Holly A. Gultiano

Studying mathematical/theoretical/computational neuroscience & data science in dᶻidᶻəlal̓ič (Seattle) -- more interested in studying nervous systems through abstraction than studying neurons to improve artificial systems

⚧ ND (ASD/mTBIs/cPTSD/ET/probably some more letters) ⬛

Long time musician, now slowly inching my way thru academia as first in my immediate family to go this route. Grew up unschooled, which gave me a heavy autodidactism habit

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npub12gvxrj7dnx4ylr6y5uuatp7wlga4n8ctr8t72trvtaaml8a2r3yqzh55ru

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axoaxonic_at_synapse.cafe@mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqs9yxrpe0xen2j03az2www4sl805w6enu93n4l993k977aln74pcjqcuhgh4

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npub12gvxrj7dnx4ylr6y5uuatp7wlga4n8ctr8t72trvtaaml8a2r3yqzh55ru

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Last Notes

2024-09-04 02:44:32

Kvass is a really underrated* beverage
*in this country

2024-08-16 02:38:30

In a 1922 paper called "Natural Selection as a Physical Principle", Alfred Lotka rephrased "survival of the fittest" as simply "persistence of stable forms." Seems like way less loaded of a term. Stable forms persist in biology until they become unstable in a way that makes them unable to persist, then they change and continue as new forms.
10.1073/pnas.8.6.151

2024-06-30 17:00:44

Woke up today before #Pride thinking about the word "orientation," and how my pansexuality feels more like a non-orientable surface, like a Möbius strip (but higher dimensional). I wonder if anyone else thinks this is an apt analogy.

2024-06-05 17:23:24

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@npub1j4v…p4ys Really into it, but I've only read the first book in the series and watched the series. Do you know if the other books get farther into the details of the San-Ti?

2024-06-05 00:31:50

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@npub16w5…dxft I just passed Octavia Butler Ave in Lake Forest Park. I've read Parable of the Sower and Dawn. Any others you'd recommend for the above reasons?

2024-06-05 00:03:02

Looking for sci-fi where the aliens are unlike any being on Earth. I've always been weary of humanoid aliens with misspelled Arabic word names, maybe they're green, or half-human, half-fish people on a planet lightyears away that should have drastically different evolutionary paths. Any recs?

2024-05-24 19:48:27

I have a weirdly good memory for number strings, getting 100% of them right on the WAIS forward digit span test, which the examiner said they never seen before. This is helpful mostly because I can memorize license plates of cars that seem like they're about to hit me while riding my bike, and it's dangerous because I remember all my credit card info and can buy stuff online really fast lol

2024-03-28 03:26:07

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@npub1f7d…s5uv Ventusky has precipitation and hour-by-hour forecasts https://www.ventusky.com/?p=47.599;-122.345;11&l=rain-1h&t=20240328/0300

2024-03-12 23:40:15

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@npub1skv…aky3 I believe I'll always be deeply interested in a lot of different things and weave them together, I 100% can't turn that part of my mind off, nor do I want to. I'm mostly amazed at people's ability to focus on one research topic, even if it's just for a year or two before going to the next, making some really solid work happen. Even DaVinci finished paintings.
When everything's interesting or all the champagne on the shelf looks good, usually the best thing to do is to pick whatever one you're drawn to and go and enjoy it. That's the most important part anyways in "no wrong choices" situations, the unique experience the choice results in.

2024-03-12 22:56:49

In this society that emphasizes competition and mastery to create value, so many people say you have to focus on one thing to be successful, but no one really says how to do that.. When I was younger I heard that advice, I decided to focus on neuroscience, but even within this field there's actually millions of potential things to focus on.
If anyone wants to share their method/s of deciding what to devote serious time to, feel free to reply

2024-03-01 15:42:48

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@npub15sw…x855 Do you have any preferred alternatives? I like "reflect" -- models as mirrors

2024-02-25 15:50:08

Went to the Shahdmehr lab youtube page too look if there were any #cerebellum vids, and was surprised to find a whole series of hour-long lectures from the Johns Hopkins Cerebellum Seminars
https://www.youtube.com/@shadmehrlab1352
Invidious version to avoid trackers and allow adblockers:
https://vid.puffyan.us/channel/UCSifaCZt1HmnZJ3440AOf8g

2024-02-01 15:41:16

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@npub1skv…aky3 there's a similar phenomenon in West Seattle https://www.knkx.org/other-news/2012-09-06/mysterious-hum-keeping-west-seattle-up-at-night
People think it's probably from a fish called the Midshipman fish

2023-12-15 03:00:55

Got tired of running out of RAM when analyzing large datasets, and I don't like paying Amazon or Google to rent their clusters, so I ordered pieces to assemble a new laptop from a "for parts" base Getac V110 G5 (rugged not because I want to pretend I'm a militant gundam pilot but because I drop things a lot, plus a laptop I can use outside sounds nice) with 32GB ram, all it needed was a drive and a charger so I got a 2TB SDD.
If it works it should be pretty solid, and I want to try a new #Linux distro. Been using #!++ for years, now leaning towards Void Linux, but I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a distro optimized for data analysis, if that makes any sense. Ideally that would mean not just package availablility, I know how to download and compile from source if I need, but how it works at the base level. I know a lot of them use the same kernel since they're mostly forks of Debian, Ubuntu, or Arch, but some like Garuda have features that effect how it utilizes RAM etc.
I was looking into NixOS too but it seems like that's more for people who love hacking their own OSs. Would also try out a BSD or Redox OS but worry about the learning curve and dealing with incompatiblilty

2023-12-05 03:42:46

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@npub15sw…x855 It looks like inhibition causes learning to be more stable and accurate, so without it learning would likely take longer to converge to the correct information. The Kohonen paper without inhibition doesn't say anything about how long it takes, and only mentions that "the primary purpose of lateral inhibition ... is to improve spatial acuity in pattern detection, and certain inhibitory connections also tend to standardize the
scales of the excitatory signals." It might be fast enough on input that's not very complex or noisy, and I suppose it could learn something wrong quickly..

2023-12-05 01:41:55

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@npub15sw…x855 This version of the Self Organizing Map competitive learning model doesn't need inhibition:
"One might ask why there are no inhibitory synapses or lateral inhibitory connections in this model. The simplest answer to that is that, unlike in the earlier models, they are not needed for self-organization, as proven here"
"Self-organizing neural projections", Kohonen, 2006
10.1016/j.neunet.2006.05.001
Although other biologically-grounded versions of SOMs incorporate E-I dynamics, like in https://mathematical-neuroscience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13408-020-00097-6

2023-10-19 01:23:56

Just found this list of neuroscience themes in #SciFi literature https://dynamicsubspace.net/research/neuroscience-and-science-fiction-literature/

2023-10-10 22:42:05

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@npub1200…aqy2 I've been doing weekly electrolysis for about a year and it's like almost nothing has changed. I've been trying to cope by remembering rad bearded ladies and the beautiful hairy enbies of the world, wanting read this https://nyupress.org/9781479840823/plucked/ soon, but the feeling of inaccessibility is also depressing. Looking into laser again now, but thanks for prepping me for a continued long road

2023-09-20 12:14:08

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1gpe…aa0f @npub12ss…c7zf CO2 has been used a panicogen https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.31887/DCNS.2011.13.4/jwemmie , to experimentally induced panic at levels from %5 to %35 , even in people with damaged amygdala https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3323
I wonder how what percentage of CO2 wildfire smoke adds to the air at that AQI level

2023-08-10 21:46:43

If people into category theory for neuroscience and people into topology for neuroscience want to interact more, here's a cool open access book to bridge the gap: "Topology: A Categorical Approach" Tai-Danae Bradley, Tyler Bryson and John Terilla (2020) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539357/

2023-08-09 21:21:23

~9 years ago I was really into the work of Donna Haraway, and even got to attend a talk and crash a luncheon she was at. She has repeatedly brought up the work of systems scientist Beth Dempster, who addressed the closed, indepedent nature of Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoietic systems, and proposed an interdepence-network type expansion of them called "sympoeietic systems" https://web.archive.org/web/20210214033415/https://drago.intecca.uned.es/download/d3d3LmludGVjY2EudW5lZC5lcw==_230879_1484148400_10.1.1.582.1177.pdf [the only free pdf I can find is all highlighted, sry]
It emphasizes how change within systems, like organisms, almost always happens through interactions, as opposed to a more exclusively internal self-emergence in autopoeitic systems. This network of interacting systems can itself be thought of as a system itself.
It got to be a popular concept with humanities and critical theory scholars, but it seems largely unknown in the sciences. It lacks "formalization," but seems totally ammenable to it. There are already formal concepts of interaction, such as transfer entropy, mutual info, and interdependent networks https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-03518-5