iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 04/09/2026

for #FossilFriday, two of the most charismatic displays at the Museum Of The Moment, the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philly

a pencil drawing of a mosasaur skeleton, showcasing its very awesome teeth and not showcasing its anything else because I stopped drawing

t rex. classic. drawing in pencil on paper. skull only, got bored and stopped.

120

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 20/07/2026

for example, here's a hologram I carved of Suzanne from @blender.org . like doing File ⟩ Print in Blender, but with a bajillion other steps :) #penplotter #creativecode #blender #blender3d

230

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 18/07/2026

hey, come on now blueblocks.jordan.matelsky.com

the blueblocks game (which i freakin made) doesn't accept the word "ediacaran"

000

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 28/06/2026

oh wtf @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social, I searched for four papers in five minutes while writing a grant and that gets me banned??

Sorry, you have been blocked
You are unable to access www.biorxiv.org
Why have I been blocked?

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
What can I do to resolve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

010

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 27/06/2026

Just donated to #fdroid because the #FOSS ecosystem is a beautiful thing! Learned a lot when I published Coppelia [blog.jordan.matelsky.com/coppelia], my Jellyfin music client, and the review team and community was extraordinary!! #foss #jellyfin #android

A screenshot of the fdroid donation receipt showing 2052 financial contributors and a $50 donation

010

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 16/06/2026

Bonus video! Poke it for yourself: neuroglancer.bossdb.io#!https://sho... #sciart #neuroscience

030

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

wow I totally thought this was a 2x cuddle buddy but it turns out to be a triple cuddle buddy too!! neuroglancer.bossdb.io#!https://sho... (Am I supposed to NSFW tag this..?)

TRIPLE CUDDLE BUDDY THREE NEURONS GETTING SUPER CUDDLY

240

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

In any case. Thank you for joining me on this little #academicsky journey :) brain is awesome!

130

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

Finally, I want to return to those cuddle buddies that inspired me ages ago. Here's what it looks like to sneak "inside" a soma of a TRIPLE(!!) cuddle buddy. When you look "up" at the surface of the cell, it's dominated by contact with other neurons. Clearly important! But why?

120

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

Here's a beautiful shot of a single dendritic spine (black). It has ~3 synaptic partners (blue). But it has nearly TWENTY contact partners (red), which could be electrically or chemically influencing it! (thank you @blender.org for making it so easy to create videos like this ❤️)

1112

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

And it's just... always true. EVERY synapse is like this. Glia are EVERYWHERE. Here's the same synapse in two views; the glia (green) surrounds the synapse, and could foreseeably tune/train/kill it. HOT TAKE: I think big chunks of learning & memory will turn out to be mainly driven by this :)

the same synapse; green totally surrounds a synapse.

120

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

For our next trick: Does that glial network touch synapses specifically? Another resounding YES: PRACTICALLY EVERY SYNAPSE has a glial cell within 1µm, and near the synaptic site, almost ALL of the surrounding tissue is glial. Glam-shot: a synapse's microenvironent is dominated by an astrocyte :)

173

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

The answer is... holy crap YES. Here, I've shaded in red the astrocytes that participate in this network. Yep. It's literally EVERYWHERE. If we look at the nuclei of these astrocytes, they're perfectly uniformly distributed in the mouse visual cortex too!

a slice of microscopy, with a dominant red tint showing that astrocytes in the syncytium are basically ubiquitous

a 3-axis scatter of astrocyte somas, showing that they're uniformly distributed in the microns volume

120

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

The answer, INCREDIBLY, is... basically ZERO! *A neuron already touches virtually every neuron that comes within ~10µm of its cell membrane.* omg!

Fraction of nearby cells that are already direct contacts, as a function of radius.

130

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

ok cool so let's take each neuron (blue), and draw increasing radii around it: 0.5µm (green), 1µm (yellow), 2µm... all the way up to 10µm. That's actually quite a lot of distance! ~1000x more volume than the neuron itself. So how many new partners are there in that HUGE halo we don't already touch?

a neuron with increasing halos around it showing radii of 1um, 2um...

110

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

It also turns out that different cell types have different "fingerprints" of their volume to surface-area relationships. Unsurprisingly, you can immediately tell who's a neuron and who's glia (green = glia, blue = neuron), and in fact different cell types even have their own "sub-fingerprint"!

Two totally separate green/blue clusters, showing that glia have lower volume-to-SA ratios than neurons.

120

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

Our first result was super obvious: in mice, CONTACT networks (the #contactome) are 5-10 times as dense as the synaptic connectome.

log-log contactome degree vs synapse degree plot shows a linear, ~5x relationship

a histogram showing contactome degree; the distribution clusters at around 10^3

130

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

More generally, if you knew every cell a neuron touches, would you know something new beyond its synaptic #contactome? How many other cells does a neuron touch, anyway? Here was our first exploration: a single pyramidal cell (cyan), followed by all its synaptic partners, and then all its contacts:

a bunch of neurons synapsing with the cyan neuron

a CRAZY amount of neurons that touch the cyan neuron. basically fills the volume.

250

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

I first got excited about this ~8y ago when I started seeing a pattern in #microns and other datasets at bossdb.org @alleninstitute.org @bcmhouston.bsky.social @princeton.edu @mit.edu Usually neuron cell bodies are spread out... But every so often, you get what I call "cuddle buddies". wtf?

a bunch of zoomed out electron microscopy data

CUDDLING CELL BODIES! SMASHED AGAINST EACH OTHER! WHY!

230

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/06/2026

so I just realized I forgot to #skeetprint my Contactomes paper... (is that what we're calling it?) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @kordinglab.bsky.social @dacolon.bsky.social smithneurallab.weebly.com @jhuapl.bsky.social #academicsky #preprint #neuroscience

a single dendritic spine with a handful of synaptic partners but a HUGE number of contact partners

23512

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 23/04/2026

this is fun!! I just spent a ton of hours making this animation for my dissertation defense in @blender.org, I wish I had known about this a little sooner 😆 mine is of course not real data...

060

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 11/04/2026

coolest visuals in the world, science is amazing

small integrity crew capsule against a backdrop of the ocean

small integrity crew capsule against a backdrop of the sky

integrity crew capsule with drogues and parachutes open

000

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 26/03/2026

excited to announce it's time for me to defend my dissertation! come hang :) april 21, 2026 1:30pm EDT gaulton auditorium at UPenn or Zoom jordan.matelsky.com/phd

0111

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 16/03/2026

someone's working late to fix the production string replacement fail tonight at Strava I'll bet

screenshot of Strava showing they forgot to replace the string interpolation of segment titles with the actual text

010

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 04/03/2026

the base64 encoding of this image is also this image blog.jordan.matelsky.com/bb64/

the famous "cameraman" demo image showing a guy looking through a camera on a tripod

the famous "cameraman" demo image showing a guy looking through a camera on a tripod. but this time it's represented in ascii art! and it's the data URL of the first image.

041

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 19/02/2026

I remember the days before @blender.org even had a "save before closing" :)

meme graphic of a soldier shielding a sleeping person with his body; the bullets are labeled "IT DEPT TRYING TO REMOTELY FORCE-REBOOT MY LAPTOP" and the soldier is labeled "BLENDER SAVE CHANGES BEFORE CLOSING DIALOG"

030

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 06/02/2026

"Iguanodon Hamsa" in gold ink, to celebrate a very exciting day for iguanodons everywhere. #penplotter #fossilfriday #paleoart combo post!

a tesselation of gold ink line art of the hand of an iguanodon, tiling a cardstock canvas in different rotations

a closeup macro of the ink showing details of the artwork

121

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 06/02/2026

#penplotter art inspired by Josef Albers — took me forever to figure out how to turn this concept into a procedural algorithm :)

An orthographic projection of what looks like a floor plan, but is comprised exclusively of impossible shapes a la MC Escher. simple black pen on white card stock. if you're reading this alt text I will send you a postcard if you DM me your address!

071

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 03/02/2026

in particular this always feels like a real jumble of blocks to me; the "content begins here" cyan is all over the place...

000

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 23/01/2026

doodling with my Kaweco sport and some émeraude de chivor — plus a bonus shopping list for some blizzard soup :)

An ink sketch of a kettle with an aluminum gray fountain pen in the foreground

2310

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 22/01/2026

these get harder throughout the week: this game involves making as compact a scrabble-board as possible with the letters given :) blueblocks.jordan.matelsky.com

The instructions for my blue blocks game which unfortunately is not a very accessible or screenreader-friendly game at all. If you would like to play this game but that's a barrier for you please get in touch at game@matelsky.com I would love to make it better but I need help knowing what that means to you!

020

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 22/01/2026

as someone who looks at a lot of neurons they also definitely look very neuron-like :)

an electron micrograph slice of human brain tissue from the "H01" dataset showing neurons

010

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 13/01/2026

a beautiful specimen! for those who aren't used to looking at these, i've enhanced the photo for you 😊

a purple four legged unidentifiable cartoon animal looking at the camera. they're goofy with big googly eyes, and a shiny tush. they have one foreleg off the ground like they're doing a dance, or pretending they're an airplane.

0163

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 04/12/2025

philly 30th street station is like 90% scaffolding right now and I love it

A photograph of the interior of the Philadelphia 30th Street station showing that the majority of the open space in the hall is consumed by scaffolding for ceiling repairs.

060

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 03/11/2025

Amelia Bedelia-ass copy-editor at Target

010

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 03/11/2025

oh wow I just started @adapalmer.bsky.social 's "Inventing the Renaissance" and it's SO good. Only a few pages in and there are gems like this:

An excerpt of a book, focusing the text,
"Machiavelli: WTF?!?!
Conclusion: must invent Political Science."

You should really read this book. Also hi alt-text people :) I haven't heard the audiobook version of this book but it seems like it would probably slap, based on stuff like this.

0474

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 17/10/2025

excited to share a game i made: blueblocks.jordan.matelsky.com If you've played scrabble/bananagrams you know the great feeling of densely packing your tiles. blueblocks assigns points for the smallest bounding box possible! mondays easy → sundays hardest! feedback welcome, hope you enjoy :)

two letter-tile puzzle grids, one with densely packed letters captioned "GOOD" and one with lots of empty space, captioned "BAAAAAD" which is partially funny because one of the puzzle's words is "goat" but that's not really a fully formed joke I guess

020

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 15/09/2025

super excited for #bcon25 #blendercon @blender.org — did some sketching around Amsterdam today :)

A pencil sketch looking down a canal in Amsterdam with three bridges lined up consecutively. The closest bridge has several bikes locked up along its banister.

A loose pencil sketch of an ornate building partially obscured by loosely sketched trees on a body of water

140

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 10/09/2025

quick sketch i made of some zebras a few days ago at ansp.org, if you want to check them out or whatever

loose pencil sketches of three zebras. a mommy, a daddy, and a baby. the baby is quite small and should be given a treat

020

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 27/06/2025

love the albatross sequences. their little love-dances are so fun!! here's a couple i saw on Punta Suarez in the Galapagos :) #oceanchat

two albatrosses (waved; not the same species as in the Ocean documentary) doing a little "hi are you my girlfriend?" dance

0101

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 27/06/2025

love these 3D ocean floor maps in a hand-drawn style... they remind me of H.C. Berann #oceanchat

a beautiful 3D relief map of the ocean floor, showing its depth in a hand-drawn style with pen marks. the region shows the British Isles and north of Europe

2192

jordan @jordan.matelsky.com · 11/02/2025

go birds 🗑️ 🦅 🍰

eagles fans after the super bowl standing on a garbage truck outside The cheesecake factory on the second floor of the Verizon store in downtown Philadelphia

070