The Salt Lake Temple

Yesterday I rode my bike down into the valley to see the famous Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City's roads are built on a grid system which follows cartesian coordinates; For example, my friend Mark lives at 1300 E, 600 S. It's a bit weird at first, but actually becomes intuitive and makes it very easy to navigate the city within a day of arriving. Can you guess what the coordinates for the Salt Lake Temple are? Yes, its 0,0.

The temple is rather pretty, and the grounds very pleasant with well-kept gardening, but I always become a bit reflective around religious buildings and iconography. It all seems so...vain. Vain in that humanity would think God would actually care about some collection of stone built for him. It there is a God, overseeing our huge universe, it seems incredibly presumptuous to assume this deity cares about me. Take, for example, a tenet of Christianity, "God sent his one and only Son Jesus in the form of man, and Jesus died for your sins." Now,if you take away the fact that Christianity has permeated our Western culture for 2000 years, doesn't it all sound a bit ridiculous? I remember in college some of my Muslim friends pointing this out.

I like to think of my pet Gecko. He cannot possibly comprehend me in any sophisticated way as other than "The top of the cage comes off, and I wait for he who delivereth unto me crickets and rain." Maybe my gecko has arranged the dirt in the cage as a way of saying thank you to me. Maybe he worked really hard on it. Do I care about some arrangement of dirt? It is beyond to ability of the gecko to communicate with me.

Anyway I digress and the things I am saying are not particularly original. The truth is religion gives people comfort, a code to live by, and eases/erases the fear of the unknown darkness (i.e. the existential "this is all there is"). So it was enjoyable to see some Mormons in their young 20's, happy, with their three kids already, strolling around the grounds. And to be honest, I became a bit jealous. At how they seem to have it all figured out, even if it is all based on a rather shaky foundation.

You can see newly weds posing in front of the temple (lower left). The golden arch in the center of the temple contains an inscription which reads: "Holiness of the Lord, The House of the Lord Built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Commenced April 6th, 1853. Completed April 6th, 1893." And above the main door there is the inscription, "I am the Alpha and the Omega" (which is not true. The cingulate cortex is the alpha and omega. My research has proven it). The golden statue at the top of the temple is a 12 ft sculpture of the angel Moroni, who was the angel who appeared to Joseph Smith in a vision and told him where the golden plates for the Book of Mormon were buried in Palmyra, upstate New York.

Which, by the way, makes Mormonism about the coolest religion I know. It's just so distinctly American. Whereby protestants and jews have to go all the way to that powder keg which is the Middle East to see their holy sites, Mormons simply have to drive an hour east of Buffalo to visit the place where it all went down.

Well, tomorrow, I go off the grid and into the wild of southwest Oregon to raft the Rogue River. This trial diary will not be updated for a week or so while I am out there.

Where the Magic Happened

Yesterday Mark and I biked around the University of Utah campus. Ann Arbor's campus is incredibly bland by comparison. The biking was hard with many hills (with the altitude to boot), but the views spectacular.On this trip to the University of Utah, we visited Mark's old PhD lab: Dick Normann's Neural Engineering Lab. The lab is famous for inventing the "Utah Array," which along with the "Michigan Probes," is considered the forefront of electrode design. 

The Utah array is being implanted in humans right now for Neuroprosthetic work (CyberKinetics) and for Epilepsy research (Bradley Gregor). So, I wanted to see where the magic happened and the machine where the first 100-channel Utah Array was made. And here it is, the magnificent silicon dicing saw that made the first prototype:

But if you have 100-channels, how do you interface with the electrode itself? The first actual recordings with the electrode were done with homemade switch-board amplifier, in which you could access any 16 of the 100 channels. Notice the 100 pin holes on the left, and the column of 16 holes on the right. You would simply use cables like an old-fashioned telephone operator. In 50 years this equipment may be in a museum somewhere like the old ENIACS and PDPs in the computer science buildings. Right now the switchboard just sits in an cabinet in a corner of the surgery room along with other ancient equipment no one uses anymore.

Reaching Salt Lake City

After defending my dissertation, I headed out west to relax and free my mind of the crushing concavity of worrying about the defense perpetually (and also to hopefully gain some headway on the "what next" issue). I set out to Salt Lake City in Bopper, my 1981 Tercel with a top speed of 84 mph on a straight away.  Here is a picture of me setting forth, with a full toolshop in the trunk.

Good thing I brought it too. The right side transaxle began to leak fluid, and in Davenport, Iowa, I had to do a little roadside repair. You can see me giddy (I'm serious, I love this stuff) with excitement at the challenge below.

I know I would have to replace the transaxle once I got to Salt Lake City, but while on the road I found a combination of epoxy and chewing gum reduced the leak such I could make it to Salt Lake without breaking down.

Also in Iowa, I noticed this car at an gas station, with a rather touching, morbid, dedication on the back of the car. I asked the owner, a smallish teenage latina girl, if I could take a picture of it, and she said it was no problem.

And finally on Monday evening I drove into Utah. My car's 1.5 liter 60 horsepower engine had a hard time handling the mountains. With the pedal all the way down to the floor, I would watch the speedometer go from 80 mph in the flats to 45 mph as Bopper stuggled up the rocky mountains. Big brand new shiny SUVs and trucks would fly past me mockingly, but let's see how good their vehicles are at 335,000 miles. Chumps.

But oh my heart, how wonderful it was to see the landscape open up and rift. After being in Ann Arbor chained to a desk and a bar stool for 6 months now, in complete stagnation, I can feel my mind waking up and becoming excited and alive as I dive into the west, open roads, new places, and new faces.

I am now at Mark's house in Salt Lake City (Mark is a former post-doc of my lab), and I will explore this odd city for a few days before heading out Friday morning to southwestern Oregon for our 4 day white water rafting trip of the Rogue river.

My Dissertation Defense

You can watch now watch my PhD defense over and over again via youtube, anywhere you are in the world.

The verdict: I passed the defense fine. They didn't really criticize the science too much, but wanted some rewrites and expansions of the intro and conclusions. I should finish the rewrites by the end of July.

The 6 parts are presented in sequence. The whole talk is about 55 minutes long.

"On the Accessibility and Manipulation of Brain Signals for Neuroprosthetic Applications"

May 16th, 2008

Nature Cingulate Letter Rejected

Last year at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in San Diego, my colleagues and I presented the "Cingular Theory of Unification: The Cingulate Cortex does Everything" as a humorous satirical poster on the contemporary problem of neophrenology. You can read the extensive story here on my friend Shelley's old blog.

Rather happily for me and my colleagues, this work shall be published later this year in a German neuroscience satirical book "Braintertainment 2.0" and translated into "Die Cinguläre Theorie der Vereinigung: Der Gyrus Cinguli ist Für Alle Geistigen Leistungen Zuständig."

One slight untold detail about this work though was that right when my colleagues and I were presenting it at SfN, a paper in Nature came out about the cingulate cortex's role in "optimism." I could not believe my eyes. How much longer are the imaging folks going to get Science and Nature papers for simply mapping the brain? It's a totally fine scientific endeavor to do so, but such work is not the big science worthy of high-tier journals. So, I wrote a letter to Nature, which they never published. Its too bad. The text is below:

Dear Nature Magazine,

Your recent published findings of Sharot et. al, describing the functional brain regions involved in optimism have converged us into a rather drastic conclusion but that is nonetheless inevitable. Considering that the cingulate cortex is involved in loneliness, religious experiences, political leanings, stimulus-reward associations, motor planning, error detection, social evaluations, reward expectancy, sleep, and so on (references available upon request), we here propose the “Cingular Theory of Unification,” whereby we propose that the cingulate cortex does everything and is involved in all aspects of human behavior. We can thus move from determining what the cingulate cortex does to researching HOW the cingulate performs its infinite myriads of divine functions.

Tim Marzullo, Greg Gage, Hirak Parikh

University of Michigan

Flying Over Ann Arbor at 2500 ft

I love flying, but I hate flying. 

Seeing a plane in the air never ceases to amaze me: that actually works? You can actually fly in the air? I get the sense of wonder at man's magnificent achievement every time.

However, I don't know how to fly a plane, and the lack of control makes me uncomfortable. I can't stand being in a jet liner with 100 hundred other people being flown in a long aluminum tube by a pilot I don't even know. Every noise the plane makes freaks me out. Now, I don't let this get in the way of traveling, but I am never happy in a plane.

This love/hate relationship can be seen in the video above. My buddy Luis was in town, and after I turned in my dissertation last week I thought it would be fun to fly with him and see Ann Arbor from a different perspective. And it was fun, but everyday the plane jerked (it was pretty bumpy in that small plane), I'd freak out in my mind. I didn't show it to Luis of course, but I had the simultaneous feeling of loving the adventure and the view but also wanting to get on the ground as fast as possible.

Rolling Your Own Load Cell

Anyone who knows me with even the tiniest of familiarity knows I am a proponent of manned space flight and a space flight history buff. I've often bemoaned the slow development of propulsion systems of the past decades. As a young man growing up in the internet generation, I've been shocked at how the computer industry can be changed by lone wolf programmers hacking their way over a few months (re: facebook, youtube, napster, bit torrent, etc..).

I wish such bottom up innovation came in the space industry, but the truth is, rocket development is both very hard and very expensive. I wish I could read on slashdot tomorrow: "Teenager from Alabama invents cheap way to bend space time, making traditional chemical propulsion engines obsolete," but I know that will never happen. 

But it still occurred to me that I shouldn't be complaining. If I really wish more people would try to understand and tinker with rockets, why aren't I doing it? I realize I am not going to the change the world with my cardboard tubes filled with a gunpowder paste, but it at least is a fun exercise actually learning what goes into rocket design.

Over the past two months, maybe one-two nights a week, I have been developing a load cell rig so that I can actually digitally record on my labtop the thrust-time profile of my homemade rocket engines. I bought a load cell from Aerocon systems  and a cheap USB D/A converter from DATAQ systems. The amplifier I built myself, and you can see the first working demo here.

With the help of an electrical engineer friend of mine, we made the amplifier from a common op amp chip. There is a lovely website, here, that tells you exactly what resisters and capacitor values to use to set the gain and bandpass filtering you desire. We set our load cell amplifier for a 20 gain and a 300 Hz low pass filter. The image above left shows the configuration on the chip pins, and the image above right shows the whole circuit with power supply and indicator lights.

The Olympic Torch Backpack

A few months ago my friends and I got into a debate about China's plan to bring a torch up to Mt. Everest. Climbing the mountain is hard enough, but bringing a torch as well? And how would the torch even continue to burn in the oxygen poor, windy, snowy conditions of the mountain? So, in some down time, I drew a schematic for how I would design an Olympic Torch Backpack. My friend Shelley blogged about it, to some moderate success. Now, I usually take jokes way beyond the point they need to be, so late one night after a couple beers I submitted the olympic torch backpack to the tech-transfer office here at the University of Michigan.

My e-mail:

Hello Tech Transfer Office,
I am a graduate student in Daryl Kipke's Neural Engineering Lab at UM, and my friends and I got in a recent discussion about the 2008 Winter Olympics. It turns out the Chinese Government plans to carry the Olympic Torch up to the peak of Mt. Everest. This, of course, got the engineering head of mine thinking about how you would actually get a torch up to the oxygen thin windy snowing conditions of the mountain. I drew up a schematic, and my colleagues suggested I submit it to your office. Imagine a UM logo on an olympic torch on Mt. Everest!

My question is: is it worth patenting? I know you have a disclosure form on your website, but for this kind of thing I thought it would be best to contact you directly in this fashion.

Sincerely,
Tim Marzullo

And a month later the response:

Subject: olympic torch design

Hi Tim,

Your email was forwarded to me!  Very ingenious design :-)  However, since the design has been published online on www.seedmagazine.com, it has been publicly disclosed.  Based on patent laws, once an invention has been publicly disclosed, it is no longer patentable in any countries except for the US.  As a result we feel that we will not be able to get enough patent protection even if we decided to pursue this.

Please feel free to give me a call if you have any additional questions, I'd be happy to discuss this with you.

Nadine

Tech Transfer Office

University of Michigan

Oh well. It was a fun exercise. But, yesterday the Chinese actually did bring the torch up Mt. Everest. Unfortunately, they cheated a bit. They simply lit the torch on the peak, rather than carrying it up the whole way. If I had known of that less stringent technical requirement, I would have just made the torch out of gunpowder, since gunpowder has its own oxidizer built in and will even burn in outerspace. China went about it a different way and made their torch to burn on propane, which evidently will still burn at the lower oxygen density of 28,000 ft.

You can see the whole shenanigans via youtube.

Neurophysiology of Flight Control

In my pipe dreams, I'd love to combine my hobbyist interest in space flight with my day job as a neuroscientist. In my early days I tried to do this by working on vestibular systems, but I found that field simply wasn't very interesting. It's as if, take neuroscience, which is interesting, and space flight, which is interesting, and combine them together, and you get something boring? Sorry to all you vestibular folks out, maybe its just I am not a sensory neuroscience guy. 

Anyway, I've always thought that once wireless technology improves, it be a lot of fun, and probably ground breaking, to extend my study of motor cortex electrophysiology to the motor physiology of flight control in birds. What is the representation of wings in the motor cortex. How does the motor cortex (neopallidum in birds I think) encode controlled stalls when landing?

Well, I have no knowledge, really, of aerodynamics, and some investigators here at the University of Michigan wrote a book: "The Aerodynamics of Low Reynolds Number Flyers" which I just bought today on Amazon. Ask me in four months if I was actually able to understand it and come up with an experiment!

To be fair, however, there is one professor, Michael Dickinson of Caltech, studying the neurophysiology of flight in the much more manageable preparation of the fruit fly. 

Hottest Scientist Ever

If you are a Rhodes Scholar, beautiful, in a rock band, and an excellent scientist, I just want to let you know, I instantaneously have a crush on you.

What's your name again..Pardis Sabeti? Wow, that's a pretty name. You're Iranian? Saleem! Hodahoffes! Mochikira! I know Farci! Let's go out.

My Scientist Hero

Awhile ago my lab had a contract with DARPA to train sharks using brain electrodes. I was only minorly involved in the project, but I did get to meet the coolest scientist ever. We collaborated with Dr. Jeff Carrier of Albion University, as his lab actually housed the sharks we implanted.

I want out to Albion one day to help with the electrophysiology, and during some down time I asked Jeff, "You know, in our lab, we work on neural interfaces, which has potential clinical benefit, so we have a variety of funding sources. When you are a pure biologist simply interested in shark behavior, how do you get funding to do your experiments?"

Jeff then looked at me straight in the eye and said "Any f**king way I can. I put my house on a second mortgage to lease a boat to do my experiments." 

Now that is pretty badass. I'm never complaining about the difficulty of getting funding ever again.