and now a word from our sponsor Not

. . . and now, a word from our sponsor*. * Not really. These “commercial breaks” are cross-references, footnotes, comments – or jokes – prepared by us, the course instructors. --advertisement--

This section of the lecture is brought to you by. . . the physicist who decided to leave Cal. Tech and go live on a farm in Vermont. He was confident of finding a new job, since physics is the science underlying everything. Looking around, he concluded that his best option was to become a consultant to the dairy industry. --advertisement--

He went to his local milk producers’ cooperative and offered to give them a free sample of his work. Of course they agreed – the price was right – so he hung around the barns for a few days, read some back issues of Dairy Industry Weekly, and went home to his study to do some modeling. After a month of hard work, he showed up with a Power. Point presentation that began: --advertisement--

Consider a spherical cow of uniform density, radiating milk isotropically. . --advertisement--

Remember that real neurons are to “neural net neurons” as real cows are to “spherical cows of uniform density” Real cells are complicated things that can do a lot individually and can interact in complicated ways. Like this white blood cell chasing down a bacterium. . . --advertisement--

or this movie of dendritic filopodia exploring an axon. . . --advertisement--