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You are viewing the most recent 10 entries February 8th, 2008January 21st, 2007December 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...
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