Nicely organised cats

Although I never drove an Uber, they sent tax forms to the IRS saying I earned ~$30k (got another one today). I reported the identity theft to IRS/FTC/Uber (hopefully fixed it). Still curious who’s driving an Uber as me -ask them some tough neuro questions if Paul Thompson pops up in your Uber app!!

Brilliant talk by Michael Miller at USC today. Michael has inspired countless generations of students, including me in the 1990s when his work with Ulf Grenander [1] helped new generations of mathematicians get involved with medical imaging and neuroscience. [1] www.ams.org/journals/qam...

Brilliant to catch up with giants in neuroimaging + genetics, Anders Dale and Ole Andreassen. Thank you to Pravesh Parekh from the J Craig Venter Institute for a great talk on detecting time-dependent genomic effects on the brain, and his FEMA method to accelerate massively parallel GWAS analyses.

Thrilled to welcome Dr. Pauline Favre on a Fulbright Fellowship to work with us on international neuroimaging in bipolar disorder! International exchange speeds up science + medicine, opens doors to training+resources; helps everyone reach their potential

Thank you to my daughter Lauren Thompson for making this cool flyer + posting it around campus !

PUZZLE question (asking for a friend): Does the fastest (shortest) flight from South Africa to Los Angeles go through: 1. Greenland*, 2. Brazil, 3. ask the cool bird ? * so long as nobody is invading it

The weather got worse

This wasn't a very sensible way to get home, or edit papers for Friday's EMBC conference deadline

A world map *yes there are no people (only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid day sun)

Today I learned you should stand still if a paraglider is approaching

Cheerio England, sad to leave

Haha you have an amazing memory !! Hoping you are warmer South of the Watford Gap :)

At the end of this bleak remote road there was suddenly this

I surprised my mom with a very quick visit (she is 88!). This is what it looks like at 3pm in the Yorkshire Moors* *it really is like the Emily Brontë books / Wuthering Heights movies

UK football* : “it has been utterly compelling, this first half, that has failed to yield a goal.” US football: 42-68 at half time * well, soccer

Heading north. The flight attendant asked if I had ever been to England before ;)

Lunchtime in Mexico

Moon over Los Angeles after the rain cleared (10pm Monday)

OK, back to work then. Good luck to all of us :)

🔥 I just saw our paper made the top-20 most cited neuroscience papers of the last 30 years* (!): 🧠 Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood. Gogtay N., Giedd J, .. Rapoport J Thompson PM PNAS (2004) www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... (It helps to be old!) 👇

Cheerio 2025, with appreciation for all of you. Wishing you all a peaceful, safe, creative 2026 !

An annoying game I am enjoying

Have a restful holiday everyone* *or you can blast this at 100 decibels m.youtube.com/watch?v=LDPw...

Home finally

Puzzle: which flight mainly* goes East on the outbound journey and mainly goes East on the return journey? Clue: I did not see Santa *the pilot said this means going East for most of the journey

Somehow loud Frank Sinatra is not good for jet lag at 6am

I told the cheerful dog that I have to start the 4-day journey home

“I did not want to make this hike too easy”

Stochastic gradient ascent

This is going on all day when we are usually writing grants

I have borrowed a cheerful dog to walk in the Himalayas

Friday afternoon

Tea time

COME JOIN US for our sessions today on Multimodal Computer Vision - I’ll do a plenary tutorial on vision language models and other cross modal (genome-image) AI models, with new uniform convergence bounds (ie how much training data do you need) #ICVGIP

Afternoon meditation

Apparently the conference I am speaking at is this way (this is the 4th day of travel to get there :)

I have to do the ENIGMA End of Year Zoom call from 1130pm-1am in Chandigarh. Should I do it from my hotel room and annoy the people trying to sleep in the next room or try to haggle with the hotel to keep the business center open after midnight ?

Today I learned you can be fit 6 vehicles in 3 lanes of traffic* so long as everyone is paying attention

Today I learned you can be fit 6 vehicles in 3 lanes of traffic* so long as everyone is paying attention

Sunday morning mad dash to airport, flash flood warning

Cortical expansion and genetic risk for PD. Led by Houman Azizi and Nooshin Abbasi. With @ptenigma.bsky.social @misicbata.bsky.social @yasharneuro.bsky.social @ndrewvo.bsky.social and many others www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

🔥OK I have honestly written a new computer vision lecture for next week's #ICVGIP2025 keynote 🔥 *a very jet-lagged 13.5 time-zones ahead, so strong coffee needed! *yes it's yellow as I have bad eyesight and could help if I can read my own slides ;)

440pm