Reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in ~20yrs and I forgot how much of Fellowship is just songs. Feeling so cheated that the movie left out the song about the cat, the dog, and the cow that got super drunk one night, broke a fiddle, and scared the cow so bad it jumped over the moon…

We are pleased to announce that Webvision has been fully migrated to our new home at the University of Pittsburgh. www.webvision.pitt.edu All traffic should not automatically be redirected from the old URLs, but please update your links. Heads up: @pittophthalmology.bsky.social

FINALLY! Although knowing Microsoft this’ll also automatically invoke CoPilot for some godforsaken reason, just to juice the numbers… www.theverge.com/news/767551/...

“But is there a rootier cause? Only wellness influencers know for sure…” youtube.com/shorts/R-XO5...

Installing Ubuntu on a separate SSD so I can dual boot my PC… so this is what a slippery slope feels like

This… this is my Elysium #ColorimetryNerdHeaven

The local Safeway just started locking up their ice cream and I wanna take whatever moron executive thought this was a good idea and toss them casually into a wood chipper… this might seem extreme but I feel it’s justified. NEVER get between a stressed out grad student and their Ben & Jerry’s

If you put googly eyes on the Pillars of Creation you get muppets 😄😄

Literally the only macro on my phone and computer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s mapped to the word “shruggie” 😂

Me: "What did you learn at journal club today?" Intern: "That one day I'm going to publish a paper, and a bunch of people are going to sit around a table and rip it apart."

It’s been a weird, unproductive week at the lab and I’m feeling a little down. So here are 10 cool facts about vision:

Exoplanet System xkcd.com/3103/

PSA: around 5-8% of the population has a color vision impairment for red/green. Many talks at #2025ICDB still use red-green LUTs on slides that are not accessible to everyone. Changing to more accessible colors is doable and easy. We can do better. #devbio #ICDB2025 #WeTheColorBlind

Question for my science peeps. I’ve been resisting using AI coding tools for almost anything beyond documentation looking while building my data analysis pipeline for a few reasons. From most practical to most personal: (1/n) 🧵

Update: this morning’s ear worm is “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast so… a distinct improvement I’d say! Although my papa is definitely going to get kidnapped later so not all good news.

Woke up this morning with Maroon 5 - Payphone* stuck in my head from the moment I hit consciousness… that’s the modern equivalent of a dark omen, right? I’m not misreading this? *I have not heard this song in years

Don’t mind me, just wading into a new subfield of vision research with decades of extremely thorough and contentious research across about 10 animal models plus human psychophysics. If you need me I’ll be in the aisle that sells information-fire-hose-to-brain adapters… Oooo they’re on sale! 🫠

Lately I've been struck by a wave of nostalgia for buying things in person... in a store... where I can actually see and touch and try them. This is especially true for electronics. I don't know what caused it but I'm just so tired of ordering shit online, convenience be damned.

(1/6) Thrilled to share our triple-N dataset (Non-human Primate Neural Responses to Natural Scenes)! It captures thousands of high-level visual neuron responses in macaques to natural scenes using #Neuropixels.

Friday morning timeline cleanse: Seattle sunset at Green Lake from earlier this week.

It’s incredible how adaptive optics has absolutely transformed vision research 🤯 it’s not an exaggeration to say AO techniques are ushering in a new age of psychophysics research in vision science. And that’s just one of several applications!

Some of my favorite signs from yesterday’s #standupforscience rally in Seattle. Incredibly heartening to see the whole scientific community come together like this 🥲

#standupforscience Seattle!

🔖🌐 Archivists re-created a mirror of the CDC site prior to all the censorship, edits, & takedowns. It won't replace live updates on vital topics like flu & measles, but does bring back all the data that was purged on an easy-to-use, navigable, & fast website. #medsky restoredcdc.org/www.cdc.gov/

🤦🏻‍♂️

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it. www.science.org/content/blog...

NSF has created an Executive Order Implementation webpage to ensure the widest dissemination of information and updates. We will continue to communicate with you as we receive additional guidance. new.nsf.gov/executive-or...

I have a lot going on right now (lots good, some bad) and I find myself feeling super grateful for the refuge of art. My partner got me back into pottery last year, and it’s played a huge role keeping me sane and happy. Being a scientist is amazing, science+art is greater than the sum of its parts.

Hot take: The phrase “PhD-Level Intelligence” is meaningless marketing garbage that relies on the childish idea that “PhD” simply means “super smart.” It’s just catastrophically misguided. Which PhD!? A PhD isn’t an indicator of general “intelligence” it’s an indicator of specialization.

My favourite was having dinner with a bunch of Oxford ornithologists. "Braveheart was RUINED for me about halfway through. Everyone knows black-headed gulls didn't nest inland in Scotland until the 1950s"

Starting the year off with a publication in JOSA A about a portable, surprisingly accurate iPhone-based color vision test we prototyped! Basically a little hand-held Anomaloscope. Lots of potential to make accurate color vision testing way more accessible : )

Best end of year roundup every single year, bar none 🥹

31 December 1995. Still the perfect goodbye.

Excellent suggestion for anyone wanting to explore the color vision and color perception literature. The refs in this paper are packed with some of the most important papers in the field.

Stuff like this is genuinely fun as a silly game, but a reminder from your friendly neighborhood color vision scientist that it absolutely CANNOT be used to compare performance between people using different/uncalibrated displays or even the same display in different viewing environments.

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube! Please like and repost to help us get the word out! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization 🧵

I know this icon is supposed to be a video camera, but it looks more like a blocky angler fish in the middle of a conversation.

Every time I read a vision paper I find a several new rabbit holes to dive into. Today's find: did you know humans can reliably differentiate visual scenes based on the relative amount of dark vs light patches? It's called "skewness" and may be a result of asymmetric adaptation at the cone level.

Differential equations final done, JOSA A paper proofs reviewed and accepted… if you need me I’ll be in a sugar coma so deep not even James Cameron could find me.

Sometimes going back to grad school in your 30s means finally feeling excited by the work you do every day and psyched to get up in the morning. Other times Diff Eq tries to smother you in your sleep with an infinite series... Four stars, would still recommend. ★★★★☆

What’s one way you show people your research is actually super duper cool actually? Innocent bystander: what do you study? Me: I’m looking at potential retinal contributions to color constancy… *sees eyes glazing over* … uhhh … look these butterflies are the same color, they don’t actually change!

Didn't see one for Neuroscience yet; allow me to oblige

But what if we tried MORE power? Watch the latest What If? video collaboration with Minute Earth! youtu.be/jgafb8G7i4o

Alright folks, let’s talk about color blindness! Why? Because I think it’s super interesting and also because most people misunderstand it. Plus it’s extremely common (~8% of males and 0.5% of females) so it makes for great dinner party conversation! 🧵 incoming

Very cool explanation with amazing visuals! The only other comparably accurate and accessible explanation I’ve seen is in @standupmaths.bsky.social’s book Love Triangle (highly recommend for the math curious and/or pun connoisseurs 🤓)

I love this 😂 apparently ChatGPT is pretty easily fooled by exaggerated/fake versions of real visual illusions. Incredibly ironic since it’s a computer and could literally check the pixel values. It’s like the whole “how many r’s are in strawberry” thing they had to fix, but for vision nerds.

Cone photoreceptors are hard to beat, and ipRGCs are just plain cool, but I think my favorite is the humble H1 horizontal cell. They’re the unsung heroes of high acuity vision. Just quietly going about their business while the photoreceptors and ganglion cells get all the glory.

Vision scientists: go.bsky.app/3EWSGiv

Three awesome things happened today: 1. My paper got accepted for JOSA A’s 2025 color vision issue 2. I found a bunch of my favorite vision scientists on Bluesky And 3. There is leftover pie for dinner If we watch Muppets Christmas Carol and make hot cocoa tonight my head might explode.