Can you beat von Neumann?

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 level, and…



Make the void blink first

Having a rough day?

Just keep moving,
embrace the chaos,
stare into the void,
and make the void blink first.



Mistakes

photo unrelated

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 an…



Marr’s Three Levels

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. They’re…



The route to landmark work

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 art.

Graduate…



Milk and Brain

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 — 79%…



Options for pulse compression for 2p imaging

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…



If you didn’t record it, it doesn’t count.

image source

Write it down.

If you didn’t record it, it doesn’t count.

It turns out that we can’t say this enough to students.

It’s not science if you didn’t document…



The elegance of vendor tutorials

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 of…



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…



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 …



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…



I plant seeds

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

Today,…



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…



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…