Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Neuro geeks of the world unite!

Welcome to Neurochannels, a blog where we will discuss a series of neuroscience books. The idea of starting a blog was suggested, with ambiguous seriousness, by Serapio Baca. The first book will be the third edition of Bertil Hille's classic Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes. In fact, that book was the inspiration for the name of the blog. Expect the first post in early August.

2 comments:

Serapio M. Baca said...

Gearing up in LA

Jelloe? I said Jelloe...

Well, if your lab-mates move to the other side of the country, the best thing to do is to start a blog. And read some science books. This will almost assuredly get you off the A list in Hollywood, and the Scientologist's are unlikely to find you a lucrative patron, I mean devout believer.

So, once I get a paycheck, I am game to begin reading Hille's third edition. I remember reading the first edition--the cover is black-- while I was in Woods Hole. Reading that one with several other NS&Bers was a lot of fun--though I doubt we understood half of what we read--and we referred to the time as "Chillin' with Hille." We will see if this go around is nearly as entertaining.

Ok, I gotta get some sleep. Brainstem dissections are a bit tough for me right now though I can start working on all of my medulla oblongata jokes. Let's shoot for sometime in July to begin this in earnest? And are others going to join in the fun?

-SMB

Eric Thomson said...

Bacalator. Hey, I think an early July start date sounds good. I'll post something on Chapter 1 then. I started it last night in earnest and, far from being a breezy overview (my expectation), as you probably already know, it is a dense and pretty damned hard book. Especially the second half.

This makes it even more worthy of reading group scrutiny.

I am mentioning this to a few people: I told Briggman and Isaacson so far (the latter b/c for some reason I have always associated this book with Jeff, even before he and Jane's fateful class), and a couple of people at my lab. But if this goes well, a lot of people will ultimately read and contribute. A little something I like to call "audience participation."