Interesting ideas interspersed with nonsense - RSS - by nikhil bhatla, nbhatla@mit.edu -
About Me   Jan 9, 2009

Web trinkets
Exon-Intron Graphic Maker
C. elegans Interactive Neural Network
Attack of the Microscopic Vacuum Cleaners

Favorite posts
Survival School
I Know You
Stool Sampler
Arrogant Atheists vs. Everyone Else
How I came to believe in God

Business ideas
Gift Cards, Post-Pay Style

Friends' blogs
Becca Loya
Sachin Agarwal
Omar Khan
250words.org
  All blogs »

Classes I've taken at MIT »

Books I've read »

Videos I've watched »


First Pics with Canon SD700
Jul 9, 2007, 4:02p - 26 photos

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Hearst Castle & Morro Bay
Jun 18, 2007, 8:25p - 15 photos

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Washington DC
May 10, 2007, 12:09p - 35 photos

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Philadelphia & Longwood Gardens
May 8, 2007, 11:54a - 16 photos

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Manhattan with the 'Rents
May 6, 2007, 11:45a - 8 photos

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Amit & Bianka's Wedding on Long Island
May 5, 2007, 9:56a - 133 photos

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Bacteria don't have to be icky
Feb 7, 2010, 10:30a
(This is the second in a 3-post series on biology. The first post gave background on the various levels at which biologists analyze organisms. This post discusses bacteria and an interesting behavior that they have called chemotaxis. The last post will present a web app that's an interactive simulator of this behavior. Yes, I had originally thought this would all ... more »

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A name change
Jan 3, 2010, 2:55p
I was reading an essay about art and neuroscience out loud to Becca. The more I read, the more insightful it appeared it could have been, yet the more like computer-generated spam it actually sounded. Becca said "That person sounds like they have a lot of interesting ideas, interspersed with nonsense." For some reason, that made me think about my ... more »

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A Note about Biology
Dec 25, 2009, 3:11a
(This is the first in a 3-post series on biology. I begin with some background, mostly to provide context for the second post, which is about a behavior in bacteria called chemotaxis. The third post will introduce a web app that simulates bacterial chemotaxis, and will be explained in gratuitous detail. I made it over a year ago, and ... more »

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Cell phones, gestures, and 3G
Dec 23, 2009, 11:14a
(I'm sitting on a plane as I write this, flying to LA for Christmas. It's a 6 hour flight, and since I seem to be slightly phone-obsessed at the moment, I figured I'd pass the time by putting my thoughts down, since there's nothing on TV and I'm bored. Be forewarned - my blog is not turning into yet another ... more »

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Tugging Bubbles in a Box
Dec 15, 2009, 10:15a
Last weekend, I went to San Francisco for a friend's wedding. While there, I was thrust back into a world I left 3 years ago, the world that is my California. It is a world of engineering and of business, the world of working and thinking in Silicon Valley. It is a world raft with rapid, superficial, constructed, and possibly ... more »

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Making DNA look simple
Nov 19, 2009, 8:47p
UPDATE #2: Users can now change the scale bar to any length they'd like in the Exon-Intron Graphic Maker. The default had been 100 bases, but for people working with genes much longer than worm genes (such as human genes), the scale bar would disappear into single-pixel oblivion. So now users can set the size of their scale bar ... more »

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To Be Conscious in a Body, Frozen
May 16, 2009, 11:21a
It's hard to tell if a thing is conscious. You know, if there is something that it feels like to be that thing. I know it feels like something to be a person, and I think it doesn't feel like anything to be a shoe (unless perhaps I've been smoking some salvia), or to be a dead person. But what ... more »

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Visualizing a Worm's Neural Network
Apr 21, 2009, 11:17p
For almost a year and a half, I've been working in Bob Horvitz' lab at MIT studying the nematode C. elegans. A microscopic worm of diminutive proportions (weighing in at only 1 millimeter in length), a single creature is just smaller than the size of an eyelash. These worms have been studied since the 1970s and much is known ... more »

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You have 2 time travels: Choose wisely
Jan 13, 2009, 8:37p
If you could travel to any 2 points in time, to where and when would you go?

This question popped into my mind as I was wandering the snow-cleared paths of MIT today. I had taken a break from my lab to contemplate the fine points of associative and non-associative learning (with little luck), when I saw a few plump ... more »

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Controlling robots with your mind
Nov 8, 2008, 12:15p
It's the stuff of which sci-fi dreams are made. Mind control, well, not of another person, but of a robot. Want your laundry done? Tell your robot to do it. But not just tell it, think it.

That's the idea, anyway.

Before I applied to grad school, this stuff really intrigued me. While working at Google, so often I ... more »

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