Jaunts in Mind Space

Recordings from Crayfish Ventral Nerve Cord

2006-04-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

It seems that there is a dearth of raw extracellular recording data online. To help remedy that, I am posting a collection of recordings I made for a class several semesters ago. These were done with a hook electrode around the ventral nerve cord of the crayfish between the fifth and sixth ganglion (AB5 and AB6 in the figure).
Zip file of the recordings: http://neuralsmith.googlepages.com/CrayfishRecording.zip
The format is a comma delimited text file.

Creating an Interactive Plot in Matlab

2006-04-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

The code below creates a plot where the user can draw a series of connected lines. Afterwards, the points chosen for the lines is displayed as an array in the top right corner of the plot.

function cursor_plot_test(points)
%Sets up figure, fig1 is the handle for the figure
fig1 = figure('Name','Cursor Plot Test', 'Pointer', 'crosshair');

%axes creates a plot with axes having the minimum and maximums
%specified in the square brackets
axes('Xlim',[0 10],'Ylim',[0 10]);

%This retrieves the mouse position in the figure whenever it is left
%clicked. The x_pos and y_pos values are scaled to the axes
positions(1,:) = ginput(1);
for p = 2:points
positions(p,:) = ginput(1); %the 1 in ginput means that it will collect
%one mouse click position. If we put in
%2 then it would collect two mouse %positions.
line(positions((p-1):p,1), positions((p-1):p,2));
end

%This is why we kept the handle for the figure, so after we done
%choosing our points we could set the pointer for that figure back to
%an arrow.
set(fig1, 'Pointer','arrow');
%Displays the positions we chose as a matrix
text(7, 9.5, sprintf(' X Y \n')); %springf takes in a formatted string
%and outputs it as a string
text(7, 8.5, num2str(positions)); %num2str can convert an array into string

The M-file for this project is at: http://neuralsmith.googlepages.com/cursor_plot_test.m

Odd spam email

2006-04-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

I recieved a spam email today that had the following text:

! mynah the serendipitous a bonn some cryogenic
be ticklish it's embodiment but constipate may cardiovascular
it impropriety a requisition see delineament it neumann
try pane try charlotte

Old Scientific American

2006-04-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

While studying in the library, I came across back issues of Scientific American going back to the 1850s. I decided to take some pictures of them and post them.

Glitch Samples

2006-03-30T21:42:00.000-08:00

This set of samples was created from a drumbeat I had made in Reason. The "glitchy" sound came from putting the beat through effects in Audacity. The effects used were redux, beat repeat, and a bandpass filter.
http://neuralsmith.googlepages.com/glitch.zip

CORRECTION: The program used was Ableton Live, not Audacity.

Quadrupedal Walking Robot

2006-03-23T22:36:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of a quadrupedal walking robot I built a couple summers ago. Its purpose was to go over simple obstacles and hopefully climb stairs. However, because it was a power hog and the servos did not have a good torque rating it needed to be tethered to a power supply. Once I realized that it would cost me several hundred dollars worth of high quality servos and rechargeable batteries to have it perform as desired the project was dropped. The one video I have of it walking was taken before the knee joints were completely added. Later I realized that the knee joints could not bear the weight of the bot and so they were never fully implemented. The link below is for the video of the bot.
http://neuralsmith.googlepages.com/quad_walk.WMV

Parallel Port Breakout Board

2006-03-23T22:18:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures of a parallel port breakout board I am making. The board was made in anticipation of building a data aquisition board that will interface to my parallel port.Blue wires = ground
Yellow wires = control
Green wires = status
Red wires = data

This was taken at home. I gave it a plexi base so that the wiring would not be exposed to the "elements" of my desk.

Treesleeper

2006-03-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

I was browsing youtube and found this guy who goes by the name treesleeper. His music is very idm, to the point of it being archetypal. While some parts can get a little boring he has a good sound overall. Check it out at http://youtube.com/watch?v=OtXeB2Xnm74. He also has a myspace at http://www.myspace.com/treesleeper.

My Parents Art

2006-03-03T20:10:00.000-08:00

Thought I would show off my parents art work.

Dad:

Temptations & Necessities, 70" x 51", 1979, acrylic on canvas

"Headley's art is an art of convergence and displacement; flaunting its idiosyncracies and boisterous in its unpredictable profusion. He seems neither content with nor contained by the singular incident, preferring instead the restless intercourse of a turbulent aesthetic. He is likewise unwilling to accept or comply with the incestuous and labyrinthine principles of art historical evolution on the contemporary scene. Headley's unselfconscious transgressions may well be a catalyst to the enrichment and expansion of American painting. "

- DAVID HEADLEY by John Deckert, Arts Magazine, 1981

http://www.davidheadley.com/index.html

Mom:

Indian Summer, 2005. Acrylic on canvas. 18.50 x 19.50 inches

"Weather dominates landscape in the most seductive manner. It is nature at its most abstract--most violent, most serene, most mysterious, most prosaic--and it mirrors the changing emotional landscape within me. My painting practice is to work with watery pigments, I pour sweep, brush, drip, and fling layers of paint like clouds scudding across the sky. I coax pools of paint into translucent veils of color. Anchoring these ephemeral elements are gestural tree limbs, horizontal water marks, stripes and blocks of color."

- Jackie Battenfield

http://www.jackiebattenfield.com/index.html

Of SRAM and LCDs

2006-02-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

Two things I have always wanted to interface to were an LCD screen and a memory chip. Since I have been accepted to the graduate school programs I wanted, I have the time to learn how to do this.
The first project was interfacing to a 32k SRAM chip. The reason I chose SRAM was because of its relative simplicity in addressing and setting the chip state. On a PIC16F8777, you are going to wind up using most of the pins:
14 for address
8 for data
+ 3 for control
----------------
25 Total, that comes out to 3 ports + 1
You can see the wiring mess this causes below: The LCD interface was a little bit more tricky, one of the things that holds people up with these are that the initialization is weird. You have to supply the initialization command three times, which is actually similar to the way ps/2 mice initialize (the computer sends the initialization/restart command several times to the mouse). Either way, once you get it working you are on easy street because the character map on the chip that controls the LCD is standard ASCII (except for katakana characters and \ being replaced by ¥). The nice thing is that there are a lot of good resources on LCD interfacing. Check out:
http://www.myke.com/lcd.htm Nice overview of basic LCD interfacing.
http://www.datasheetcatalog.com/datasheets_pdf/K/S/0/0/KS0070B.shtml This datasheet has a good tutorial on how to send text to the LCD and move the cursor.

Joy Stick Controlled Filter, With Saturation

2006-02-04T21:36:00.000-08:00

This is a quick project that I am just wrapping up. I will have more on it later, but here are some pictures of it.

Feynman Quotes, Gotta Love Them

2006-02-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

"A complete conspiracy is a law of nature."

This quote comes from a lecture he gave on Special Relativity. It was with reference to the strange and confounding results of experiments such as the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Neat Tone Decoder Chip

2006-02-02T09:36:00.000-08:00

The MC1350P IC is a pretty neat chip. Capable of acting as a frequency doubler, tone decoder, and oscillator (and much more); this chip seems pretty useful. Surprisingly, it is not mentioned as much as the 555.

Oh the sounds we make

2006-01-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

These two sites provide a pretty good sampling of the vocalizations humans can produce. It would be neat to construct a song completely out of these sound samples.
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter1/chapter1.htm l
http://phonetics.ucla.edu/index/sounds.html

Overview of Op-Amps

2006-01-21T15:32:00.000-08:00

http://focus.ti.com/lit/an/slod006b/slod006b.pdf

Great general overview of op amps covering both practical and theoretical issues. Best of all, it is free.

Great tutorial on sound synthesis

2006-01-16T09:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.modularsynth.com/SOS.html

This site compiles a list of linked articles from Sound on Sound on synthesis techniques. Some of them will be old hat for anybody with a background in electrical engineering (skip the filter article, you know it all already).

MIDI in MATLAB

2006-01-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago I ran across a great toolbox for MATLAB that could handle MIDI files. There is quiet a variety of tools in it for both visualizing and analyzing them. Another feature which really drew me to it was a group of functions for evaluating how melodious a group of notes are. It would be neat to see if one could generate pleasant sounding tunes algorithmically by using different metrics of melody.

http://www.jyu.fi/musica/miditoolbox/

I pray these are all bad translations.

2006-01-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

http://internationalreporter.com/news/read.php?id=615

This article is about a Dr. Raj Baldev, who apparently speculated that water was on Mars before the recent NASA findings. However, that is not why I posted this. The reason I posted this was to show some seriously funny quirks about Dr. Raj Baldev.

Firstly, he is a "Cosmo Theorist". Now, maybe it was just lost in translation but I hope they mean cosmologist.

Dr. Raj Baldev said, "There is a vast area in Mars, where the availability of water was very much there and it can still be found under certain rocks."
Under certain rocks? Do they mean that the minerals formed in water are present in the rocks? Or am I supposed to take this statement at face value?

"When water was there in Mars, there was a definite life; small insects, reptiles and fishes were the natural life, fishes used to live in small, medium and big lakes. There were no seas or oceans on Mars, only lakes were available, where the river used to end their journey by dropping water, particularly in the big lakes." Dr. Baldev said.
Wow, pretty presumputious. It is amazing that the same types of animals we see on Earth would evolve on another planet. Just where does Dr. Baldev gets his ideas, and do they come in dime bags.

You can see Dr. Baldev's bio page here: http://www.igcar.ernet.in/igc2004/balbio.htm. Funny, he is actually listed as specializing in "Materials characterization & Technology Management."

But thats not all, he also is a supportor of intelligent design.
http://india.internationalreporter.com/news/read.php?id=800

Dr. Raj Baldev, Cosmo Theorist (there is that phrase again!) from India, is the staunch supporter of "Intelligent Design" but his views are quite unique and exclusive and do not match with other thinkers. His approach is entirely scientific (well that puts my mind at ease, at least he acknowledges that those promoting ID are not doing it scientifically). He not only contradicted the theory of Dr. Darwin in 1957 but is also bringing out another book commenting on Darwin's theory titled "Ape or Man, who descended first?"

"The scientists have no other option but either to debate on the 'Intelligent Design' or focus on some third scientific formula since everything around us clearly and strongly suggests that the entire set up is not a game of chance. Every nano-atom or nano-particle (this better be poor translation. If not, could Dr. Baldev show me some micro- or centi-atoms) has a history and it carries intelligence behind its working and moves under a fixed law and time, and it is proved beyond doubt that it is not a work of chance.

There is so much in this article, you really should read it for yourself.

What started this all was a post on Dembski's blog, http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/661 about Dr. Baldev's ideas on ID and evolution. The funniest quote of all was actually posted on that site (and it is sad the poster did not realize how ignorant it was).

Dr. Raj Baldev, Cosmo Theorist from India, had first compared Darwin's theory with Intelligent Being in 1957, again in 1992 and then in 2003, 2005 and now in 2006. He gave this account in his book "Man Never Descended from Species" in 1957 and through articles in 1992 and 2005 and 2006.
Man Never Descended from Species?! What does that even mean? I leave this as a challenge to any reader.

Cartoons in Tektronix Schematics

2006-01-12T21:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.reprise.com/host/tektronix/humor/default.asp

fIRST pOST!!!!!!!!!

2006-01-09T20:12:00.000-08:00

sO 1337!!!1!!1!1