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…



Job – London – UCL – SWC – In Vivo Imaging Specialist

From Rob Campbell. Here’s a link to the job posting.

The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL, is recruiting an in vivo multiphoton specialist who will be based in the Advanced Microscopy Facility but work throughout the Centre….



Better robots, please.

It has been heartbreaking watching my daughter get excited about robot toys– and all of their fantastic behaviors that she has read about and seen in fictional shows — only to be ultimately disappointed at how lame they are in…



People with guns killing people on campuses

There are so many campus murders, usually with guns, that most of us are not too removed from them. Maybe you’ve been on campus during a shooting, and if not, then maybe you are colleagues or personal friends with people who have been though that trauma. How many degrees of separation are you from…



Job ad – Neural Circuits in Barcelona, Adam Ranson lab



End legacy considerations in college admissions

The meeting hall for a student club.

An interesting study recently came out:

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to…



Practice your talk

“I know I’m over time, I just have one more thing I want to tell you about, I think, …”

I practice my talks and try to nail the timing. I use the presenter display in…



The Cousa objective, an ultra long working distance, large field-of-view air objective for multiphoton imaging

We just updated the preprint for the Cousa objective. It’s a big update.

Back in November 2020, we announced a design for a 20 mm working distance objective optimized for…



Distilled simplicity for scientific publishing

Scientific publishing is essentially a solved problem.

Research dissemination is almost free. For hundreds of years, humankind relied on printed material and postage or shipping to share their work. That hasn’t been…



Restlessness

This post will probably mean more to me than it means to any of you dear readers. But maybe someone will recognize a bit of themselves in it. Or maybe I’m underestimating how…



New camera: 316 MPixel, 58.6 square cm

That’s not a typo. 58.6 square centimeters of detector area. It’s the Big Sky camera by Sphere Entertainment Co. I want to know more about that lens on the front too.

Maybe an upgrade for the next version of the ExA-SPIM?



What is your goal?

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…



If it sounds good, it is good

From Dall-E, via Bing. The prompt was something about the Santa Barbara coastline with Washingtonia robusta palm trees and Lemon Gum Eucalyptus trees in the style of an Ansel Adams photograph….



Free textbooks online with Internet Archive

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 companies create…



A large amount of apparently unproductive work

I saw this quote, as a photograph of it jotted down on a whiteboard, and it made me smile.

I looked up the source. It’s freely available online. It’s an 1893 book on microscopy. It’s…