Tuesday, April 12, 2011

python-engulfed-a-spreadsheet

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:
The screenshot blew me away...and then came the screencast!
Watched the demo and synapticised reinteract instantly.

Friday, April 01, 2011

MyGDict

A GAE Based Dictionary Like Object!

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

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

HOWTO: Nokia BH-505 Bluetooth A2DP Setup for Ubuntu

For Ubuntu 10.04LTS

  1. sudo vi /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf

  2. Un-comment:
    AutoConnect=true
    [A2DP]

  3. Comment out:
    HFP=true

  4. sudo vi ~/.asoundrc

  5. Type:
    pcm.btheadset {
    type bluetooth
    device 00:00:00:00:00:00
    profile “auto”
    }
    Save and close.

  6. 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

  1. If already paired:
    hcitool con

  2. If un-paired
    hcitool scan
Cheers!

Saturday, February 26, 2011

10000000/365

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

Friday, February 18, 2011

EH

Q. What is EH?

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

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Beam That, Scotty.

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?

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Introducing, Comet.

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!

Friday, December 31, 2010

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Neo F. Darwin

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

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

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Evolve

From dawn to dust.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

S.I.

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

Friday, September 03, 2010

Greenpeas

Grass on the other side is probably AstroTurf.

Totem

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

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Add-on

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

Thursday, August 12, 2010

G.A.B.A.

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

:D

Thursday, July 01, 2010

The Sixth Smell

Smell lies in the air of the beholder.
- Ajeeb Babu

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Damned bug!

IndexError: list index out of range exception!

all the time

Monday, March 08, 2010

Albendazole

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

Monday, February 22, 2010

On mysosin V, allegedly

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

Monday, February 08, 2010

Reflex

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

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Botany

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

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Damn!

All's due to bloody oxytocin!

Friday, December 11, 2009

Malibu

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*

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Lin Al for a Penny

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

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Monday, October 12, 2009

Friday, October 09, 2009

Friday, September 18, 2009

Dog works in mysterious ways

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

Monday, August 31, 2009

Monday, August 24, 2009

The Stem Cell Series

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

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Your neighbourhood is what?

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

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

Monday, August 17, 2009

White Condensate

Cloud 9 is the ninth puff.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Emergence

Pauli's exclusion holds, even in loos.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Windsor Pub

Stony stony night.

Beat root

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

Saturday, June 27, 2009

White, small and cheap

Who stole my mp3 player ?

Friday, June 19, 2009

Ehthereality

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

iWant Plus (new and improved)


a. an Arduino











b. a 3GS


















c. an FZ16


iWant

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?

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Geometric algebra

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

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Recurse()

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.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Dream in the Shell

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.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Sunday, March 01, 2009

import Geeksta.*;

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.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Royal stag nacht

Yesterday night was crazy.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Cheers

Lecture halls too obey the Beer-Lambert Law.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

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.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Inbox

Frequency of checking your mail = ( joblessness ) + C

Monday, September 01, 2008

Scene III
















CS has its own uses.

Behind the scene:
Kir2.1
Yankee
PT
Duds

P.S. Grrr...

Friday, August 22, 2008

Nasty over Curly of Oster

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

Culture Curry

Cultured neurons is maggi.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Fly Interrupted: Scene II

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.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

abbr. lol: Laughs Out Loud

How many times do you actually lol when you lol ?

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Chick Flight

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

P.S.: Sympotein hangover.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Boomer

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.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Bumper

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

Sunday, June 29, 2008

First Law

If it is in the fly it will be solved.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Whiskers

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!

Friday, June 06, 2008

Troll

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

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Saturday, May 31, 2008

The D Bug

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

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Lift off

Just reached Mars. The pole.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Screen

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

Monday, May 19, 2008

UT

And UT is UT.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Shuttle

Singles badminton and doubles badminton are two different games.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Blurrrr

Motion_detect() == Edge_detect() in time.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Stinky

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

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Free Will

Free will is only as free as the neurons allow.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Developmental Determinacy

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

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Fly-Will

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

Fly-Walk

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?

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

SimpleXMLRPCServer

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.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Wanda the Phish

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

JLT

Wanted to write something profound. But forgot what.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Conversation in a fly lab

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

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Catalase

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

Sunday, March 09, 2008

P value

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.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Fink before you leap - PIL Installation howto for a Mac


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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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!


  3. 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.

  4. 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.

Monday, December 31, 2007

tumb tumb...

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.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Differentiated

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.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

The Chain of Chains

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.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Fly Custards and Fly Jelly

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

Sunday, September 16, 2007

On Evolution

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.

Friday, September 07, 2007

Wiring - An Interlude : The 2nd Rotation


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".

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Wiring : An Interlude - DBS TIFR AWS On Adult Neurogenesis

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

This one hit me like a bullet. Shaken.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Wiring : An Interlude

The answers are coming.

-Morpheus to Neo, The Matrix.

Friday, August 24, 2007

On Biological Evolution

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.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Wiring 1

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.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Reality Check

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)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

The Wait


In the coming couple of weeks my neurobiology course will conclude. It will end with how-the-brain-gets-wired themed lectures. I guess two of these plus a lecture focused on a special kind of wiring - the wiring of the optical pathway. Nothing less than a feast.

Following are the typical questions whose answers I will be fishing for in these lectures.
  • The basis of instincts. Especially the behavior of just born calves. Where does this information come from?
  • Nature of data structures. Is the location and form of a given memory identical (or at least similar) in two different humans? For e.g. say the neuronal data structure corresponding to a given memory - say the English numeral 1 (i.e. basically a shape).
  • Imagination. Imagination is a brain activity unlike other brain activities such that you have neuronal activity in absence of an external input. How does one imagine?
  • Perception. Making an image of the world around you is a biological challenge in itself. A 100% biological lens followed by a bunch of 100% biological cables and ultimately a 100% biological "processing center". Marvelous. Still, beyond that how does an individual perceive an object. For e.g. when I see a square I feel a square. I wonder if some kind of reflection phenomenon - reflection of neural impulse encoded information within the brain would be necessary for perception. Say back and forth between the two cerebral hemispheres. This question is perhaps intricately related to the puzzle of imagination stated before.
Yeah, pretty much it. I hope to get at least a start towards solving these puzzles from these lectures. A reasonable expectation I suppose.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

BioSphere


Biology is like a sphere. Every worker thinks the field he is researching is central to biology.

Monday, August 06, 2007

On Biological Evolution

Following two general ideas about biological evolution are the result of an informal discussion with a fellow colleague.

  • The period just before advent of cell membranes is what I shall refer to as the late primordial soup times. Assuming that during this period organic compounds which would be sources of carbon skeleton and free energy would be available in plenty and hence would not be a limiting factor for the survival of contemporary biologicals; it would be a free lunch. One would therefore expect the evolutionary pressures to be relaxed. However, after membranes were invented these diffuse biologicals would get a sense of individuality. Evolution would now have a well defined target for it to act upon.
  • When faced with a challenge only those cells who have invented a biochemical pathway to solve it will survive. But it probably was when the cell found a way to document this information in the form of genetic information that evolution got a firm substrate to work upon. With it also came the concept of "next generation of cells" who would re-use their ancestral biochemical logic than re-invent it. But the beauty is that the system still allowed for new experiments, in essence allowing the ancestral logic to be overriden.

The events following post-genetic material times probably are just biology trying to solve its own engineering problems.