More politics, some brains.

Every single one of these images is an indictment.

Support our troops by bringing them home - don't force them to do this any more.

Vote for the candidate who will end the war.

Ok, enough politics out of me for the moment. It's not an anti-war blog, I'm just an anti-war person.

More about brains!

As of this week, I've become involved in a new research project. Based on new information about Parkinson's disease and exercise, we will attempt to refine existing models of Basal Ganglia structure. I will be working with Dr. Arbib, who is one of my favorite professors at USC. I will also be working with a Post-Doc from Duke university, who has done some fascinating work in information theory and the decoding of neural signals. I'd link to her but she doesn't have a home page, and we have only just met. Somehow it seems impolite to point the entire internet at a person who will be a colleague, but with whom I haven't yet interacted face to face.

I'm excited to be involved in a research group again. I enjoy the MS curriculum very much, but it's nice to be applying what I've learned.

What I do enjoy about the Neuroengineering track is that it's highly interdisciplinary. I've been allowed (encouraged?) to graze at the buffet of knowledge, take classes from many different departments, and to plot my own course. It's making me very happy and busy.

I'm also spending a lot of time filling in the gaps. I took my undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry. Now I am confronted with a lot of electronics, signals, mechanics, some computer science, and the mathematics that describe them. I enjoy math and fancy myself capable. However, applying these skills to electronics I never really learned is proving to be non-trivial. What it's required me to do is build my own shadow curriculum, and stay very organized and focused, which is good. MIT OpenCourseWare has been indespensible for this.

The goal is to be caught up entirely before BIL, and before I begin the Neuroanatomy course through the Keck School of Medicine.