Category: Uncategorized

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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 it.

This…

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…

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…

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…

(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…

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

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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…

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…

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…

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…

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”.

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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…

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…

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…

Sunrise

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