Neuroscience

There are surprises everywhere in this field. The mystery of how brain works will remain unsolved for at least another century, I think. Just when the theories look fine, usually an unexpected result shows up and changes everything. You never know what the brain has in store for you.

A lot of the past work related to brain was done by studying trained animals as subjects. But now brain plasticity has raised a big concern. The researchers then turn to untrained animals, and the same task can not be repeated for too many times since that would be considered training....this is getting interesting. A lot of past papers need to be checked again for wordings.

It's now too late for me to switch my major, but if I had taken some neuroscience course back when I was a freshman, my life would probably be completely different. Well, I don't really like the idea of sticking an electrode into an animal though. Poor monkeys. It's fine to read the papers, though I will give a second thought before I actually did that myself.

Experiment analysis....

Oops. It has been quite a while since I last post article here. I was busy last weekend....watching Strawberry Panic and Chocotto Sister, 50 eps. in total.

Now back to the subject. It costs me several hours to find out some stupid errors: I forgot a factor of 1/2 and messed up a length unit. I hate cgs units, to be honest. What makes things worse is that I started to be suspicious about the formula I derived. I worked in cgs units, as the base of the derivation comes from the lab guide and is in cgs system, and I were not sure if I have forgot some random constant. Guess I have to live with it.

Level up!!

...in terms of skill of this particular experiment. Normally when you tune the mirrors there is a coarse tune with a micrometer, and a fine tune with bias voltage, but now I can get the peaks with only coarse tune. It's just some experience thing. This makes the experiment setup so much easier, and doable by a single person. The fine tune definitely needs two people, or more than 4 times longer it will take to finish that step. Well, there are no more experiment sessions though. Next week we'll start on the superconductivity.

Fortunately we got the data yesterday, last 3-hour session of this experiment. The effort in the 5 sessions before are all in vain, if you don't count failure experience. This is the first time it is so dramatic. No data in more than 15 lab hours, and suddenly lots of data in the last 3 hours. Our presentation is next Friday, so there are only at most 8 hours (noon everyday) that we could use if there is something wrong in this batch of data. I believe we made it this time, but....we'll see. d: