Busybusybusy

Everything always seems to happen at once. In the next couple weeks I'm facing my neuroanatomy final, graudate school applications (the goal of this whole blog in the first place), and a transition at work -- my group in the company is being bought out, so we all need plan B jobs lined up soon, in case the transition doesn't go smoothly. In addition, I got caught up in the whole facebook/beacon fiasco, with the end result that googling my name is now far more interesting, and I actually have a conspiracy theory about me! You can read it yourself here.

In the meantime, here's what I was planning on posting about a month ago, right before most of the busy times occured:

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I've been great - neuroanatomy is hard, mostly because I was very used to math and physics and the sort of subject where I didn't need to memorize things if I was good enough at deriving from first principles. Unfortunately, it's hard to do that with the location of cranial nerve nuclei in the pons, so I had to turn to massive rote memorization, which I never liked very much. The course itself, however, is fascinating. We're currently studying the thalamus, which I'm absolutely in love with. Plus, being NIH and therefore a somewhat crazy place, they gave us human brains to take apart and we got to scrub in and observe a brain surgery :)

Other than that I'm agonizing over personal statements, and lining up a third recommendation since the guy I was originally hoping would do it has dropped off the map and can't be reached. I'll be far happier once my applications are all in, and I can go back to doing neural models. I've got a pretty fun system going on with izhekevich models for the neurons and a homebrewed neurotransmitter release/plasticity model (adapted from a few things I found online and a lecture Erwin Neher gave at NIH a few weeks back). It seems to produce a functioning monosynaptic reflex in my AIBO, which is pretty cool :)

Work's been good too - I've taken on hunting the storm worm, which is a hive-structured virtual parasitic organism that moved into an abandoned p2p file sharing network that was left over after edonkey was shut down by the RIAA. It's really advanced in some ways, and hard to study because if the other members of the hive recognize you as an outsider they spread an alarm signal and everyone nearby starts attacking your internet connection. We're attempting to adapt the math from computed tomography to essentially take a CT scan (deriving the internal structure without coming into contact with it - and therefore not triggering an alarm) of the p2p network, though, and it's looking really promising. Our first test is next week on a local network, if all goes well.