I spent the last week in Newport, RI, at a Gordon Conference. These are small conferences usually organized around a narrow topic. This one was on neural circuits and plasticity, which is not at all a narrow topic, but oddly enough I came away from the conference with a better sense of the field than I've had in a long time. The fact that people who work on systems as disparate as flies and songbirds can still have a meaningful exchange of information bodes well. There may be no such thing as "the" brain - in other words, the problems in different organisms may be so different as to make unified theories unsustainable pipe dreams - but we still have a common vocabulary of ideas and methods.

You will notice a significant redesign of the site, which I've been meaning to do for quite a while. The wiki was a bit annoying for posting new information, didn't really support RSS very well, and I'd more or less forgotten how to edit the templates that specify how the content is displayed. I heard from a couple people at the conference, though, that they had stumbled across some of the software I wrote back when I was at Berkeley, and that motivated me to finally make that available. Once I reminded myself how CSS worked it was pretty easy to switch over to Nucleus for the blog. I'm far too lazy to import the old material over to this format, but it's still at the same address if anyone cares.