I recently attended a biology conference where, among many other things, I got to see a talk by Dr. Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University on brain connectomics research. It's very interesting stuff. He has produced a set of custom equipment that can scan brain tissue (well, any tissue, but he's interested in brain tissue) at 5x5x30 nm resolution. His super-duper one of a kind electron microscope can at this point scan about 0.3 cubic millimeters in 5 weeks, if I'm not mistaken. It spits out a dataset in the fractional-petabytes range. He's had one such dataset for a full 3-4 years but is encountering major problems with analysis - tracing cells and fibers over their full path is a very difficult problem. Automatic cell-tracer programs are good enough over the number of slices that makes up a cell-body but utterly fail at identifying things like synaptic vesicles reliably and when tracing fibers over their full lengths. To the point that most of his good data that he showed us has been manually annotated by graduate students and undergrads working in his laboratory. Hence the above link's mention of gamifying the task to try to crowdsource it. Interestingly, he described his equipment as a 'tissue observatory'. He thinks that neuroscience should take a page from astronomy and just see what the heck is out there. He thinks they are trying to make detailed hypotheses about function and structure and everything else on far far too little data right now and we need a lot more data on the actual structures before we can be confident about much about them other than the mere fact that they correspond to function. To the point that during his talk, when showing the 30 micron wide completely-perfectly-annotated chunk of his first dataset that he has published much analysis on the thousands of synapses of (something like 0.01% of his first raw dataset he has had for years) he showed the exploded figure of hundreds of cellular fibers and the table of dozens of parameters for t

I checked out the Transhumanist Party site, and they didn't have a list of stuff Zoltan Istvan would do if elected, not even many applause lights. They also clearly haven't hired a web designer. They don't have a voting guide for different ballot measures. Finally, I'm tempted to vote for a 3rd-party candidate as my congressional representative, and they seem to only have a presidential candidate listed. I don't think Istvan has any plans for what he would do as President, and he doesn't seem to want to be elected.