The Cortico-Chocolate Axis

Eureqa!

2012-01-16T23:47:00.003-05:00

... is a really neat tool for finding relationships in huge piles of data. Plus, it automatically does held-out data for validation. Do you have inscrutable data? Check it out at Cornell Creative Machines!

Desk work just got a lot more intimidating

2009-07-29T16:44:00.003-04:00

Spam musubi

2009-04-10T19:57:00.002-04:00

We accompanied my grandmother to Hawaii for her birthday this year! It was beautiful, but surprising in some respects - like food.

Hawaii is a complicated place where food is concerned. There are plate lunches that consist of macaroni salad, rice, and spam, all swimming in gravy; there are fantastic restaurants with excessively authentic food from any nation in the orient; and there are strange hybrids like the Hawaiian hamburger, made with teriyaki sauce and a pineapple slice on the burger.

None of these can compare to spam musubi.

We saw them first in the grubby hands of two boys waiting at a bus stop, and thought they were some sort of ice cream sandwich, but no! That band around the center was seaweed, and the sandwiched portion was rice and spam. I finally found musubi presses in a grocery store in Waikiki, and I'm beside myself with joy.

SPAM MUSUBI: delicious, filling, and conveniently portable.

Ingredients:
1 can SPAM
Rice. Sushi rice, sticky rice, brown rice, whatever
Seaweed
Seasonings - teriyaki sauce, soy sauce, furikake, ginger, pepper, whatever you want

- Slice the spam, as thick or as thin as you'd like it, and fry. Straight up is fine, or with teriyaki sauce (use low-sodium spam because the sauce is v salty)
- Make rice. Sticky rice is better.
- Put your press on a sheet of seaweed; korean roast seaweed seems better because it's more brittle and breaks when you bite down, so the rice doesn't squirt out the end when you try to eat it.
- Smash rice into the press.
- Add a slice of spam.
- Add more seasonings, vegetables, fried egg, whatever.
- Smash more rice into the press.
- Push the musubi down with the plunger while lifting the mold up.
- Wrap the seaweed around the musubi and moisten the ends to stick them together.

Best served hot.

Utilitarian plastic bag sculpture

2009-01-28T19:01:00.004-05:00

I don't know how these things happen.

Icy winter morning

2009-01-28T08:42:00.003-05:00

On the validity of animal research

2009-01-24T20:44:00.006-05:00

Unpleasant though it may be, the truth is that wide swathes of advances in the sciences are based on animal research. Animals are used in fields ranging from immunology, where 'anti-goat' or 'anti-rabbit' antibodies are a standard tool, to medicine, where the efficacy of new treatments is tested first in lab animals, to neuroscience, where nearly everything we know about the visual system comes from cats.

I won't address questions of morality here, but rather questions of validity: is animal research telling us what we think it's telling us. Scientists over the years have raised numerous complaints with respect to potential confounds in animal research. A few examples:

1) Genetic strains. Animal research is significantly easier than human research in the immunology-related fields because the experimenter's level of control is far greater than is possible with human subjects. Environment, diet, social interaction, and chemical exposure, any of which may influence immune reaction, are all within experimenter control, and can be made identical across subjects. This leaves a single major potential confound: genetics. If your rats are genetically dissimilar, differences observed between treatment groups could be due to differences in treatment or differences in genes.

Suppliers of lab animals solve this problem, or rather ameliorate it, by inbreeding mice and rat strains to yield sets of animals that are as genetically identical as possible. This makes interpreting results from these animals a little bizarre, because you have to ask - are they truly representative of their species, or are the effects you find complicated by many generations of inbreeding? Are all mice dumb, or is it just that your mice are mentally retarded due to distinctly unnatural inheritance?

2) Circadian rhythms. Rats are nocturnal, so studies of cognitive function in rats with respect to drugs, environment, social interaction, or any other possible influencing factor really ought to be done in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, humans are diurnal, and the average workday of a human researcher varies around nine to five. This means that time of day with respect to the rat 'daytime' is usually ignored (or, upon occasion, grad students end up in the lab at 4am).

This little issue is very, very rarely addressed in publications, but nevertheless calls into question results of studies of any nocturnal animal that was performed during the animals' native sleep time. Damn near everything varies with circadian rhythms; immune function, hormone release,

3) Environment. Not long ago, the concept of neuroplasticity was so much voodoo, but now it's taken for granted that an animal's environment can influence its cognitive abilities. Mice, rats, monkeys, cats, anyone raised in an "enriched" environment with objects to explore and things to do are better off on every scale than creatures raised in barren surroundings. Can We Trust Research Done with Lab Mice? is an interesting discussion of aberrant behavior observed in lab animals in poor environments.

This last point in particular has complex implications for humanity, but I'll save the discussion for a later post.

I've heard of knitted brows, but this is ridiculous

2009-01-17T00:38:00.003-05:00

Anatomically correct knitted brain.

"In this case, for me, there are two humorous aspects: one is simply to undertake such a ridiculously complex, time consuming project for no practical reason; the second is the idea of making a somewhat mysterious and difficult object - a brain - out of a 'cuddly', cheerfully coloured, familiar material like cotton yarn."

Color me impressed! Zow.

Productivity Sabotage Tip

2009-01-15T19:00:00.006-05:00

The Daily Kitten.

Thank you, Karen, for sabotaging my workday with adorable.

Bakin' Bacon

2009-01-11T14:07:00.001-05:00

Lazy Bacon Casserole
prep time: 5 minutes
cook time: 40-50 minutes

~1/2 C Bacon chopped into small pieces
~2 C Frozen vegetables - I used two mixes that together included broccoli, carrots, onions, bell peppers, and water chestnuts
Butter, a pat or two
Soy sauce
~2 C Brown rice, cooked

1) Add bacon and vegetables to an ovensafe roasting pan with a lid.

2) Drop pats of butter on top of pile of veggies.

3) Splash soy sauce liberally about.

4) Bake at 375 for 40-50 minutes.

5) Remove from oven and stir in brown rice.

Oh, the kitchen-filling scent of bacon, what can't you do. Makes excellent leftovers.

Math and the Honeybee Dance

2009-01-10T20:37:00.006-05:00

Our post-climbing IHOP conversation today touched briefly on the application of complicated mathematics to random other fields, and it brought to mind an article on quantum fields and honeybees. The honeybee dance is a prime example of creatures usually assumed to be dumb displaying sophisticated behavior. Some argue that this indicates intelligence, others argue for pattern-matching to genetically hard-coded information, but everyone agrees that nobody knows how they do it.

According to this article, the answer lies in quantum fields. A mathematician, who happened to have a background in bees, was doodling around with projecting a 6d manifold in 2d when she realized, roughly, 'My God! I'm looking at the bee dance!' The particular manifold she was working with shows up in, apparently, the bee dance, but more famously in the math around quarks, hence a proposed connection between the two.

A response in Ortholog claims it's all hogwash (and a commenter says something about a Lagrangian approach that I don't understand at all) and that bees just need neurons - but we know that already, the question is how the neurons acquire and process information. Granted, proposing that because phenomenon A and phenomenon B share a pattern there exists a causal relationship between the two is a bit excessive based on what's known, but it's still a novel, unusual direction from which to approach a problem nobody else has solved.

This was published in 2007; I don't know if anything's been done on it since.

Tetris as PTSD preventative?

2009-01-09T19:33:00.010-05:00

In a paper published recently in PLoS ONE, researchers at the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford used sessions with Tetris to interrupt consolidation of traumatic memories ^[1].

The beloved game of Tetris becomes a cognitive load that not only distracts the player, leading to fewer flashbacks during play, but also produces long-term reduction in flashbacks by occupying visuospatial processing resources that would otherwise be consolidating the memory of the trauma. As I understand it, here's how it works:

1) Recalling a memory isn't like replaying a film - it's more like rebuilding the experience. Thus, each recall of a memory isn't an exact copy of the original, it's a reconstruction.

2) When a memory trace is reactivated, it becomes more plastic, and then reforms when you're done with it^[2]. During and soon after retrieval, it's vulnerable to interference by disruption of the processes that would reconsolidate it.

3) Visual perception and mental imagery share a significant proportion of neural resources^[3]. Playing Tetris soon after memory consolidation or during flashbacks occupies those resources, which thus aren't available to give the activated memory the boost it needs, and so the memory is reconsolidated in a weaker trace.

Past PTSD intervention attempts have largely been chemical, using methods like interrupting fear conditioning by targeting glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus or amygdala ^[4] or administering propranolol to block adrenaline's enhancement of memory consolidation ^[5]. Rather than applying an external, often globally active drug, Holmes et al. manipulated the development of traumatic memories through the brain's own resource limitations. I like the direction this work is going, and not just because medicinal Tetris is a hilarious concept.

------------------------
In related news:

- Instructables: Tetris bookshelves
- Human Tetris
- Instructables: Tetris ice cubes
- Tetris theme on glass bottles

Lastly, a terrific rendition of Snake, in the style of Tetris-on-buildings.

------------------------

[1]Holmes, James, Coode-Bate, & Deeprose, 2009. PLoS ONE 4(1): e4153.
[2]Duvarci & Nader, 2004. J Neurosci, 24, 9269-9275.
[3]Ganis, Thompson, & Kosslyn, 2004. Cog Brain Res, 20, 226–241.
[4] Tronel & Alberini, 2007. Biol Psychiatry, 62, 33-39.
[5]Pitman et al., 2002. Biol Psychiatry, 51, 189-192.

Tomato Tomahto

2009-01-08T20:33:00.003-05:00

Tomato and Fresh Veggie soup
prep time: 10-15 minutes
cook time: 15-20 minutes

1 tsp oil (sesame, vegetable, sunflower)
2 cloves garlic, chopped (or 1 tbsp jarred)
1/2 C finely chopped mushrooms
4 round red potatoes, chopped small
4 C water
1/2 to 1 can tomato paste, to taste
1 medium-large onion, finely chopped
1 medium-small zucchini, chopped small
4 small links sausage, chopped
salt, pepper, oregano, basil to taste

1) In a deep saucepan that can handle soup, sauté the garlic in the oil for two or three minutes.

2) Add the mushrooms, potatoes, onions, and sausage, and sauté a minute or two more.

3) Add the water and tomato paste and stir well. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer.

4) Simmer until soup potatoes are suitably cooked and the broth thickens. Add the zucchini.

5) The zucchini will cook fairly quickly; when they're cooked to a pleasing degree, remove soup from heat. Season to taste.

Good with fresh bread. Serves four.

On writing not-so-well

2009-01-08T14:05:00.011-05:00

My name is Alice, and I'm a bad writer.

In looking back over my growing collection of writing samples, I've discovered a equally growing collection of failings:

I use too many words in nonstandard ways, with nonstandard meanings.

I use too much jargon, usually without even knowing it.

I have a hard time nailing the right tone for a given piece.

I have colorful, grammatically loose, undulating language for personal expression, and a sort of bland, stilted style for formal writing, and crap in between.

I loathe formal writing, with so little voice, in the passive (damn you, science), without flavorful examples, without anthropomorphization.

I can't, for the life of me, think linearly, and writing is an irritatingly linear pursuit.

But, my name is Alice, and my major research interest is plasticity - I believe that things can change! Thus, the primary purpose of this blog is to practice writing. I plan to write about science, about food, about kitties and climbing and photography. I want to learn how to translate the colorful, multisensory muck in my head into words that carry the meaning I intend.

Other than getting in the habit of writing regularly with an eye to improvement, I have other goals that I think this 'blog' thing help me will work towards.

- Learn. I'm a grad student in a lab whose PI never sleeps (near as we can tell), so we have a lot to do. Writing about what I learn should help me both understand and remember it.
- Record and keep track of things. Recipes, research, projects.
- Photograph. Or rather, process photographs; as of this post the backlog comprises 40,631 images. At least one image daily should facilitate processing.
- And, of course, propagate the endless ridiculous stuff I encounter on the intertubes.

Onwards and upwards!

Face

2009-01-05T14:50:00.008-05:00