Vintage Impressions

I absolutely love old vintage prints, I have a
great calendar with 1920 vintage commercial
prints...it's beautiful!

Memory Simplified

Early and Late Phase LTP from Principles of Neural Science, Fourth Edition, Eric R. Kandel.
Early LTP (top synapse) (long-term potentiation) does not involve protein formation, unlike late LTP. In late LTP (lower synapse), messengers are sent to the nucleus to induce structural changes, to allow explicit memories to be formed. Thus for us to hold memories we need to make proteins.

Me

Point One

I can't think of stuff to post on this website so I figured I'd continue with describing a little about me. I live in the woods of Lafayette, Ca where I live at home with my mom, brother and dog, Shelby. My dad died when I was one in Denmark, and then I moved to Japan with my mom until I was 4, and then we moved to California. My mom remarried, had my brother, and here we are. Growing up was weird, but I guess I had the typical upbringing, getting addicted to coke at age 12, stealing cars, having wild sex....just kidding, although a lot of kids I went to school with did just that. As for interests, I've always liked the outdoors, hiking up the mountains and along rivers, horse-back riding, camping out, reading, dancing and art. I was planning on going up to Yosemite in April with some friends, it should be beautiful!

Since I'm not in school anymore, I'm working, at a pharmaceutical company in the north bay as a research assistant where I am examining the growth conditions and specific productivity of a variety of cell lines to optimize our manufacturing productions. In addtion, I also am working on a project called phenylase, in conjuction with our MPS projects. With phenylase, I will be growing the cells and inoculating them into a 20L fermenter and running the system. The hardest part is probably just getting everything setup. To increase robustness and tighter control into our operating systems at a process development level, I am also in charge of implementing FermWorks into our processes, which is a supervisory and data acquistion software. The cool part will be when I begin configuring the DAQ boards and channels to our software to provide control loops for our larger systems. I like working with my hands, with computers and in a lab setting so this is all great.

But eventually, I would like to go to grad school, to pursue a degree in neuroscience. I've applied to UW, but I'm still waiting for a response. I really don't have a backup plan, since I was counting on getting in, but we'll see. In the meantime, I've been a little on edge and a bit anxious, so I've been at home, trying to get my mind off of life in general, reading some good books, but trying to avoid going out so much, which is a big deal considering my weekends are usually packed with great fun, lots of dancing, and hanging out with great friends. Ahhh!! I think once I know if I got in or not, the more relieved I'll be to just keep on going....right now my life seems to be at a standstill almost...it's weird, but I can't really explain it.

Finding Who We Are

I decided earlier this year that I would learn more about myself, including what I want, what I don't, what I enjoy, why this, and the list goes on... You would think that such a task, or goal, may seem fairly straightforward, and yet it has proven to be quite difficult. We are often times looking at the world through the lenses of our preconceived notions of what things are or look like, based on the teachings from our environment. It is quite difficult to look at things purely objectively. In addition, we no longer pay attention to small details that we have conditioned ourselves to ignore... We have been conditioned to see what we chose to see and learn to ignore extraneous stimuli that does not influence us directly.

Enlightenment thinkers? How about philosophical postmodernists' views? Is it possible that all can be known, or can we know nothing? Would you want your fate to be revealed, to be known and defined by scientific principles and reason? I think it's comforting to know that science has its limits and its boundaries, and cannnot reveal the absolute truth. In this light, it can be possible to understand ourselves and the forces and interactions we have with our environment and each other, but it cannot be done solely based mathematical principles. Deeper connections, must be made across the physical sciences, the natural sciences, the social sciences and humanities. In addition, in order to further deduce such ideas set in scientific discourse, we must unveil the workings of the human brain.

So how do we manage that? Through awareness. How do we acheive awareness? Through detachment. By detachment, I mean detaching ourselves from certain preconceived notions of who we think we are from our ways of thinking. Maybe our way of thinking isn't all that great, and by retraining ourselves to think in a new way, we could begin to utilize our senses in a whole new way.

Shelby

My beautiful puppy Shelby!
Shelby is a pure bred German
Shepherd, about 8yrs old.