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Day 142: So you want to record from the brain…

EEG setup

My college helping me set up for the experiment I just did. This is how we add gel to the head, there is a tiny hole by each sensor, we then insert a blunt tip needle (we do NOT puncture the skin!) to add the gel between the sensor and the top of the head to eliminate the air gap caused by the hair. Unfortunately it looks scary, but we need something tiny to get around the sensor (if you look close you can seethe tiny, tiny opening each senor has). The lights on each sensor tell us how good of a connection we have, red means bad, yellow means we’re getting close, and green means good.

Today’s post was inspired by a conversation I was having yesterday in the comment section (you know who you are and thank you for the questions). I thought I would elaborate on how we record from the brain and why. There are a lot of different ways we can do this, some of them are super invasive and others are non-invasive. In the lab I work in now, we do things non-invasively there are good things about this and bad things about this, so let’s get into it!

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Day 141: PI meeting result

brains

Well I’ve had my first meeting with my main PI (vs my Co-PI). It went well, I’m very happy with the result and while I’m not at the end of my PhD (yet), it seemed like we were in agreement with my progress. I still have the meeting with my PI and Co-PI coming up, but let’s go over some of the things that we talked about in this meeting.
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Day 140: A meeting with my PI

 

EEGCap

Tools of the trade, an EEG cap I set up for my experiment

With the term about to start (we get another week, even though some schools are already kicking off), I have a few things that I need to do prior to the start. One of those things was make more work for myself, no really. I made a few emails between my two PI’s (which sounds like a TV show) and arranged for a meeting.

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Day 139: My cat cannot lay down right…

hikari

Huh, maybe it isn’t big enough for her to fit? No, she’s just a big weirdo, keep reading…

Well today is another day of painting the house. Like I mentioned this has been an ongoing project since I moved last year, let me just say painting takes longer than you think it will. In any case, with all the stress of possible war, I need a way to relax or at least something else to focus on. In that regard I thought I would share one of my fuzzy daughters.

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Day 138: Stress painting

Tali

Tali expressing exactly how I feel at the moment.

Today is one of those days where I’m stuck trying to figure out what to write about. Granted they happen infrequently, but this is a little different. With all the stress from the impending probability of war I just want to relax. I’ve been thoroughly engrossed in painting my house, a project I’ve been working off and on for the past year. It’s nice to be able to do something mindless, something I can distract myself with. Basically I’m just going to be doing that for the day.

Day 137: The reality of war

IwoJima

Fun fact, this is a staged photo. For an even more “fun” fact, you should learn about what happened to these people after the photo was taken and made popular.

Well, 2020 is off to an … interesting start. We have all of Australia burning, Indonesia flooding, and trump starting a war without congressional approval (that last one is a rather large crime fyi). So in typical american fashion, people are starting to fetishize war again. Of course these are the people who have never been to war, so as someone who has some experience on this, let’s talk war. It’s going to get messy so let’s just throw in a CW for combat talk.

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Day 136: A look forward

a look forward

The obligatory photo of a path that goes on into the distance (taken from the hike we went on during the neurotech confrence).

Yesterday we took a look back at the past decade. I’m not a fan of looking back, it’s not how I’ve survived this long, it’s not something I’m particularly comfortable with, and even though it wasn’t a bad thing to do, I would rather look forward and talk about the things that will be happening (hopefully) this year. Let’s ring in the new year with the to-do list for this year!

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Day 134: New Year’s Eve!!

Newyearseve2020

Well it’s new year’s eve so I’m taking the day off. What? No, no party or anything, I’ll probably be asleep when the new year hits. It’s just a good excuse not to have to blog today and get some house work done instead. Maybe I’m old or maybe I’m just boring, but it beats trying to be social.

In any case, here’s to the new year and the hope that the next 10 years will be better than the last!

 

Day 133: The truth of VA healthcare

VA Hospital

I’m a disabled Marine veteran. From a TBI to my mental health, I’ve got some serious issues. Furthermore, with the rate of suicide among veterans ever increasing it may be odd to an outsider why this is happening. After all, the government provides us with free healthcare, why are so many of us dying, why are so many of us killing ourselves? The answer is sadly straightforward, although grim, so let’s talk healthcare as a veterans.

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Day 132: Rat model validation!

stock photography Pet rat closeup

Yesterday I mentioned that I had some rat data to go through. It was an old(er) dataset, about five years-old to be exact, but it was one that was going to help me validate some of my findings. Unfortunately there existed no invasive human datasets to compare my human data to, so I needed to find an animal model, in this case a rat model. Let’s discuss the importance.

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Day 131: My laptop is ALIVE!

poor laptop

The poor thing has been through a lot, notice my c key is completely worn down. I didn’t know I hit c so hard!

Well after a few days of curing time, my laptop is alive again! In fact I’m writing this on it now. YAY!! I honestly don’t have the money to replace the thing and I already have much needed car repairs to attend to, so this cannot break on me yet.

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Day 130: ‘Twas the night before Christmas, a racist police story

Day 130 - night before christmas

With all the excitement around here, I almost forgot to tell one of my favorite stories! Okay, not a favorite, but a good example of why racist cops are… well racist. Let’s set the scene, it was seriously the night before Christmas and it was the first time I dealt with a police officer, it wouldn’t be the last time, but it was certainly the most memorable. Especially when my name got thrown into the mix, let me explain…

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Day 129: Everything is breaking!!!

Day 129 - repairs

Well it’s post Christmas day and I have to say my stealth wrapping was a hit. Of course, after the first gift (or even the second gift) people catch on, but overall it was a lot of fun and I even got a few apologies for some of the ill will based on my apparent lack of wrapping abilities. I HIGHLY recommend giving it a shot. So let’s talk about the image above for a minute.

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Day 128: Christmas Day

Red Christmas Balls on Old Wood with Christmas lights

For those of you who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas! For those of you who celebrate different holidays this time of the year, happy holidays, and for those of you who don’t celebrate anything, that’s okay too. No judgement here for sure. Since today is C-day I figured I would do a quick post and share something a bit personal to me.

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Day 127: Stealth wrapping Pt. 3

santa

For the past two days I’ve been trying to introduce a new way to level up your gift giving experience. It’s a way to make your holidays more magical, best of all, this works for any present giving time, birthdays, weddings, anytime! If you’re just tuning in you should read part 1, where I introduce the first principles of stealth wrapping. Yesterday I posted a few more examples, which you can see here. Today I’ll give some last examples and a few helpful hints I’ve learned over the years of doing this. Let’s get going!!

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Day 126: Stealth wrapping Pt. 2

wrapping

This is a continuation from yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read how I like to wrap my presents, you should probably start here. For the rest of you, this is going to be just a few more examples of my wrapping creativity. Same rules apply, don’t stealth wrap your gift as something the person would want! I CANNOT stress that enough, otherwise let’s get started.

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Day 125: I wrap better than you, a how to guide

Presents

Tis’ the season! The holidays are here and depending on your traditions and what you believe in, you’re probably planning on giving gifts to the people you care about. Think about it for a second, perfectly wrapped rectangular packages organized neatly just waiting for you to open them. But that’s boring!!! Why wrap your gifts nice and square when you can have some fun with it. Let me blow your mind.

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Day 124: On the importance of time off

Overworked

When I left the military, I threw myself into work. I was offered — and I took — all the overtime I could get. If I stayed busy, I didn’t have to think about anything else and at the time, it is what I wanted. I didn’t want to have to think about anything else. It was an unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyle, one I don’t necessarily regret, just one I had to learn from.

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Day 123: Well I HAD a meeting

timeobsessed

Today I reluctantly had two things to do on my list, this despite being sick. Now, I don’t normally like going out when I’m unwell, I don’t want to get others sick, I don’t want to suffer more, blah blah blah. The usual things you’re supposed to do when you are sick. Well today I was not that lucky, let’s talk about why.

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Day 121: Qualifying Exam Aftermath

Steele - QE

I don’t normally share photos of myself, but I thought I would share the final slide, I love it so much.

Well if you don’t follow me on twitter, then you don’t know the results of my qualifying exam. Well I’ll tell you, but not yet. First let’s talk about how it went and what the qualifying exam is (I know we’ve covered this already here, but it would be good to do it again).

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Day 119: Conference Day 4

Winners

The winners of the pitch competition giving a surprise 1-2 minute elevator pitch

Well, I’m finally home. It’s been exhausting, but super exciting. I’ve got so much to share I’m not even sure where to start. Let’s go over how yesterday went first. It was our last day at the confrence and our trainees got to present their company pitches. We named the top three (of ten) teams and they got prizes (surprisingly useful and super nice prizes, a wireless phone charger in fact). We also had some talks, so let’s go through the highlights.

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Day 114: Classifier Update

NARXNET Classifier-Raw out

Behold! My amazing predictive power!! *insert evil laugh here*

It’s been a long and exhaustive road to get to here. As you may recall, I’ve given several updates already on my progress and I THINK I’ve finally hit success. In fact, I know I have, the problem now? Well what the neural net saw to make the predictions is a mystery to me, so I don’t know why or how it works… yet.

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Day 112: Conference Prep

conference

We are just a few days away from my first of two events back to back. First up is the confrence I keep mentioning. It’s a meeting with collaborators from several schools to discuss work we’ve been doing that the group funded. I have one of those projects, so I will be presenting a powerpoint with an update on the work along with a poster that I’ve made.

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Day 111: A prosthetic update

colored-head.jpg

Prosthetic I’ve designed for Lucas, you can see the full view further into the post.

Now that the term is over, you would think I get some time to myself. That is unfortunately not true. There is still quite a bit of work ahead for me before I can take some time over the winter break to relax. One of the more important things that needs to happen is the prosthetic project I’ve been working on for some time.

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Day 110: Experiment!

EEG setup

This is an actual photo from my experiment setup, one of my colleagues is adding gel to the sensors. While the giant syringe looks scary, it isn’t. It’s full of conductive gel that gets placed between the head and the sensor. There is no pain or puncturing of the skin involved. Afterwards the gel washes out of the hair. The real pain is sitting for ~30 minutes or so while we gel each electrode enough to get a good reading.

A few days ago I mentioned I did a thing, well an experimental thing really. It was… fun? It was definitely something. Overall it went well, but I said I would give everyone an update and I try to be a man of my word, so let’s do this.

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Day 109: Post exam exhaustion

exhausted student.jpg

It’s over. The term has finally come to an end and I’ve taken my final as of yesterday. It’s bittersweet, on one hand I can now (sort of) relax. On the other, it means that there are exactly zero chances for me to improve my grade. I’ve done my best and now I need to hope that it is enough to get me to the finish line.

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Day 102: Finals ahead!

Warning sign

Well it’s that time of year again, finals! On one hand I’m excited at the prospect of being done with the term, on the other I’m a notoriously bad test taker. I deal with a lot of anxiety you see and even when I know how to solve the problem, come test day I end up drawing a blank or making very stupid mistakes. Standardized tests are the bane of my existence!!

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Day 101: Holiday

Well today is thanksgiving, not a holiday I celebrate, but I’m happy to have the day off at least. I’ll be taking the day to get some work done and relax some. Deadlines are coming so I can’t take the whole day to myself, but at least it’s a low stress day.

Until next time, don’t stop learning!

Day 100: Graduating lab members

Day 100 - PhD defense offense

Image from: xkcd.com

Wow, time flies, we’re already on day 100. Still not half way done, but it certainly doesn’t feel like 100 days of writing. Today has been a busy day, which is why I’m writing so late. With the end of the term comes other projects that need to be addressed, namely my qualifying exam, final exams, and other lab members having their Ph.D defense. Yep, we have not one, not two, but three people defending their Ph.D this term.

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Day 98: Laptop troubles

Well it finally happened. My laptop looks pretty dead. Right now I have it in pieces while I try to figure out what went wrong with it. Thankfully I have a desktop computer that I use for all my heavy computing as a back up. Just one more expense I guess, I should be grateful that it wasn’t something more serious like the hard drive going out.

So short post, I know, but I have to get this fixed or find some sort of resolution since my laptop is an important part of how I get work done. I’ll have a longer post tomorrow, but for now I think that is it.

Until next time, don’t stop learning!

Day 93: QE date is set… again!

5 tacks on a single date on a calendar

Exciting news!!!!! Well as you can tell from the title, my qualifying exam date is set. After some time emailing back and forth I finally just sent out a doodle poll to get everyone to vote on what time would work best for them. Last night, my last committee member added their availability to the poll and with that, I have a new time and date!

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