Monthly archives: December, 2025

Rigor for everyone

It’s right there in the name of this blog. A double entendre: (1) for experimental apparatus rigs and the people who build them, aka “riggers”; and (2) rigor, an important principle, both generally…



Autonomous vehicles vs. mice vs. bouncy balls

I have a little piece I often reuse, it goes something like this.

We know that visually guided navigation is a hard problem even for state-of-the-art AI because we’re pouring…



DIY synth for circuits and signal processing

I came across this cool minimal synth kit called Labor from Erica synths. It’s great for learning about circuits and signal processing. There are videos online about…



Building a two-photon microscope is easy

One time, years ago, I was asked (by a very nice person and an accomplished scientist) to write a book chapter. I didn’t want to. But I was working with a brilliant postdoc who might…