Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist.

Jacques Monod

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 of mind that nourish…



Neuroscience with particle physics level confidence

Bubble chamber data.

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 glimpses…



More money than god and a death wish

(bing designer)

Last summer I asked Bing’s Chat AI to write advertising copy for a microscope objective. I just came across it again and maybe it’s worth sharing.

Do you have a…



I plant seeds

In May 2022, I asked for an “LLM to automatically write code to port arbitrary data sets to NWB format”.

Today, I see…



Postdoc position at UC Santa Barbara

This is an ad for Michael Beyeler. He’s awesome. Together with Michael Goard and Cris Niell, we have formed a supergroup that is funded by the NIH…



The LLM copyright issue is more like sampling than Napster

source: https://alchetron.com/Dust-Brothers

OpenAI — and LLMs in general that train by scraping data from the web and ignoring copyrights — are in legal jeopardy. There are multiple lawsuits filed and many of us are wondering how…



Reprints and literature searches before Pubmed

NPG still sells reprints (link). Seems anachronistic, doesn’t it? If you got into science after the year 2000, you might not be fully aware of the sea change that occurred just before you got into science….



Floating air tables with quiet compressors

I used to float tables with tanks. They didn’t need to be changed very often, but it did need to occur, and it was a pain. I’ve used house air before, and house nitrogen, but they were dirty and/or unreliable.

We’ve been using compressors in recent years, and in particular these compressors from Newport (hat…



Out with “collaborations”, in with “supergroups”

With the New Year, one change our lab is making is a purely superficial one. We will no longer refer to groups of collaborators as “collaborations”. Instead, we will refer to them as “supergroups”.



Doorstop

Another little bit from lab. This showed up in a lab discussion:

I asked my lab to please buy these basic items. I assured them that we have sufficient funding to buy doorstops. Some…



Social dynamics in lab

I do tag-team 1-on-1 meetings in the morning before the group lab meeting. Instead of blocking out 30-60 minutes per person on a standing basis, it’s just first-come first-served, and it’s however long that person wants / the meeting takes. And then I let the lab know when I’m available again. Images, memes, emojis, and…



An open letter to students reaching out about graduate school

I get a lot of email from students that are interested in graduate school. Many of these emails are automated. They are from real students, who want to connect…



Parked car, walking to class, at UC Santa Barbara

Sunrise



Che-Hang, Filip, and Xing making things happen.




Advice for responding to reviewers

I was taught that when responding to reviewer criticism, there are two valid strategies: (1) new data, or (2) references to papers. When reviewers stray from these two strategies, they are…