Ah a year ago today that I hosted 'From Womb to Word: Pre-linguistic neurodevelopment of language' at SFN in Chicago. During what was an outrageously difficult personal period, this was a really enjoyable experience... Also hey scientists, sit at the front more...

I miss and love Kent, but this place has such a long history of electing people who are against their interests that I struggle to have any sympathy for my old home. Been happening for decades.

Held my silence on this long enough... "As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti" This is a terrible simile. "This mountain was rising like a mountain". Anyone who doesn't know what a mouintain is will not be helped out by this regress of an explanation.

This is why I am an excellent chook (and animals in general) wrangler.

Academia is relatively unique in that folk are promoted to positions of management based on technical ability. Then are given insufficient time or pressure to attend leadership and management training. Thus a culture has developed where "good science" = "Good lab lead" though these are orthogonal.

Unsurprising. I've seen at least half a dozen cases first hand of labs where access to data is part of an authorship bargaininy chip.

On National Poetry Day, the greatest poem I have ever read

For ages now I have been saying that nuance free open-science and science reform will be a political hammer with which specific work will be targeted. Money down this'll be a repeat of the US's recent "well, it's bad cos it's not replicable enough" as technical justification for moral outrage.

I love scientists... bar one minor problem. In any context, whenever I ask my scientist friends "What does that say?" if it's something I can't physically see, the answer is *never* the actual text. Even in contexts where I'm helping them solve something on their end.... Infuriating.

I mean.... both have their place. However, video tutorials!? Absolute nightmare. I need to reread stuff in instructions and tutorials. I need to be able to skim text to find relevant parts to my problem. I'm not watching 20 minutes to see if maybe it covers my issue.

Guess uetliberg is still in bed, all wrapped up.

"Science is not broken, and it most certainly is not dying. It is an inefficient human activity....When we catastrophize, we feed a disillusionment which political actors can weaponize to get rid of scientific evidence they find inconvenient." #AcademicSky 🧪

the climate is just changing because it turned up at the party wearing the same outfit as the host.

Post one of the most haunting shots in movie history from a film made before the year. In a film that's otherwise a blend of serious-campy horror, this shot I think stayed with a lot of people often making them forget how campy that film actually is 2000.https://makeagif.com/i/0F7S5T

Someone blocked the tram door and it reopened letting in two wasps.... This is a biological attack

I've opened bsky and it's all Kirby. I've missed something?

Inadvertently dressed like Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek

Other people in suits: refined, signifies. Smart. Me in a suit: due to your failing to meet the coal mining quotas, this year the orphanage will not be celebrating Christmas.

3 piece suits... Great idea when you're not wearing them.

I've been here for 8 years, so I often forget... But man... Zurich is odd. Zurich is really odd.

It's 2025 and people still write neuroscience papers with assumed knowledge. Any given neuroscience paper could be of interest to a psychologist, biologist, computer scientist, statistician, or psychophysics backgrounds. You can't omit how you did XYZ becuase it's standard to your background.

Everytime I read a maths centred paper I feel I'm being trolled

Been pavloved into seeing "no-reply@" as a bad thing. So seeing "no-reply@" and subject line "Payslip" makes me freeze like there's an electrified floor and a tone just activated.

There are some ways of writing (inscription of words onto a medium) that, when consisting of over use of rhythmically disrupting construction, I find quite vexing (i.e. annoying) as, while they are often factually correct and use complex language, they're a nightmare to read.

Abstract: "Our study supports a unified theory of general cognition accounting for every possible concept in cognitive sciences" Methods: In N=5 mice....

PhD graduation tomorrow. Not sure if I should go. There'll not be anyone there i worked with during it, none of my PhD colleagues even finished the PhD so there's no shared celebration. It'll all be in a language I don't speak so well too. Feels like I should go, but I can't argue for it.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... Finally.

I keep a momento moray so that I remember to Carp Diem

a) Money is famously a socially constructed value that doesn't represent the physical property of the token. b) We did stop using gold as currency or tying value of currency to it. c) People fighting the change from gold as currency still exist, it's a key point for sovereign citizen......

Keeping my friends grounded.

Ah god... Someone didn't clean up some spilled rain and now the brollies are inside again.

What movie do you consider perfect? (no quote marks, as this is objectively correct)

I wil be boycotting the Oxford comma, dictionary and punting til this decision is reversed.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Wait, now I love the idea of studies failing replication.

I so often wish I had a hyper niche interest like this because I feel it must make so many diverse sources interesting in so many new ways depending on how that interest is embedded in them.

Reddit user asks community what's wrong with his basil plant after using one of those plant identification apps. Can't imagine the leaves added much to the pasta lol www.reddit.com/r/gardening/...

Do the architects who design offices not ever work in them? Signed: Someone who cannot see their pc screen because of the 3 meter windows flooding the room with light and now way to shield it.

The time since chatgpts public launch and now is the same as iPhone 1 and iPhone 4. How are we still seeing public demos fail lol. Last two years I've heard nothing but "wait a year and you'll be impressed" and it's not gotten any better.

Can't complain about the office view.

The more I read about computational neuroscience, the more it feels like we're just making increasingly plausible models but weirdly like...asymptoting towards ground truth. Every new iteration is a little more plausible and compelling than the prior, but what counterfactuals do we ever establish?

Window washers today, so every few minutes two workers slowly ascend or descend on the window right next to my desk in an extremely comical fashion, like Waldorf and Stadtler in hard hats are about to criticise my matlab code.

Hey #neuroskyence, so... effective connectivity, where do we stand on this? Doing some reading and I'm noticing that there are various families of model but each model is rarely used by folks outside it's lab. Some models generate 20 papers in 2 years from a lab, and seem to have minimal wider use.

Just obsessed with this pic I took lol.

I kept saying "Yeah Baldurs Gate 3 is amazing but the third act is kinda long". I finally beat it. Acts 1 & 2 - 22 hours combined. Act 3 - 60 hours lmao.

Ultrasound stimulation is, like absolutely everything containing the words "phased array", so damned cool. Given some recent advanced in non-invasive neurotransmitter measuring, there is such cool potential for great advances in our mechanistic understanding of the brain within the next few years.

Do you like photos of Kent? Or the Sea? Or Gulls? If so, boy do I have a treat for you! huwswan.ghost.io/kent-sea-gul... #photosky #photography #gull

I bought a bargain bin lens that get's quite intense lens flaring... That or someone at the Irchel Campus has had an incredible idea

A selection of my favourite bird photos from the last month.

Snapped this the otherday... As far as I can tell, someone destroyed St Gallen.