A new beginning

OK, I've changed my focus yet again.  I don't seem able to keep my attention on one area for very long.  I keep coming back to the same topics.

I'll drop my musings on economic issues for now and chronicle what I've been learning most recently.

I finished the Coursera class, "Synapse, Neurons, and Brains" about a month ago.  It covered a lot of material, none in any real depth.  I had to learn a few electronic formula and concepts.  There were no lab work; all I did was watch the lectures and take the tests.  I'll expand my knowledge as I get up to speed in other areas.  For now I'll set this aside then come back to neural network models later.  NEURON is an open source implementation of Rall's Cable Theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_theory.  I don't have the computing power to do much right now.  The Blue Brain project, http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/, is using a 16k core supercomputer to simulate about 10k neurons.  Just getting up to speed and expanding my knowledge about how to program these things simply will be my focus for now.  Actual discovery will have to wait.

I'm in the second week of "Computation Molecular Evolution".  This class covered  the evolution theory basics and population frequencies in the first week and dealt with phylogenetic trees and some tools to help analyze them in the second week.

I started "Coding the Matrix" this week.  It looks to be quite time intensive but should teach me a lot of new tricks and methods.  The class lab work runs on a virtual machine under Oracle's VirturalBox using a disk image of an Umbutu

Many of the comments in the forums for these three classes mentioned edX and Rosalind.  edX is much like Coursera in that one can take college level courses on line for free.  I hope this model is sustainable.  I may take courses from both and elsewhere.  Rosalind focuses on Bioinformatics.  I've started Rosalind.  I'll back away for a few days while I verify I can handle both 2.x and 3.x versions of Python.  I might have to just use two computers.  I considered installing a Win7 virtual machine using Oracle's VirtualBox.  I've backed away from that idea.  I have enough on my plate.