NicoleCRust

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

Big thanks to @ehud for pointing me to this book on Scientific Imagination (eg metaphors and the realism of models). It's exactly what I was looking for.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-scientific-imagination-9780190212308

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago to science

Metaphors in science - know any?

I’m fascinated by the role that metaphors play in scientific discovery. Like Darwin’s “tree” of life. When we shift how we think about what we’re working on, sometimes it inspires us to see it in a whole new way that clicks.

Know any good accounts of metaphors in science - others or your own?

#science #metaphor

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago to random

Has this changed? Will it brain research mature with big breakthroughs like molecular biology?

Francis Crick on brain research, circa 1984

(One question here is whether there are universal principles for the brain akin to the universal genetic code).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago to random

Crick: Not quite what I thought

The universal genetic code (DNA > mRNA > protein) has been interpreted by so many as an inspiration for reductionism (complex biological things can be traced back to simpler mechanisms), that I always assumed Francis Crick (involved in its discovery) was squarely on team biological reductionism too.

Not so fast: here he cautions against Ocam's razor in biology. He goes on later to use protein folding as an example (that it's complicated).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit
(Available in openlibray if you'd like to read).

neuronakaya, 11 months ago to random

Twitter's algorithm is so shitty that I no longer see many academic discussions. Many academics have been offline. I was relying on this platform to connect with scientists and read their research papers but I now hardly see them. What twitter has become is fucking depressing.

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago to random

(whispering): I so love this time of year. In my (academic) world it’s all so quiet. The inbox; the social media; all of it. I’m so happy to indulge in the energetic headspace of the shhh, knowing the frenetic chaos will soon circle around again.

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago to random

Wow.

@Mer__edith

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/11/signals-meredith-whittaker-these-are-the-people-who-could-actually-pause-ai-if-they-wanted-to

NicoleCRust, 11 months ago to random

Terrific Aeon piece about origins of biological agency by master science writer Philip Ball. As a bonus, you can either read or listen (26 min).

https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

Alzheimer's went into the textbooks with n=2

Many of you might know (or not) that Alzheimer's disease is named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer who first reported that the brains of some patients with age-related dementia had "a peculiar substance" (which today we know as beta-amyloid plaques).

But did you know that he found that in exactly 2 patients that he studied before his boss put it in a 1910 textbook and coined it "Alzheimer's disease"? That substance could have been a complete coincidence! (And in that case, I guess we never would have heard about it again) ...

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546010/how-not-to-study-a-disease/

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

Mind twists vs brain spots

In the long and complex debate about whether mental disorders are brain disorders, EE Southard coined a provocative title in 1914: The Mind Twist and Brain Spot Hypotheses in Psychopathology and Neuropathology.

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

One of our favorite quotes was a parenthetical statement about model fitting:

"(Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful)."

George Box,
Empirical model-building and response surfaces (1987)

matrig, 1 year ago to random

"Elon Musk has successfully turned Twitter into a site where extremists have free rein"

"Why are liberals still on it?"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/03/twitter-conservative-media-elon-musk-ron-desantis
#elonmusk #birdsite

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

For brain researchers who are more genetically/molecularly/cellularly inclined ...

What are you most excited about along a timeline of the next next 10-20 years or so? Is it, say, the ability to manipulate DNA in living creatures (eg CRISPR), leveraging the immune system to tackle disease via antibody based therapies (like the new Alzheimer's drugs), cell type atlases, or something else altogether?

adredish, 1 year ago to random

Are there better preprint servers than #bioRxiv? Every time I try to post something to #bioRxiv, I have to fight with them that a paper doing new analyses on real data is a "real paper" just because we also do a good job of placing our results in the literature.

Moreover, #bioRxiv has an explicit policy that new theoretical insights are "not suitable for posting" (meaning they don't think theory is a real contribution to the literature), which is bad for science. What are the better other options?

It's almost (almost) as bad as fighting with editorial desk-rejections at a real journal.

#neuroscience #preprints #sciencepublishing #theory #experiment

jonny, 1 year ago to random

I would like to give a shout out to all the people out there on line who constantly help me think about stuff and help me with problems and empathize and all the rest. it is really amazing to me how people are willing to spend their time helping an internet rando such as myself. the world can be a beautiful place with beautiful people in it.

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

Fresh off the podcast: #TedChiang and Alison Gopnik

Developing AI Like Raising Kids - Alison Gopnik & Ted Chiang
https://casbs.stanford.edu/podcast#developing-ai-like-raising-kids

And if you haven't read Chiang's Lifecycle of Software Objects, you must!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects

debivort, 1 year ago to random

It's pretty disappointing how many influential, personable scicom folks are still on twitter, as Musk is hocking anti-trans hit pieces.

I get some of their tweets here through bots, but I'm thinking of cutting that off.

What do you all think about this?

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex

The brain is the hungriest organ in the body (using 20% of all energy consumed). But most of it is not used for "computing"; it's used to send messages around.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2008173118

mrcompletely, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to books

Last recommendation in my nonfiction #books thread is The Book Of Minds by Philip Ball, which was recommended either by or via @NicoleCRust, so again, thanks!

I'm often skeptical of popular science books by nonscientists. They often rely too much on metaphor and analogy and I worry that they don't have a deep internal understanding of the topic. The McPhee book and this one are strong counterexamples. I felt that Ball had true understanding and a real POV.

🧵

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-book-of-minds-how-to-understand-ourselves-and-other-beings-from-animals-to-ai-to-aliens-philip-ball/18100243

nadel, 1 year ago to random

I was recently contacted by a science writer who wanted to talk about the hippocampus and imagination. We just finished zoom chatting when I asked about her last name - Wickelgren. Did she know there was a famous psychologist -- yes, she said, that was my Dad. For those of you who don't know the history, Wayne Wickelgren was a renowned cognitive psychologist back in the 1950s and 1960s, who published some very insightful and before-its-time stuff on hippocampus. It's worth having a look.

#HippocampusHistory
#HippocampusGurus
#hippocampus

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

Ever heard about this trinity?

I'm loving this phrasing for something researchers talk about a lot. Have you ever heard it described as a "trinity" before?

The trinity of understanding, prediction, and control undergirds the dominant fantasies of both science and science fiction.

(To elaborate):

Understanding often involves reducing a complex phenomenon to a set of basic laws or mechanisms ...

Prediction introduces the time dimension in which the future state of a natural phenomenon is specified ...

Control is the third member of the trinity, but understanding does not imply either predictability or control. If you know from observation that horses need pasture and fresh water, you may predict that a wild herd will gather in the grassy fields near the river. Capturing them, taming them, and bending them to your will, however, is a far more difficult undertaking ...

Fleming, James; Fixing the Sky

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/fixing-the-sky/9780231144124

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

The story of Evan Moss and epilepsy - both moving and inspiring

Evan was born with a form of epilepsy. When he was 6, he wrote a book to help raise funds for a seizure dog to help alert his parents about when it was happening (you can still buy it here https://www.amazon.com/My-Seizure-Dog-Evan-Moss/dp/1463566719). Evan's book was so popular, he was able to raise funds for many other patients as well.

Evan's seizure dog is named Mindy. When he was 9, he and his mom told his story and described all the ways his seizure dog helps him navigate his condition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_lD5xagBLc

Evan is around 19 now. His family recently co-authored a paper with their doctor explaining epilepsy from a patient perspective. The TL;DR: Evan's dog is great, but patients like Evan need better Seizure Detection and Forecasting

A Patient Perspective on Seizure Detection and Forecasting
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8874203/

NicoleCRust, 1 year ago to random

Who knew? The development of the computer was funded by the idea of weather control.

If you know anything about the history of computing, you probably have John von Neumann's name attached to it somewhere.

In 1946, von Neumann attended what he thought was a secret meeting in DC with the government folks to pitch his idea of creating the computer and secure the big $$ for it. His argument was that they needed it to forecast the weather (which required solving many nonlinear equations). Two days later, that secret meeting ends up in the New York Times with hints that the end-game was weather control (article here - it's great):
https://nyti.ms/3IpBRPq

Turns out that the Navy twisted things a bit, knowing that those big $$ weren't going materialize for just to make forecasts:

Why the Navy leaked the story almost certainly was related to mustering support among Navy leaders for developing a meteorological application for von Neumann’s computer. Navy meteorologists, like their counterparts in the Weather Bureau and in the Air Force, recognized that the computer had the potential to speed up the availability of predictive charts and to increase their accuracy. This new tool would allow on-site forecasters to spend more time on locally tailored weather prediction. For military leaders, weather was of concern only when it hampered operations. When it was not troublesome, no one gave it a second thought. To obtain continued support from war-fighting interests, meteorologists would need something more appealing than a faster forecast. Weather control, with its possible application as an offensive and defensive weapon, was clearly very appealing.

If you're interested in more, this is the book to read:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262517355/