Webrat and ElSud burst into laughter.

P.S.: ElSudcampeador later asserted that he too had CG after a long time. Unlike Scotty, a chewing gum person.

Sympotein 2: Opening Slide (beta)

2008-07-31T22:43:00.001+05:30

Bumper

2008-07-14T20:36:00.000+05:30

Even an atomic nucleus is not really smooth when you get to know him closely.

First Law

2008-06-29T13:43:00.001+05:30

If it is in the fly it will be solved.

Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the cortex is...

2008-06-28T11:00:00.001+05:30

The cortex is smart enough to fool itself.

Whiskers

2008-06-17T16:16:00.000+05:30

I wish the mouse had balancers.
I wish mouse could be made in 10 days.
I wish mouse had larval stages.
I wish it hatched out of eggs.
And there was fly!

Troll

2008-06-06T03:45:00.000+05:30

Spare Drosophila melanogaster from pull downs. It doesn't really enjoy Westerns either. Yeasts love biochemistry.

"Ashte", me.

2008-06-03T18:00:00.000+05:30

FlyMeet-Techniques Opening Slide (beta)

2008-06-01T16:02:00.001+05:30

The D Bug

2008-05-31T00:06:00.000+05:30

Fly brain was probably written in PERL.
Gal4>UAS:{ChR2/TntG} is python.

Lift off

2008-05-27T01:46:00.000+05:30

Just reached Mars. The pole.

The XORTex

2008-05-25T00:36:00.001+05:30

Screen

2008-05-22T20:00:00.000+05:30

When you get your camcorder along flies refuse to show phenotype. Flies are camera shy

UT

2008-05-19T20:13:00.001+05:30

And UT is UT.

Shuttle

2008-05-15T20:49:00.000+05:30

Singles badminton and doubles badminton are two different games.

Blurrrr

2008-05-11T18:50:00.000+05:30

Motion_detect() == Edge_detect() in time.

Stinky

2008-05-02T02:16:00.000+05:30

Do you remember the smell when we fell in love?
Do you remember the smell?
Now baby
Do you, Do you
...

Free Will

2008-04-30T09:21:00.000+05:30

Free will is only as free as the neurons allow.

Developmental Determinacy

2008-04-26T00:08:00.000+05:30

How much breathing space does the fly genome allow it's neural system?

Fly-Will

2008-04-23T21:26:00.000+05:30

Is a fly's free will all about the indeterminacy emerging from the complexity of its neural connectome?

Fly-Walk

2008-04-23T00:28:00.000+05:30

A wingless fly. Starved. Food odor. Watch fly-path.

Would this fly have taken a different trajectory in a parallel universe?
How many parallel universes to account for entire trajectory space?

SimpleXMLRPCServer

2008-04-22T04:43:00.000+05:30

Just wrote* a command-line based ping, mssg, picture send/recv system which:

is Multi-threaded
uses XML based messaging
uses RPC

Using Python's SimpleXMLRPCServer (shipped with the standard distribution) in under an hour's time. Python simply kicks ass when it comes to speed of development. Also its so much easy to think in python.

Plan to add voice messaging ability and encryption support to it. Tomorrow. Day after.

Anybody else want some!

*I use Vim. Vim is sweet.

Wanda the Phish

2008-04-20T15:58:00.001+05:30

The close resemblance of the recent posts to Wanda the Fish Fortune teller is purely coincidental.

JLT

2008-04-20T15:55:00.000+05:30

Wanted to write something profound. But forgot what.

Conversation in a fly lab

2008-03-15T15:47:00.000+05:30

Guy A: Do you have CS?
Guy B: You mean Canton S or Counter Strike?
Guy A: Photoshop CS.

Catalase

2008-03-13T22:47:00.000+05:30

Catalogues received at conferences shall be properly utilized. As RNAse free paper.

P value

2008-03-09T18:24:00.000+05:30

Its been happening a lot to me recently. Everytime I look at my watch it shows some interesting time. 22:22:44 or 5:55:55 or you know of the sorts. Always (almost) some pattern in it every time I check.

Saw, what I think, is a shooting star yesterday night on the way back home from the lab. Pretty fat white blazing mass with a bluish hint in its tail. Bigger than I have ever witnessed before.

And today. Read some book by the pond side. Book reading at its best. Life of Pi, amidst a garden, on a metal bench by the pond side. That was some experience.

Saw pre-sunset sun stuck behind tall green vegetation. Orange disc interrupted by spinach green tree tops. Either the time is good and I am lucky or my current environs are so much abound with beauty that wherever and whenever one looks one gets hold of some pleasing sight.

Fink before you leap - PIL Installation howto for a Mac

2008-02-22T23:40:00.000+05:30

PIL (Python Imaging Library) habit is difficult to let go. And well a Mac is a Mac. Follow these steps to get PIL up and running on your Mac.

Install fink. fink = an apt-get like (ditto?) package manager for your Mac. apt-get also gets installed along with it. Just google for fink and you will find its dmg image on sourceforge. Installation is simple point and click.
Configure fink by issuing the command
fink configure
It will ask you couple of easy questions. Bear with the thing. If you use a proxy to connect to the internet its necessary to specify it during this configuration procedure. *IMPORTANT*: Write fully qualified name of the proxy (with the protocol). For e.g.
http://proxy.ncbs.res.in
I had dropped the protocol during my initial configuration and fink failed to connect to internet. I wish fink architects had arranged so that the proxy config defaults to http protocol. Newayz. Now you know!
Then issue this command
apt-get install pil-py23
This command will install all the necessary dependencies along with PIL. May take a while depending on your net connection speed.
Test your installation by
python2.3
import Image

P.S.: Looks like PIL is currently available only for python2.3. You might wanna consider symlinking python2.3==>python in your /usr/bin. I am undecided for my Mac mini shipped with a python2.5. And I hate putting that extra "2.3" to launch the interpreter. What life !

P.P.S: Thank me. And then thank Raj who egged me on to blog this.

tumb tumb...

2007-12-31T23:50:00.000+05:30

So much to write home about. Not really up for it though after a new year's bash ;)
Anticipation is all time high and the scale of happenings is going to go up exponentially with each day that passes.
Nervousness, anxiety, adventure, excitement and sheer joy. A mocktail of a different kind to give one the high of highs.

Differentiated

2007-11-18T21:32:00.000+05:30

Behavioural Neuroscience it is.
Making fruit fly larvae race and flies jump is gonna be the way of life. Of course with a little bit of genetics and electrophysiology and imaging and biochemistry. And perhaps some gene construct designing and transgenics :D *high, delirious*

Dunno if its gonna be Mumbai or Bengaluru though.

The Chain of Chains

2007-10-06T20:15:00.000+05:30

An E. coli cell divides. That the DNA is passed on to every "new born cell" post-division is no big deal. But along with DNA the daughter cell must also receive at least a bare minimum non-DNA things to make use of this genetic information. Which is why a cell division involves distribution of cytoplasmic goodies between daughter cells than just budding off of a replica of the original DNA molecule.
This means that every cell, each and every one of them that we are made up of and those we see around us in other beings have at least once shared a single cell membrane at some time point since the first membranated organism in the primordial soup upto this moment. And this truth will remain so as long as there continue to be cells. The mother of all chains - this cytoplasmic connection.

Fly Custards and Fly Jelly

2007-09-25T10:25:00.000+05:30

Fly Custard
The corn medium has smell. I wonder how much influence that smell is having on the larval olfactory circuit which I intend to put to "adaptation/recovery" tests. The smell is a cocktail. And my worms have ploughed through it endlessly before they were abducted for a larval plate test.

Can the smell be fixed? So lets think of something else. Wish there was a Matrix like "pod" for the larva. A larva living its life oblivious to "reality". Life would be so easy for the fly worker. el yo el

Excuse me on my lack of information as basic as this. I guess the fly cannot be grown on just glucose. The vitamins et al things must be imported into the worm body as it develops and the yolk resources get exhausted. But m gonna test this one.

Fly Jelly
Lets get a fly couple to mate on an agarose gel block soaked in glucose solution. A sort of fly date on the beach el yo el. Then see if the eggs hatch and observe how far a larva goes through its development. This way there would be little smell that the larva would have seen in its "past life" and would be an olfactory virgin when I show it the aromatics during my plate tests.

P.S.: A genetic way of doing it (one of the ways (at least in principle) ) would be making a line which is conditional mutant for olfactory receptor expression and induce the receptor expression just before your plate test. But I suppose it could also have its caveats and may be plain un-doable.

P.P.S.: The P.S. was put there to save face just in case the glucose-gel-beach way was found to be just too ultra low tech by some. :D

On Evolution

2007-09-16T23:06:00.000+05:30

A gene may get duplicated. This may be followed by mutation in one of the copies. Functionally if this "mutated" version is very different from its counterpart then one will call it a new gene rather than simply an allele of the "original" gene. Thus a species gets a new gene. But it may also simply acquire a gene "horizontally". The rates of both these phenomenon taking place would be expected to be determined by the species under consideration. Still one may ask, generally how do they compare in their contribution to creation of new genes?
Furthermore, once a gene has been acquired by a species its maintenance would be contingent upon its contribution to the species fitness. It would be conserved if it is useful else lost if redundant (or found to be deleterious). What are the rates of this "gene dumping" phenomenon? Wondering if these "rates" could be quantitated. Then it would be interesting to compare the rate of acquiring a gene and the rate of losing a gene. Dont remember why I thought of these questions but still it would be fun to know their answers if possible.

Wiring - An Interlude : The 2nd Rotation

2007-09-07T22:23:00.000+05:30

The promised wiring blog posts are still to arrive. Maybe I am still ruminating the ideas expressed in the last two neuro lectures (its been 2 weeks already). One was on olfactory and the other on optical path-finding. Who knows, these posts may not even happen.

Newayz.

The olfaction lecture + couple of posters on olfaction + AWS + fly seems like such a cool system + other things = too difficult to resist rotating in the olfaction lab.

So here I am. Begins officially this Monday. Already been assigned to a "project" and given a dozen papers to read. The latter in preparation of a sort of a mega-journal club this Tuesday.

If you smell what the rock... :D

P.S.: Picture - C155-Chops larval pre-exposure to excitatory light just before the the "Larval Plate Test".

Wiring : An Interlude - DBS TIFR AWS On Adult Neurogenesis

2007-09-05T12:27:00.000+05:30

Epigenetic mechanisms speculated in neurological stress response in maternal separation paradigm of mice neurobiology model.

This one hit me like a bullet. Shaken.

Wiring : An Interlude

2007-08-26T17:01:00.000+05:30

The answers are coming.

-Morpheus to Neo, The Matrix.

On Biological Evolution

2007-08-24T23:36:00.000+05:30

Neo-darwinism is a thing of beauty. These days it hardly happens that one does not suspect it to be behind a given biological phenomenon. But it mostly comes as an after-thought. I wonder if it has any predictive use at all.

Wiring 1

2007-08-13T23:20:00.000+05:30

Was feeling a little under the weather. I hope a dengue bearing mosquito is not to blame. Damn! I could feel I was not at my analytical best. But it was a neuro lecture, so a hightened sense of understanding was my default state. Could have been much better.

So the questions...

The lecture moved on. I was getting kind of desperate as it seemed the answers weren't on the menu. The lecture began with a recap session which seemed unusually long. Then the flow of the discussion kept getting led astray mostly due to certain over-enthusiatic individuals who seemed to get ahead of themselves. A pack I think I once certainly belonged to and one which I think I am transiting. Let the prof talk, you might lose out on some vital insight in your attempt to push/validate your ideas amidst the discourse. This is some sort of a policy that I have (unknowingly?) adopted these days. Wait and watch and pounce when you just have to, an almost compulsive act.

All in all kind of less than my expectations (greed?). But...

At the end along came an idea. A classification of memories was touched upon slightly. Motor memory and declarative memory. My face might have lit up. Yeah, just when I was gonna conclude a wasted lecture. "Functional memories". I felt reassured. I have not been reading useless stuff after all; amidst short naps on the D-block library couch.

I am glad I saw a thread. At the end of the lecture. So be it. Have been promised a talk on the developmental problem of the sense of smell in the next lecture by a seasoned and a highly motivated student. Also have been urged to do some home-work on how the smell problem was such a special problem before it was cracked by a certain Linda Buck. Will fit in the home-work thing tomm since kinda jobless these few days. At least until 21st when I get my time on the NMR machine again...

The sense-of-smell talk is going to be interesting in every way.

Reality Check

2007-08-10T19:02:00.000+05:30

After attending a neuro causerie.
I wonder whether when I myself master the jargon and fluorescent imagery my past scriblings will seem even to me as nothing more than idle doodling. (Not that they don't at all seem so now :P)