Blog

• August 23, 2012

  the fundamental “purpose” of brains… maybe I should give a TED talk

  I have this pet theory that nervous systems are fundamentally organs for predicting the future so the organism can respond appropriately. And to do this, nervous systems rely on correlations in the environment and temporal precedence to infer caus...

• August 16, 2012

  Why do scientists tend to prefer PDF documents over HTML when reading scientific journals?

  I’m taking a play out of Bradley Voytek’s playbook and re-posting one of my answers to a question on Quora…Why do scientists tend to prefer PDF documents over HTML when reading scientific journals?For me, there is one primary reason that I prefer ...

• August 16, 2012

  in the future, the scientific literature will follow you

  Of the 1+ million new scientific papers published each year, which ones should a scientist read?Its obvious that any single researcher can’t read them all. Nor do we want to… the overwhelming majority aren’t relevant to us or our work. We limit wh...

• July 24, 2012

  new goal: regular blog posts

  They might be short. They might be long. But the goal is to just start writing again, because 140 characters is no longer enough.“Reset” photo CC-BY Steve Snodgrass 

• May 11, 2011

  (mis)representations of impacts

  This is a draft post from a few months ago that I forgot about, so the links a slightly dated, but the topics are still relevant.As I’ve been going through graduate school, I’ve been struggling with how I represent and justify the work that I do. ...