So Bill Gates sets up a huge non-profit foundation with his wife that is funding some amazing projects around the world.  What has his old partner, Paul Allen done?  Well let’s see. 

• He’s purchased the Portland Trailblazers and Seattle Seahawks.
• He’s purchased The Sporting News. (This is my kind of guy).
• He’s set up his own foundation (in 1986) that’s funded a bunch of stuff in Oregon and Washington.
• Oh, and he founded/funded the Allen Institute for Brain Science which has just finished creating a digital atlas of the mouse brain.  Let the smart guys over at Boing Boing explain this to you:

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science
in Seattle are today celebrating the completion of a new digital atlas
of the mouse brain. The achievement will likely lead to a greater
understanding of how the human brain works…

Mice brains and human brains have significant differences, but are
similar enough that a complete "atlas" of the mouse brain is seen by
many scientists to be as important a milestone as the Human Genome
Project, which mapped the DNA sequence.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft 30 years ago with Bill
Gates and is one of the world’s richest men, donated $100 million to
create a searchable 3-D digital map called the Allen Brain Atlas. The map is the inaugural project of the Allen Institute for Brain Science…

Allen’s funding helped to assemble a dream team of scientists, who
methodically scanned ultra-thin slices of mouse brain with the aid of
robot helpers. Those scans help to identify how individual genes are
"turned on" in different areas of the brain…

Link to related text and images at Wired News.

You know I’m starting to feel a little better about all the cha-ching I’ve spent on Office and Windows over the entire span of my adult life.  Here’s a sample pic from the atlas: