Category: Uncategorized

What drives you?

I’ve been speaking with undergraduates a lot recently, consulting about their career plans, and the discussions can be interesting.

I tinkered a lot as a kid– taking things apart, modifying them, doing crude experiments. Maybe you did similar things. One time I found something interesting and shared it with mother. She asked, “When…

Optics by Hecht

About 13 years ago, I wrote a blog post on here about using catalogs as textbooks. I still do that, but catalogs are fading — fewer…

In my optics classes, I often give a brief historical account of Galileo’s telescopes. A point I want to make in this post, is that part of the high performance of Galileo’s telescopes was obtained through careful final adjustments. We do the same thing with our optics, designing in correction collars, adjustable air gaps, and…

Humphrey is a gentleman. We relax together after an intense day.

This is post is about suits. Most Labrigger readers will want to skip reading this one. I did…

Worldwide spending on all advertising is on the order of 1 trillion USD per year (source: statista). Web ad companies capture large fractions of this. For example, Meta gets about 10%, and Google gets about 20%. Then those companies invest heavily in R&D of various types, including for machine learning (ML) / artificial intelligence (AI)….

It is both fascinating and frustrating. Large-scale receptive field remapping in V2 neurons: Work by: Sachira Denagamage, Mitchell P Morton, Anirvan Nandy

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.01.539001v1

Our eyes are in constant…

Ikuko Smith taught me that me that Japanese people judge others by the way they wring out a washcloth. “It says a lot about how a person was raised.” That was a new thing for me to be self conscious about, but addressable. Unlike my technique for eating corn-on-the-cob. This Iowa boy is stuck in…

Many are aware of the burden of bureaucratic administrative tasks on professors. A colleague of mine called it “Death by 1000 paper cuts.” It takes time away from research and other scholarly activities, and oftentimes the time commitment is substantial, taking 20-40% of a professor’s time, depending on who you ask and what items are…

Academics don’t typically receive much advice in time management during their training. Then they get a tenure-track position and are expected to figure it out. Most do indeed figure it out, but there can be pain involved. Here are some simple bits of advice, take what you find useful, ignore the rest.

The best system…

For those who might find it useful, I am sharing some grant-writing advice. It is specifically for writing NIH R01 grants, but many of the principles are more broadly applicable.

Advice-for-writing-your-first-R01s-SLS-1Download
…

Private universities have many fewer undergraduate students compared to public universities. From Wikipedia, mostly 2021 numbers.

People generally understand the difference in governance between public and private schools, but they…