I am disappointed to read comments from people who have been PIs on NIH and NSF grants for years, sometimes decades, and they don’t understand what indirect costs pay for. They’re not necessarily endorsing the…
That’s a quote from Rick Rubin.
When I speak to a general audience, I sometimes show this clip (start at 2:52) from Fantastic Voyage and say:
How can we study the brain? What does it…
Check out this post today from Terrance Tao (UCLA) on Mastodon. It’s all good– T. Tao is excellent. I’m particularly interested in the posts because I’ve been working on some…
In two photon imaging, we want the detector (photomultiplier / PMT, or SiPM) to see only the green photons from the fluorescent molecules we’re interested in (e.g.,…
Conventional, von Neumann style computation is focused on arithmetic, logic, and Boolean algebra. Switches / transistors are the relevant building blocks for those systems even at the conceptual…
Having a rough day?
Just keep moving,
embrace the chaos,
stare into the void,
and make the void blink first.
…
Mistakes happen. Sometimes we work in incorrect or unfruitful directions. We do not try to justify it or minimize it. We own it, make ourselves better, and set…
Source https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1980.0020
Jonathan Pillow and Màtè Lengyel had a debate on the value of Marr’s Three Levels of Analysis (computation, algorithm, implementation). Here’s Jonathan’s part. Here’s Màtè’s part….
Impactful, landmark work is the product of perseverance and focused toil over months or years. There is no shortcut. Graduate studies are an opportunity to learn to be effective in that…
Found in some old notes of mine. Presented here without references or elaboration.
Brain — vs. — half-and-half (mix of cream and milk)
78% water —…
Shorter pulses have greater bandwidth.
This topic came up on social media and I’ll jot a few notes here in case it might be useful for others.
I posted about this a year ago, but it was about when you need a prechirper. I’ll elaborate on what kind…
image source
If you didn’t record it, it doesn’t count.
It turns out that we can’t say this enough to students.
A portion of Edmund Optics’ discussion on ultrafast lasers.
Fourteen years ago, I wrote a blog post that celebrated catalogs as useful educational materials. It was brief, and some…
In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony…
PART 1. Our tools are imperfect. When I first got into neuroscience, I started deep down into neural circuitry: individual neurons and synapses. It was exciting to get…
