@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

albertcardona

@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz

How does the brain work? Someday, we'll figure it out.
Group Leader, MRC LMB, and Professor, University of Cambridge, UK.
#neuroscience #Drosophila #TrakEM2 #FijiSc #CATMAID #connectomics #connectome #vEM #iNaturalist #entomology
Born at 335 ppm.
Brains, signal processing, software and entomology: there will be bugs.

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jon, to random
@jon@gruene.social avatar

They have a handy map of where I’m going tomorrow 🙂

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Pepijn @jon

Back in the early 2000s, the bus network in Los Angeles was a disaster: always late, often by 30 min or an hour. The bus drivers did what they could, considering traffic. The bus line inspectors were traveling by car and berating the drivers for being late ... the futility and absurdity of the line inspectors's actions was not lost on the passengers. No dog fooding, bad service.

Let's see when the EU mandates by law that all its representatives must travel by train. Only then will the situation change.

katvogt, to random
@katvogt@drosophila.social avatar

We wrote a "little" review about odor coding across phyla, now out in @nature review neuroscience
Enjoy reading here: https://rdcu.be/dJgF7
With Kara Fulton, David Zimmerman, Aravi Samuel and @Datta_Lab

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@katvogt @nature @Datta_Lab

Beautifully illustrated comparison between the mouse and fly olfactory circuits!

albertcardona, to Cambridge Catalan
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Cygnets herded by mama and papa swan. It’s that time of the year.

#Cambridge #UK

albertcardona, to android
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Turns out all the "unremovable" Samsung apps from the android Galaxy A14 can be uninstalled after all. It's convoluted, but worth it: far snappier – far more responsive, less memory usage.

  1. Enable developer options.
  2. Under developer options, enable USB debugging.
  3. connect to a laptop via USB.
  4. Install "adb" (Android Debug Bridge) in the laptop, a command like tool. In Ubuntu 22.04, do "sudo apt install adb". There are packages online for other operating systems.
  5. Discover which apps to remove. Not trivial, but there are various lists of Samsung "bloatware" online.
  6. Then, use adb to discover which packages to remove. For example:

$ adb shell pm list packages | grep facebook

.. and then remove them:

$ adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.facebook.services
$ adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.facebook.system
$ adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.facebook.appmanager

Likewise for Microsoft cruft.

  1. If no apps match the search, then use the "App List" (installable via F-Droid store) to list all user apps or system apps (from a toggle on the top-right menu), which lists all apps by name and with the package name under it.

An app that I removed that indeed drops some possibly valuable services but which greatly improve UI responsiveness:

$ adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.sec.android.daemonapp

The above removes the built-in weather app and various widgets. But suddenly the phone doesn't stall randomly and the UI is snappier than ever.

  1. If you regret uninstalling a package, it can be reinstalled with adb.

BTW don't forget to re-enable using only 1 background thread every time the OneUI is updated. Samsung overwrites that setting.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@dn_mason @LineageOS

Neither LineageOS not /e/OS list the Samsung Galaxy A14 as supported.

albertcardona, to Neuroscience Catalan
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

“A Connectome of the Male Drosophila Ventral Nerve Cord”, by Takemura et al. 2024

https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/97769

lana, to random
@lana@mstdn.science avatar

Overleaf, primarily used to write scientific papers, encouraging its users to use AI text. What could go wrong! I am even less open to reviewing papers now. Waiting for Evilsevier to release its "AI for peer reviewers" tool so that we can live in the most boring world ever for a few years. Just until the next generation, with better BS detectors than us, start doing real science again

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@lana

For the life of me I cannot understand of what use is to delegate writing to a machine. Writing is rewriting, because writing is thinking, is the process of composing one's thoughts, of organising what one wants to say, and putting it down, with references and pointers to data sheets and figures. Delegate writing to a machine and all purpose is lost. As if writing was pointless busywork. Perhaps that's what it is to spammers in search of the small percent of readers who will become marks.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@mathieugenois @lana

I choose not to write any bullshit, and I encourage you to depart from, and avoid like the plague, any institution that requires you to write bullshit.

alexwild, to random
@alexwild@mastodon.online avatar

Funny thing about being an insect photographer is that OneDrive will be like "Lets look at your memories from a year ago!" and shows me photos of ants eating a dead toad or something.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@petnoodle @alexwild

... and insists on calling insect photos "flowers", stressing the background as if the foreground was noise.

albertcardona, to random Catalan
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Crane fly o’clock.

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

"Compensatory enhancement of input maintains aversive dopaminergic reinforcement in hungry Drosophila", by Meschi et al. 2024 (Scott Waddell's la).
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00325-8

#neuroscience #Drosophila #dopamine

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

"CRASH2p: Closed-loop Two Photon Imaging in Freely Moving Animals", by McNulty et al. 2024 (Marc Gershow's lab).

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.22.595209v1

The new version of Mirna Skanata & Marc Gershow's 2-photon acusto-optics neuron activity tracking microscope.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I guess I just think that those questions children ask, that come from seemingly nowhere— that pure kind of curiosity: is really important, it’s precious. And I wish that it wasn’t so common for adults to stop asking questions like that. I spend a lot of time thinking about the sort of experiences that cause the endless stream of questions to dry up— (it is not because we suddenly have all the answers we need, though that is what some people seem to think it is)

albertcardona, (edited )
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@futurebird

When one asks questions of the curiosity kind, all too often the receiving adults find themselves having to question their beliefs. They don't like that. They get upset and retaliate, or at best, dismiss the questions as childish. Soon a young adult learns to stop asking questions. And to ignore their inner voice.

tedpavlic, to random
@tedpavlic@mas.to avatar

It's unavoidable that grad students will use LLM's to help them with their writing/proofreading and possibly even help jump start some of their reasoning. Rather than preaching total abstinence, this 3-page article outlines safer ways to use (and not use) these tools.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.3c01544

image/jpeg
image/jpeg

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@tedpavlic Was published over a year ago. Wondering whether the authors would update any of their advice.

albertcardona, to uk
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

professorhank, to climate
@professorhank@sfba.social avatar

Say goodbye to 2C: https://www.columbia.edu/~mailings/2023/Acceleration.2023.11.10.pdf

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@professorhank

The optimism, 15 years ago:
"... and long-term stabilisation at 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent"

jon, to random
@jon@gruene.social avatar

For the first time since 1992 (when I was 12) I’m completely disinterested by the UK General Election.

Sunak and the Tories will lose, Labour in uninspiring, the Lib Dems weedy, Greens weak and SNP weakened, and Reform simply grim. And Brexit is the elephant none of them will touch.

As I’m still a UK citizen I will vote, but it’s with less determination than ever before.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@jtwcornell91 @jon

Therefore: the Greens are weak because people don't work for them ...

ploum, (edited ) to random
@ploum@mamot.fr avatar

The kind of professor I’m trying to be at university:

EDIT: just to clarify, this is a screenshot found offline, not from one of my student. I’m more direct as I tell my students that "piracy is sharing knowledge and sharing knowledge is ethical and what I’m paid to do so please use libgen.rs and sci-hub"

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@muratk5n @ploum

That was a scam site drawing books from libgen.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@codebyjeff @ploum

The ToR browser is really helpful here. All they seized was a domain name, not the actual server. Accessing alternative domain names that lead to the same server remains possible. Via ToR in particular.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@umps @muratk5n @ploum

libgen doesn't charge. b-ok.cc attempts to charge you, and the book collection is the same. I don't know it for sure though.

RolfAE, to Leipzig German
@RolfAE@wisskomm.social avatar

Last week there was a discussion in Leipzig city council about a seed library. A concept is now to be developed with partners!

I'm already looking forward to seeing online in the future where such seed libraries exist.

http://seedlibraries.weebly.com/

I also have a lot of questions: e.g. Does anyone know of a study on the effect of such seed libraries?

albertcardona, (edited )
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@PaulWermer @RolfAE @straphanger

Not only market forces, also changes in habits and behaviours.

As an amateur baker, the bread I make is order of magnitude cheaper than when bought at the bakery, but for my time; the flour is barely a factor in the cost so splurging in fancy flours is possible: a 1 kg of fancy flour only costs 2 to 3 times as much as 1 kg of plain flour. And despite that a fancy flour baguette comes at ~35 cents of raw material. No market force here.

But what fraction of families bake at home, or cook at all for that matter, in the Western world? So the demand for good raw foods is low. Restaurants spice up and sell low quality stuff at high prices.

But that cost of time is not a cost at all, it's not time wasted, it's family time, social time, being together time, lovely time that makes for good memories of companionship, warmth, cooperative behaviours, constructive life-long busyness, a reference lifestyle, immersed in good smells and flavors to anchor taste and preferences for decades to come.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@PaulWermer @RolfAE @straphanger

Just read a fantastic one, on the work of John Letts, from 2001:

"No one had excavated a thatched roof before."

"Before systematic crop breeding, cereals evolved into local land races. Different soils, slope, shading and drainage gave endless possibilities for adaptation. With variety in the seed stock, crops would grow differently even across a single farm. Whatever the weather or diseases, something would always flourish."

"Old thatch provides an opportunity to study this lost diversity. Letts often finds a mix of bread wheat, English rivet wheat - not grown commercially for more than a century - rye, oats and barley. He has also found 35 different weeds, from corn cockle and cornflower - now vanished from English farms - to yellow rattle and cow wheat."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/may/17/technology2

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@IanSudbery @PaulWermer @RolfAE @straphanger

On time: 5 minutes to mix, and 5 minutes to roll the dough into baguettes some hours later. Actual total work time is 15 to 20 minutes tops. One just has to plan around the waiting times.

On cooking cost: depends on the efficiency of your oven and how many you bake at once. In our case, our electric oven when used during the day can draw from solar panels.

On baguette cost: a lot of the weight is water. A 500g bread loaf does not have 500g of flour, nowhere near. Closer to half of that; water loss during cooking is not that great.

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Rewilding the internet:

"Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours."

"Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests."

"For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world."

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

By Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon.
@mariafarrell @robin

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

"When and why does motor preparation arise in recurrent neural network models of motor control?"

"we modelled the motor cortex as an input-driven dynamical system, and we asked what the optimal way to control this system to perform fast delayed reaches is. We find that delay-period inputs consistently arise in an optimally controlled model of M1."

Cool findings from the lab of fellow colleague Guillaume Hennequin.

Schimel et al. 2024 https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89131

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