flâneur

Srushti Ishwarkatti

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on the atlas — 124

highlights — 596

  • A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
    EMERSON - ESSAYS - SELF-RELIANCE
  • A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages
    EMERSON - ESSAYS - SELF-RELIANCE
  • The paper on nucleoside modifications she received Nobel Prize for got rejected by all major journals
    List of biotech founders and drug hunters who were unlikely to succeed (and yet they did) — lada nuzhna
  • Frederick Banting (Insulin) Had a very slow start to his career. Failed his first degree. Got rejected from being a medic in the army twice! After reading a 1920 scientific paper describing an experiment in which the pancreatic duct was tied off, became interested in isolating insulin. Never managed to get a research position himself, so, to perform research, he reached out to a bunch of professors to use their lab over the summer He was the first person to isolate medicine from an animal. No precedent before! The youngest person to ever get a Nobel prize
    List of biotech founders and drug hunters who were unlikely to succeed (and yet they did) — lada nuzhna
  • The most commonly mutated ALS-linked genes are reviewed with an emphasis on disease-causing mechanisms.
    ALS Genetics, Mechanisms, and Therapeutics: Where Are We Now? - PubMed
  • growth factors such as glial cell line-derived growth factor (or GDNF) have been shown to protect motor neurons from damage in a number of different animal models, including ALS. However, delivering GDNF to the spinal cord has been almost impossible, as it does not cross from the blood to the tissue of the spinal cord.
    Research Areas - Svendsen Lab | Cedars-Sinai
  • Note well, the fact that an innovation in its final form may be simple does not mean that the path to inventing it or realizing it is always simple. But if in the early stages of a project we aim for “constructive failures”—failures that teach us something new, perhaps because they show us something that has never been seen before—they may show us a better path to a truly impactful solution, orthogonal to what everyone else is doing. From such wisdom, one can then sometimes move on to a simple, powerful design, avoiding the complex in favor of the simple, precise, and/or robust.
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • For a tool to be simple, there is sometimes an element of discovery involved.
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • Innovation sometimes requires you to connect the dots across fields, as in the case of next-gen nucleic acid sequencing, where a combination of biological, chemical, and optical ideas were fused into an impactful technology. What if we could invent new tools by connecting such dots in a highly scalable, deliberate way?
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • suggesting that integrative observations of the activity, wiring, and molecular composition of neurons throughout entire neural circuits may be useful.
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • Of course, malaria sometimes killed the patient, too.
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • to understand networks and circuits in terms of cells, and cells in terms of their component biomolecules. From these maps of the building blocks and interactions, we might be able to devise new hypotheses in a more systematic way. In short, getting to the ground truth, which we define for the purposes of this essay as a level of precision of analysis that allows building blocks and their fundamental interactions to be directly understood, can be worth it.
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • data ideally would be sufficiently precise, and have the right spatial and/or temporal resolution, to pinpoint fundamental building blocks and how they interact.
    Architecting Discovery: A Model for How Engineers Can Help Invent Tools for Neuroscience: Neuron
  • no one i know who is the best at their craft became the best by listening to the worries and criticism of people who also don’t understand their goals. and for me, being the best at my craft is my goal. i still need to fully define this craft but i got this.
    not scared anymore. - Hardeep Gambhir's Spaceship
  • i have observed when one chases their authenticity and obsessions extremes with no backup plans, they put themselves in a position where they are forced to succeed.
    not scared anymore. - Hardeep Gambhir's Spaceship
  • none of them have ever optimized for prestige. if they got prestige, they got it as a byproduct of chasing their authenticity and obsession. they always aim for learning the most, and learning under the best people and teams. they have often worked summers or a year under someone talented for free to learn. (grants are readily available if you want to do this).
    not scared anymore. - Hardeep Gambhir's Spaceship
  • this might seem surprising to some ppl because i always preach this unconventional path. but i’ll admit it, i was fucking scared. i thought again, like the grade 12 me, that when i’m not sure, chasing prestige is probably the right decision. i thought if i fucked up in this unconventional path, i was doomed. maybe having some backup would be good, some credentials.
    not scared anymore. - Hardeep Gambhir's Spaceship
  • Finding a question that has this tension (‘this is physically possible and would be very impactful but seems profoundly challenging’) means that you’re in the right place and your topic sits at the frontier of current capabilities - a site where ambitious, innovative thinking can potentially bridge the gap between the goods you can envision and what’s presently achievable. At the same time, being able to define your very ambitious goals precisely is important - simply saying that you want to work on neuroanatomy or Alzheimers is insufficiently defined and will risk your group being pulled in t…
    A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
  • You can encourage certain participants to give opening presentations that take risks, setting the tone for others and expanding the range of acceptable discussion and questioning. Future-looking speculation is often discouraged by journal reviewers; in this sort of setting, it’s the perfect tone.
    A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
  • Workshops, brainstorming sessions, and collaborative writing exercises where researchers are encouraged to step beyond their immediate research agenda are all excellent venues for this — each is a temporary but potentially transformative environment that creates critical connections and durable artifacts for future use.
    A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
  • Those that do often execute them as passion projects, labors of love that they lug from conference to conference or conduct well after their other critical grant-related work has been offloaded or has spun down.
    A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
  • t’s a group of intrepid researchers who want to leap-frog developments in their field or a collection of government funders determined to spur technological advancement, you have to get knowledgeable people together in a room to start thinking and writing and mapping together.
    A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
  • Identifying scientific bottlenecks requires a special kind of forward-looking judgment. You have to look down the road at what will be made possible by unlocking the particular node on the tech tree you’re contemplating or routing around. Even if it’s unsexy or particularly thorny, you have to judge the value of solving a challenge now by the future unlocks it makes possible.
    A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Roadmapping
  • Humanity could increase its rate of scientific and technological advancement by driving free energy into about 100 especially catalytic projects within reach. If there are ~20 fundamental fields of science, and within each there are ~3-5 pivotal elements of scientific infrastructure that the existing science establishment can’t or won’t build, that's an unmet need on the order of ~100 bridge-scale projects. If each costs $20-50M for a massively enabling sprint, that’s a few $B in input that could unlock trillions in societal value as outputs via accelerated R&D progress.
    How to Build Essential Technology - by Adam Marblestone
  • a need for projects that are bigger than an academic lab can undertake, more coordinated than a loose consortium, and not directly profitable enough to be a venture-backed or industry R&D.
    How to Build Essential Technology - by Adam Marblestone
  • reveal a deeper world to us and open new domains of exploration and discovery. What has enabled these leaps? New ways of organizing science.
    How to Build Essential Technology - by Adam Marblestone
  • Great books to seed your mind here include “Cell Bio by the Numbers”, William Bialek’s “Searching for Principles’, “Principles of Physical Biology”, and a thorough review of David Goodsell illustrations.
    ldeming - Posthaven
  • Specifically, to create a mental model, you might try the following: Generate a list of numbers, as long as possible, relevant to the object under study. Attempt to ‘play’ with each number at least once. Generate a problem in which you manipulate that number, and solve it mentally. Then, attempt to visualize an object that would represent the problem, and ‘see’ the solution. Try to ‘see’ the thing you want to understand. Generate as many visualizations as possible, of objects in the cell you are already comfortable with. Watch each of them to see what happens - is the phenomenon you want to un…
    ldeming - Posthaven
  • My current hypotheses: Taking a lot of time (at least 20-30% of the hours you expect to spend in a field) to create mental ‘toys’ that you can fluidly manipulate, will lead to net faster understanding and storage, and potentially more and better novel ideas. This would mean at least 20-30 hours for a field you expect to spend 100 hours interacting with. Letting yourself do a lot of weird things that don’t look like learning, if they ‘feel’ right in the first phase, is important. I dance and move to create spaces in which my brain ‘sees’ the answer to things. I’m sure everyone has a similarly u…
    ldeming - Posthaven
  • I’d submit that reading papers is actually, in isolation, a potentially dangerous activity. Sure, it’s better than doing nothing. But papers are generated in a rich social context that you don’t have, with important subtext you might completely miss. A paper is to a reproducible result as a mouse is to a human - many things might work in one but not the othe
    ldeming - Posthaven
  • I was more often caught in the middle of the storm than controlling it from the eye. The chaos consumed me, moving me frenetically from one thing to the next. I switched focuses depending on the day, without a central direction guiding me.
    a normal 2025
  • Hoola-hoops are the best metaphor for me to think about codependency, a predilection to be be overly concerned with others as a way to regulate one’s own emotional states. As you can imagine, it can lead to several issues like extreme people pleasing, an inability to be alone, a lack of sense of self and a tendency to end up in dysfunctional relationships.
    stay in your own hoola hoop - Airplane Mode with Liz Plank
  • If someone is struggling to keep their hoola-hoop in motion, and you try and attempt to aid them, not only is that going to put you own hoola-hoop in some serious jeopardy, it also won’t do anything to help their situation either. You can support and encourage them from afar, but if you get involved all the hoola hoops are going to fall.
    stay in your own hoola hoop - Airplane Mode with Liz Plank
  • I think what often happens in a marriage is that you know—or think you know—your partner so well that you stop giving them the chance to surprise you. You start to see them in a very rigid way. This is exacerbated by the illusion that your partner belongs to you. And so anything that might surprise you and destroy the illusion of complete knowing and belonging must be hidden from you.
    alternatives - by Elaine - manners & mystery
  • “not knowing is most intimate.”
    alternatives - by Elaine - manners & mystery
  • bonds that are cherished and loosely held are stronger than ironclad, legally binding contracts.
    alternatives - by Elaine - manners & mystery
  • But that idea—that supporting him was a problem—unsettled me, and I started to question it.
    The Inexistent Line Between Care and Codependency
  • Never underestimate people’s hatred for establishing their own independent set of values and planning an optimal sequence of decisions according to them.
    What's stopping you?
  • When a person experiences awe, he or she experiences a diminished self — he or she is now part of something larger than oneself. The prototypical experience of awe is astronauts looking at the Earth in the space: termed “the Overview Effect,”
    Neuroscience Informs Design, Now What? Towards an Awe-inspiring Spatial Design
  • recent research has shown that the defect in the C9orf72 gene found in familial ALS is also present in a small percentage of sporadic ALS cases. Further, there is evidence that mutant SOD1 is present in spinal cord tissue in some sporadic cases of ALS.
    ALS Research - Answer ALS
  • Passion and purpose are emotions that come after expertise and experience. The way to get them is to commit to the path of mastery, get great at something, and do great work.
    How to change or build your career | Derek Sivers
  • Looking for your passion, purpose, or calling is an example of the fixed mindset. You’re assuming that this is an inherent and unchanging thing inside of you, like trying to read your DNA or blood type. But you won’t find passion and purpose there, because that’s not where those feelings come from.
    How to change or build your career | Derek Sivers
  • But if a graduate’s time could be worth $200 per hour, yet they’re doing work that locals could do better for $10 per hour (and without airfare and hotels), then they’re actually doing a disservice to others.
    Happy, Smart, and Useful | Derek Sivers
  • While the pack of commoditised founders are fighting for the same opportunities, you’ll be exploring virgin lands in startup world.
    Justin Glibert - Stop reading the same books as everybody else
  • What I believe should be done instead, is building your own literary niche. That means reading stuff that other people have not even heard of. One weird concept will lead to another. And before you know it you’ll be a true contrarian.
    Justin Glibert - Stop reading the same books as everybody else
  • My thesis is that blindly following the Playbook, and infecting your mind with the same ideas everybody remotely ambitious got infected with, will lead you to the competition you have tried so hard to avoid
    Justin Glibert - Stop reading the same books as everybody else
  • nobody says “I am going to become an expert in a field in a year instead of ten”. That’s much more uncommon.
    Justin Glibert - How I learned modern Machine Learning
  • You want to be free and open while meeting a lot of people, until you meet the right one. Easier said than done.
    RELATIONSHIPS — Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  • Deep down a lot of bad relationships are power struggles. In a good relationship each person does what they want and does not try to control the other person.
    RELATIONSHIPS — Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  • Great relationships are easy because your value systems line up so perfectly they make you happy being who they are, and you make them happy being who you are
    RELATIONSHIPS — Almanack of Naval Ravikant