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OK, so it’s an ad, but it’s only 1 min long. I like the “amazing pen-tip interface.”

Posted 03 December 2009 † nickyp § Marketing § Playing ‡ Comments (0) °

H.M. Brain Dissection Live Online

The brain of Henry Molaison, the most famous amnesic and perhaps the most-studied neurological patient in history, will go under the knife starting Wednesday morning. Mr. Molaison, who died in December 2008, donated his brain to science; as part of the Brain Observatory Project, his contribution will help thousands of researchers worldwide.

Brain Project scientists plan to Webcast the slicing and preservation of brain matter on thousands of slides; extra-high-resolution digital images of the slides will eventually be posted on the open-access site. The operation is scheduled to start Wednesday mid-morning and will at least through Thursday, during roughly office hours, Pacific time. Part of this project is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation.

On Monday, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a nice explanatory story on Mr. Molaison and the work of the Brain Project, which is based at the University of California, San Diego. I also wrote a short piece (with an audio link) about him for Dana’s 2008 annual report.

[A version of this post also is on the Dana Foundation blog. See more cool brain news there!]

Posted 01 December 2009 † nickyp § Brain science § Learning ‡ Comments (0) °

Black Friday

Here’s an animation that offers another perspective on Picasso’s wrenching painting Guernica.

Posted 27 November 2009 † nickyp § Playing ‡ Comments (0) °

Future of Computing?

I’m all about the video, for one more week. (24,000 words to go! 5 more days! Ack!) This is fun-zooming animation; next will be a very different zooming animation.

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Posted 25 November 2009 † nickyp § Playing ‡ Comments (0) °

Deep in the pool

I am still very busy, trying to get to 85,000 words by Nov. 30. It will be a squeaker, but I’m really hoping to get to the end of the story (and hoping that it’s around 85k). Last year, I wrote 60,000 words in November, but that got me only 7/8 through the story. I then dithered on writing the scary climactic final showdown and aftermath, and didn’t get the first draft first-drafted till spring. This year, crappy first draft will be done by December!

Meanwhile, while resting my fingers, I had to play this video for everyone in the house. Great line: “She put my head and whole camera in her mouth, and did these threat displays, but then the most amazing thing happened…” “Threat displays” is a mild way to put it. I also liked that she brought progressively deader prey to show him what’s what.

Posted 21 November 2009 † nickyp § Playing § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Power up!

I am very busy writing, but I had to take ten minutes out to watch this whole video. That’s how I know you should start at the 0:40 mark and stop when she starts talking about the monkey–unless you need a pep talk, then keep going.

Posted 18 November 2009 † nickyp § Playing ‡ Comments (0) °

Still plenty of time to join in…

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There’s still lots of time left to win during National Novel Writing Month. One year, when SfN’s annual meeting was in the first week in November, I didn’t even start until Nov. 9, and I still squeaked out a victory!

According to NaNoWriMo’s blog, 2008 posted an all-time-high win rate (18.2 percent of 119,301 registrants hit the magic 50,000-word mark) with a record-smashing number of words written (1.6 billion). This year, site traffic and participant sign-ups are tracking ahead of 2008. Could we top 2 billion words? Only with your help…
www.nanowrimo.org

Posted 05 November 2009 † nickyp § Writing ‡ Comments (0) °

When senses combine

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people’s senses seem to be crossed. Some people with the condition can feel tastes or see sounds; others taste voices (think of the opposite of anesthesia, literally “no senses”). Neurologist Richard Cytowic has studied such people for more than three decades, starting with a man in the rare latter category.

“Some people are born with two or more senses hooked together,” Cytowic told an audience of around 120 people at the Library of Congress on Oct. 30. For example, for the first synesthete he studied, some flavors “were more than a mouthful.”

Synesthesia experts estimate that one in 23 people has some form of this involuntary sense-mixing. Some scientists working with infants theorize that all babies are born synesthetic but lose the trait at around three months, when their sense networks start to firm up.

Cytowic played two short films to help illustrate the ability. The first paired Chopin’s Valse Brillante with a moving pattern of dashes of color changing in time with the music. The second, a short film by Terri Timely seen below, cleverly captures the idea of living with many forms of synesthesia, Cytowic said. One difference, though, is that instead of the discrete objects such as cats seen in the video, synesthetes are more likely to see general shapes or colors.

With David Eagleman, Cytowik co-authored WEDNESDAY IS INDIGO BLUE: DISCOVERING THE BRAIN OF SYNESTHESISA, which was recently reviewed in the Dana Foundation’s online magazine Cerebrum. His lecture is part of the “Music and the Brain” series, presented by the Library of Congress and the Dana Foundation. The next event, on music and trance states, is tonight; a lecture on dangerous music takes place Friday, Nov. 6.

[A much longer version of this post is on the Dana Foundation blog.]

Posted 03 November 2009 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) °

And we’re off!

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Posted 01 November 2009 † nickyp § Writing ‡ Comments (0) °

Writing in the present tense

So, in clearing the decks for National Novel Writing Month, I’m crash-reading NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, and, no surprise, it’s not working. Gaskell’s writing demands a slow read, tasting all her clear phrases and cogent observations. And I know I said this earlier about MARY BARTON, but it reads so darn modern, I can’t stop marvelling over it. Here’s 19-year-old Margaret turning down a surprise offer of marriage:

NorthAndSouth

“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been doing. I cannot answer as you want me to do, and yet I should feel so sorry if I vexed you.”
(From NORTH AND SOUTH (1855) Norton critical edition 2005, p. 58)

She is just as direct about what she as a southern stranger sees in the northern town of Manchester, as the city girds for a factory-workers’ strike:

“You think it [Manchester society] strange. Why?”

“I don’t know—I suppose becaue, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.”
(NORTH AND SOUTH, p. 109)

While “vexed” may date the first extract, there’s nothing in the wording that would make you think it was written more than 150 years ago. And it’s just as true now, feels just as impossible, and just as sad.
This story wasn’t deep history to Gaskell; hers is a “contemporary novel.” Reading it challenges me to see if I can write such a clear commentary on my own times. After my first couple of manuscripts came out so flat, I decided I couldn’t, and my next ones and this new NaNo one I’ve planned are set as historicals. They still treat common themes (meaning of family, definition of home, roles of women, one’s place and duty to one’s society) that are relevant in my times, but at a safe distance.

Maybe it’s time to try for currency as well as relevance again. Or maybe this is just cold-feet-just-as-the-writing-project-starts pondering; a familiar refrain. We’ll see how I feel on the backside of a month of novelwriting frenzy.

BreathEyesMemoryp.s. Our bookclub read this month was BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat. Lovely but slight, it read to me like a lyrical series of short stories with not much sinew between. A great voice, and another story of generations of women struggling and surviving, as in our previous reads, HOUSE OF SPIRITS and BRIEF, WONDEROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO.

Next month (Dec.): MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie.

Posted 31 October 2009 † nickyp § Books § Reading § Writing ‡ Comments (1) °