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You are viewing the most recent 20 entries February 8th, 2008January 21st, 2007: wiiiiiiiii! spent the weekend intoxicated and/or playing wii. wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! December 6th, 2006: because really, aren't we ALL in love with Ann Coulter? http://www.myspace.com/therightbrot a serious band that seriously sounds like parody Current Location: WISPIC Current Mood: France? Wrong! November 23rd, 2006: thanksgiving i'm at my parents house, a farm some 10 miles south of Eau Claire for the holiday. it's a nice occasion to reconnect with old high school friends. i called my friend (and highschool gf) carrie to see if she wanted to hang out. she called me back and told me she couldn't because...she's getting married tomorrow. Current Location: rocket ranch Current Mood: increasingly stuffed November 21st, 2006: my second subgroup talk Like Mary said, my name is Mike Murphy, I'm a third year grad student in NTP and the title of my talk today is "From 'Psychic Energy' to Activation: Classic Papers in Electroencephalography Research". So what is electroencephalography, or as I will henceforth refer to it EEG? The idea is, you place electrodes on the scalp and these electrodes can detect the synchronous activity of large groups of neurons. EEG has great temporal resolution, you can see things that are on the order of milliseconds. However, because EEG is sensitive only to the synchronous firing of large groups of neurons and because the skull, scalp and dura blur the signal, the spatial resolution of EEG isn't very good. Nothing like what you would see with MRI, for example. In spite of this limitation, EEG is still used in a variety of settings. Clinically, EEG is used to locate foci of epileptic seizures, it is used to help diagnose various sleep disorders, and it is also used in post-traumatic neural evaluation, like after, say, a stroke. EEG is also used in many neurological and psychiatric research labs here on campus. I'm going to begin by talking about the work of Hans Berger, who was the first person to apply EEG to humans and in the process discovered something called the alpha rhythm. Then I am going to talk about the work of E.D. Adrian who greatly expanded upon Berger's results with the alpha rhythm. Adrian's work led to the development of a concept called EEG activation, which I will explain in the course of my talk. I am going to finish up by discussing the work of Moruzzi and Magoun who, in 1949, discovered a brain stem region, called the ascending reticular activating system, that seems to impact EEG activation... and so on for forty minutes.... it went pretty well. November 13th, 2006: halloween pics 2/3 of the axis of evil, a ninja, and a gypsy  axis of evil make-out session?  how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb  November 9th, 2006: i imagine almost everyone i know is thinking something like this... In 1998, I waited in a long, long line to vote for Feingold who won a narrow victory. The dems didn't win anything back, but at least Feingold and Wellstone were still in the Senate. In 2000, I remember the Naderites. I remember seeing Al Gore speak on the capitol square. I remember people talking about vote trading. I remember Florida going Blue, then Red, then Purple. I remember my ex-girlfriend crying on election night. In 2002, I watched the election returns from a dorm lounge. We weren't expecting much and we didn't even get that. It was another glum night. There were two defeats in 2004. First there was Dean, doomed by a perfect storm of Gephardt's attack ads in Iowa, huge expectations from the media, and of course, one terribly ill-advised yell. By the time he came to Wisconsin, the concession speech was a formality. Not so with Kerry, who despite several miscues (including letting himself get pushed around by a man who spent the Vietnam War doing blow and running campaigns in Alabama) blasted bush in the debates. The initial exit polls looked good. An end was in sight. But no, the majority of the voters looked at the 4 years of the Bush presidency and opted for four more years of 9/11, economic instability and dirty wars in hot, dusty places. But now, for the first time in my voting life, a sense of real hope. Finally a chance to get on the offensive. Santorum's gone, so no more man-on-dog. Pombo is out, so the endangered species act is safe for another term. It's nice not to spend a the night after an election depressed. And now, let's see what the dems can do with this... Current Mood:  happyOctober 4th, 2006: is it just me? or are there a bunch of good albums coming out all at once ? bonnie "prince" billy's is pretty good the decemberists i haven't heard yet and the hold steady's is just, well fantastic. (incidentally i used to dislike both those bands - the decemberists until i saw the video for 16 x 32 and the hold steady until modesto is not that sweet) i saw the science of sleep. i really wanted to like it but the main character was just too pathological. also, i wish that it had been less about stop-motion animation and more about partial recovery of gamma band coherence, because really, that's what dreams are made of. Current Mood: victorious Current Music: the hold steady - chips ahoy! October 3rd, 2006: the dry run and the fashion show last monday, the call came. my dad, who has bounced up and down the waiting list for a year, was about to get a new liver. bags were packed, calls were made, and soon my father, mother and two of my brothers were headed down to madison. i met them at the hospital. my dad was nervous, and inbetween telling jokes he would admit that he was a little scared of what was to come. the medical history, the blood draws, take your shirt off and we'll check your pulse, my mom argues with my brother. she leaves the room, i follow, we walk to the cafeteria so she can get a cookie and some coffee. molasses, chocolate chip, and peanut butter. her phone rings, it's my brother. the surgery is cancelled. last semester, i took a class on neuroethics. i gave a two hour presentation on brain death. it's a weird concept, a sort of limbo made possible by our technological advances of the past century. starting with the development of the iron lung we've been been able to maintain human bodies in gray zones between being "human" being "physiologically alive" and being "cellularly alive". the development of organ donation has made these distinctions relevant. no one wants to harvest organs from a living person, but at the same time maintaining consciousless bodies as simulacra of human beings, while real people die for lack of organs, seems grotesque. in an attempt to draw functional distinctions in this muddle, different definitions of "death" have been proposed. Whole brain death, brainstem death, and the controversal Pittsburg protocol (in which brain dead patients are given lethal doses of drugs in the operating room so that their organs can be harvested) have been tried. In my father's case, the donor was removed from the ventilator and the transplant team waited for him/her to stop breathing. it took the person 45 min to stop. by that time the donor's liver had begun to degrade and it was no longer usable. it doesn't happen very often (about 1-2 times per year at the UW Hospital), but it happened to my dad. by the time the news went out, most of my dads brothers and sisters were already on the way to madison. so i had to hang out with my aunts and uncles for awhile. my dad comes from a large family, most of which is batshit crazy. one example...one of my roommates is a master's student african american studies. my racist uncle asked him if he studied jive. my dad tried to smooth it over by saying "oh are you asking if there is a language component to his studies?" but the damage was already done. the others aren't as bad, but they're all a little strange. so that was a fun week. **************************************** on friday, nichole and i went to a fashion show for a local clothing store . the show took place at magnus, which i'd only been to a couple times. we ate tapas (oysters and cheese) and drank mojitos while we watched men and women strut around the stage in men's jeans. the place was packed with madison's equivalent of the beautiful people. the announcer kept bragging about the fact that they used "japanese denim, the most durable denim in the world!". the second half of the show was about "dirty denim" or a celebration of the fact that some people don't wash their pants. like for years. now i never wear denim, so i may be wrong on this, but that sounds pretty gross. i'd buy some of their fancy pants jeans but, as noted, i never wear denim, japanese or otherwise. afterwords, we ran into skemper at a concert then we ate caramels and drank singapores at opus. **************************************** Current Music: Daughters of the Soho Riots - The National September 14th, 2006: hepatic encephalopathy According to cnn.com...
Furthermore...
August 28th, 2006: river water, nude beaches and sparks it's been a nice few weeks as i got to see some old med school friends (steph, nichole, and youssef), although there was one unintentionally hilarious moment when i tried to play drunken matchmaker. sorry you two. you know who you are. also sorry to andy for not making it up to ec. there was a storm and i would have had to head back the next day so that i wouldn't miss the greatest canoe trip of all time. a round of applause for danny k for organizing said trip. we set off from just outside a little town called arena and paddled twenty-one miles down the wisconsin river. the canoe rental place was right next to a shooting range, and since we gor there early we were able to listen to sporadic gunfire. always a thrill. eventually everyone arrived and we got ready to leave. there were 13 of us in 6 canoes; rob, nichole and i shared one. we set off in the light drizzle of a gray morning. shortly thereafter, the sparks began to flow. shortly after that we stopped caring about the rain (which stopped by 30 minutes into the ride). we took several long breaks for food, swimming, et cetera the first of which was directly across from the nude beach at mazomanie. this was completely by accident, i swear. anyway, it was too misty to make out any of the details of the middle-aged naked volleyball enthusiasts on the far shore. eventually we split up into two flotilla's of three boats each. i was in the fast flotilla with nate, ceci, erin and andy. i think the slow flotilla may have been hindered by big cat's dogged determination and endless efforts to catch a turtle. he failed, but did manage to snag a frog by trip's end so all was well. we camped on a sandbar called long island where we grilled brats and corn and drank whiskey and pbr. we played some combination of i never and would you rather and learned that if dan was forced to erase one relationship from his mind forever, it wouldn't be libby hoeller. pics below and more at flickr. we lost bad today in ultimate, i was tossed around like a rag doll by the person i was "guarding". the fearless crew of boat 97  flotilla of fun  and of course this...  which led to "sparks face"  Current Mood: muddy Current Music: DeVotchka - The Enemy Guns August 25th, 2006: Eight dollars and sixty four cents... that's how much the Screen Actors Guild paid me for 9 years of residuals on this. Current Music: how it ends - devotchka August 20th, 2006: thursday was a weird day My internet connection is down and even though the good people at Charter told me that they would come to my house on Thursday afternoon, it is now Sunday and (despite two phone calls) no one has come to fix it. Later that evening, I had my first kickball game. Well, I was supposed to have it. Apparently the game was cancelled but no one told me. One of my teammates showed up and we ended up throwing a frisbee around for an hour in the drizzle. Afterwards, Nichole and I drove to milwaukee for John Riep's takoyaki party. I managed to get only a little bit lost and we made it there by 10:30. We walked into the house and saw John reading on a couch while quiet music played. His dad was enjoying a beer in the kitchen. It turned out the party was a 9-to-10 sort of affair abd we missed the excitement. Still, I talked to Bob, Sr about fly-fishing and eventually Nate-san came over and we ate takoyaki and talked about the times Nate, Josh, and Pat got in fights. Last night, Nate, Ceci and I went to see Little Miss Sunshine. There were a few things I didn't like about it (which I mention first because in our irony soaked society, it's important to maintain a sense of superiority and distance over the media you consume). Some of the scenes and dialogue were unbelievable and it rolled out all the indie-comedy tropes from Royal Tenenbaums that are rapidly becoming hoary (also, is "hoary trope" a hoary trope?). Still some parts were hilarious and the movie was twisted and life-affirming in an honest sort of way. As for this week... I hope my cable connection is fixed so I can catch up on Project Runway. I start fall league for ultimate. Canoe trip this weekend. Current Mood: sunday August 14th, 2006: DAMN IT! twice in one day! FAAAAAAWWWWWK how the hell does she do that!?! : captain save-a-ho fuck. the world seems to be trying to teach me an important, albeit painful, lesson. will i ever learn? i doubt it. i seem to just wait until the bruises on my forehead have healed before i smash my face once more into a brick wall. fuck. fuck. fuck. if you're curious to know what i'm feeling and why i'm feeling this way, just go to the archives section and look up any entry from aug 2004. hell, any entry from aug 2004 to mid 2005 will do. goddamn it. Current Mood:  AAARRRGGGGGGGGGGAugust 1st, 2006: pitchfork last weekend was pfork in chitown. it was monstrously hot and jam packed with hipsters, but thankfully there was plenty of ice cream for johnny pop to enjoy...  as for the acts themselves, well there were quite a few of them. among the more memorable were... day 1 - ted leo and the pharmacists: while listening to their set i had a little realization. i really like the first three minutes of many of ted leo's songs. unfortunately, most of his songs are five minutes long. still, they played one of my favorites... Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Where Have all the Rude Boys Gone the futureheads: a really tight, well played set. super fun, good crowd banter. strangely, the only song that didn't sound really good was the best one from their first album... The Futureheads - Hounds of Love day 2 - jens lekman: fucking superlative. worth the entire price of admission and gas alone. jens lekman is a swedish pop troubadour backed up by six blond swedish women. when the keyboardist said her sound check was ok, the crowd began clapping wildly. jens et al. were baffled and really, really excited about the turnout. and of course they played... Jens Lekman - Black Cab the national: all the hits, almost no filler. except for the last song. the lead singer was pleasingly ridiculous, in a rock star kind of way... The National - Looking for Astronauts Current Mood: sweaty Current Music: leonard cohen - hallelujah July 27th, 2006: I don't know what this means  i spend all day making and pondering over figures like this. it's pretty much mathematically invalid, but i think it says that during waking at frequency index 10, which is either 5 or 2.5 Hz, Brodmann area 3 is mostly connected to things right around itself. shocking. i know. ahhh science. Current Mood: rabies-free Current Music: on the table - ac newman July 26th, 2006: lighten up, it's just ... rabies! i woke up to find one of these dead on the floor of my bathroom.  now i'm waiting for animal control to come and test the little guy and hopefully tell me it doesn't have rabies so i can avoid this...  in other news... went up to the dells for nate's bday. stayed at the great wolf lodge. went on water slides, drank pat pepsi's and got sleepy and hungover. my frisbee team didn't lose on monday! we celebrated by staying out till 3. we play again today. maybe we'll even win. Current Mood: batty. get it? get it??? Current Music: batman theme July 24th, 2006: ug persistent low grade headache work problems parking ticket too much cheese washing machine is broken general unspecified malaise for not-general, but still unspecified, reasons it's shaping up to be a rough day July 13th, 2006 |
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