Idk about yall but the best thing in this article is that there exists a robotic arm to test knives called J Robot Choppenheimer

Wow!

I'm horrified by the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah. Political violence has no place in our country.

I hate this so much. This is so damn painful.

Cool work by Arash Afraz's lab using a dual AI system to be able to reverse-engineer the perceptual experience of receiving visual cortex stimulation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This says a lot about the PhDs at OpenAI tbh 😂

Friends (esp if you live in CA) we REALLY need signatures on this petition supporting Bill AB412 - the AI Copyright Transparency Act. TLDR = this will require AI corps to be transparent about what is in their datasets! Signing takes 1 min. Once you sign, PLEASE SHARE!! tinyurl.com/4uxbp963

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Portfolio update : The Mirror of Pride "She's been following me for several days; I only see her at dusk. She always stays about ten paces away. When I confront her, she claims to be my shadow. I then asked her if I was her light. She replied that I was confusing my pride with her patience."

The events of 2/28/2025 were especially shameful The related SCOTUS brief filed 1 August is here bit.ly/4le7P1N lots of good arguments/lawyering in these briefs

“It’s just a tool! People used to hate on photoshop too.” Take away my photoshop, take away my tablets, I can still draw. Take away your plagiarism machine and what are you gonna do? Shout prompts at me?

IMPORTANT UPDATE IMPORTANT UPDATE Regarding APHU/ACLU et al. vs. NIH Lawsuit

I’m thinking today about all the women doing DEI work in universities, and how all of our canceled grants and shuttered initiatives means that not only are we losing the time we’ve already put in, we’re now even more behind our male peers who stayed focused on their research.

After all that, grant went not discussed. Damn.

This summer my lab's journal club somewhat unintentionally ended up reading papers on a theme of "more naturalistic computational neuroscience". I figured I'd share the list of papers here 🧵:

"The Axolotl Parade" (14x18 inches, oils on copper panel) Prints are on Gallery Gerard 🌿 I had so much fun working on this one! #AxolotlArt #AxolotlLove #AmphibianArt #AnimalArt

Increasingly convinced the main damage cell phones have done to creativity isn't decreased attention spans or what not but the elimination of productive boredom. Inspiration comes from the mind filling the void inside. Hard to make art when you're constantly silencing the silence with "content."

Jay Bhattacharya seemed genuinely surprised to learn that diversity applicants compete in the same payline with applicants to standard opportunities. So terminating these grants (when they outperformed their peers) is blatant discrimination. Yet, we would not commit to correcting this

Aww shit, are they being kidnapped too?

"Science is not just something I do; it’s a core facet of who I am. If science is taken from me, an important piece of me will be gone."- @feliciatuchman.bsky.social @sciforgood.bsky.social Bravo, friend! So well done. We can't just switch off what inspires us, especially when it is under attack.

Cool

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends. But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month. See you soon, NYC.

No.

All these lives? Futures? Devastating. I can't imagine. (gift link)

some thrilling personal news: I won a generous grant from the National Press Foundation to pursue a project showing the relationship between climate, transportation and...sports! More soon, but for now, can't wait to get to work.

That the community is predominantly Latino screams scare tactic The military personnel should be ashamed with how they are being used for such a stunt

In a study of professors, women got 378 new work requests over 4 weeks vs 118 for men. Women spent more time on service, advising & teaching; men on research. Orgs should track who is taking extra duties & ensure they are rewarded and distributed fairly. www.forbes.com/sites/kimels...

🔬 Exciting News! I am approaching the end of my Ph.D. journey, and this means that I am actively seeking my next position. If you have any suggestions for positions, please DM me! See the thread for more info about me! #OpenToWork #Neuroscience #NonAcademicJobs #AcademicJobs #PostdocPositions

With the updated RCV totals just released by the Board of Elections, our campaign has officially earned the most total votes in a primary in New York City history.

You can pry my em dashes — one of my favorite punctuation marks and one I often use — from my cold, dead keyboard.

this summarize == understanding belief, I think, is largely driven by our educational system’s approach of achieving mastery through rote memorization Just bc you can repeat it doesn’t mean you understand it

Marcia McNutt (president of @nasonline.org) should resign. NAS needs a leader who understands what it means to forcefully defend science's unique role in seeking and speaking truth.

NIH funding REINSTATED! Thank you to @atg.wa.gov and other attorneys general and to Judge Young. This saves the career of a promising junior scientist. TY @jeremymberg.bsky.social for all your help interpreting these events.

Using AI to write a note is like using a car to drive a block

“Would never survive peer review” TELL ‘EM, JUDGE

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us.

…

hey I am posting this because I didn't know it, and so others might not either: but the BBB has NOT PASSED YET-- it's passed the senate & now it must pass the house. It's time to call reps RIGHT NOW. Johnson is going to push the vote ASAP before backlash can form so the calls need to start NOW.

Woah

Great piece 🥲 (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/o...

In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)

People really don’t seem to understand how offensive AI gen images are to artists. A certain amount we cannot escape. But its so gross that some people have their own personal little exceptions for it. It sucks. Its bad. It makes me sad.

APHA is gathering grants by TOMORROW NOON for Phase 2 of their lawsuit vs. NIH which regards NIH **applications** that were unfairly pulled from review, mishandled, or delayed from being awarded due to DEI issues. To add your grant to this lawsuit, become an APHA member & submit this survey:

wrote about a handful of lessons the rest of the country, even Texas, can learn from Zohran Mamdani's campaign. Come for the insights on toppling stale establishment candidates, stay for the Andrew Cuomo diss track. www.star-telegram.com/opinion/brad...

So video of this 2012 interview is popping up on other sites. Feels super relevant at the moment. Wait for the moment Rubio gets pinned to the wall about his grandfather’s deportation order… (h/t @reuben_reyñoso)

When your cat's a master of disguise.

Mahmoud Khalil is finally home with his beautiful wife and newborn son. Each one of the 104 days he spent detained was a grave injustice. From the moment of his detention, @ccrjustice.org + @aclu.org engaged my office as we worked closely to help secure his release. They did remarkable work here.

Also note that the color of your swimsuit matters for visibility in emergencies www.cnn.com/2024/06/07/h...

For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!