The strong law of small numbers strikes again!

Yesterday was very productive and then I got to spend the evening gaming with friends, so that was nice! Today I have jury duty, and potentially for most of the rest of the week… It’s fine, but my fingers are still crossed that I end up getting dismissed and can go back to my sorely neglected research tasks!

Sentient, spacefaring bees, according to the article! Not what I was expecting but still, sounds pretty intriguing!

Yeah, cryptobiotic crust! I’ve seen it in the Sonoran desert. It doesn’t look like much, I think if I hadn’t been warned ahead of time not to step on it I might have just done it without thinking. Given that just footprints can take on the order of decades to heal I think a dune buggy ban makes sense in areas where it grows.

I’m still surprised to learn about the microbes in the Atacama: it’s the driest place on earth, and I would have expected the salt deposits to make it even harder for anything to live there. Yknow what they say I guess: “Life, uh, finds a way.”

Some pretty interesting ideas. I was unaware that anything was living in the Atacama salt deposits, which certainly lends some credence to the idea that something could be pulling moisture out of the air on Mars, thin as it is.

That’s great news, and fantastic timing! Good luck on the interview, though I’m sure you’ve got this.

That’s a real mood, yeah.

I just recently decided to stick with mine. I was having a lot of doubts: feeling like I wasn’t making and progress, like I wouldn’t actually be able to finish the projects I started, impostor syndrome shit, etc. I’m happy I decided to stick with it. I just cleared some big milestones and I’m in the middle of a nice long vacation now, and I’m feeling excited again about my work.

On the other side of things, I’ve got a friend who decided to leave his PhD program with a masters a few years ago. He’s now heading up product development for a robotics startup, doing quite well for himself.

I don’t think there’re any wrong answers here. Do what will make you happiest. Maybe you just need a vacation, maybe you’re ready to move on. And remember that education is never wasted: even if you decide not to finish out the PhD, you’ve still learned a lot and that’s valuable with or without the piece of paper and title.

Best wishes, friend, whichever way you decide to go ♥

For sure. They tend to do a good job communicating tricky science and math concepts as well. They interview experts in a coherent way, tend to take the time to properly set up the background for topics, and the writers there seem to really care about getting things right rather than being sensational. They’re one of my favorite sites for stories about math and science honestly.

I haven’t had a chance to read the article linked in this post yet, but I’ll be sitting in an airport in a few hours (I really need to go to sleep now) and I’ll look forward to reading it then!

With all due respect to Penrose – who is indisputably brilliant – in probability when you start to say things like, “X is 10^10^100 times more likely than Y,” it’s actuall much more likely that there’s some flaw in your priors or your model of the system than that such a number is actually reflective of reality.

That’s true even for really high probability things. Like if I were to claim that it’s 10^10^100 times more likely that the sun will rise tomorrow than that it won’t, then I would have made much too strong a claim. It’s doubly true for things like the physics of the early universe, where we know our current laws are at best an incomplete description.

Maybe all of those PhD students would have their time better spent on this task than pretending, as if often the case, they’ve done some original work on an important theory that’s found something “for the first time”.

I mean I’m personally biased as a PhD student myself, but I think this is a great idea. I made the core of my project to basically take a picture of a phenomenon that has been inferred from spectroscopy but not observed directly. So verification, not exactly replication, but same idea. Turns out that doing something like this is very hard and makes a worthy PhD project. (I haven’t managed it yet, and am starting to wonder if my eventual paper might actually end up being in support of the null hypothesis…)

But I’m also not looking to go into academia after I graduate, so I’m not to worried about trying for something high impact or anything like that. I think for someone angling to be a professor the idea of a replication or verification project may be a harder sell, which is largely down to the culture of academia and how universities do their hiring of post-docs and such. I mean, even in this case more people are still going to be familiar with the names of Lee and Kim than any of the researchers who put in work on replication studies (can you name any of them without checking the article?).

tl;dr definitely a worthy goal and replications should absolutely be encouraged, but it’s going to take a while to change the whole academic culture to reinforce that they’re valuable contributions.

Yeah, persistence hunting! It’s cool stuff.

I remember learning about this applied to various animals

Another one of the studies I found while googling around about this yesterday mentioned something about kangaroos right at the end, and apparently their fast hopping gate is especially efficient. The mention seemed to come a bit out of the blue right at the end of the conclusion, but I was also just skimming so I may have missed a discussion of kangaroo gaits earlier in the paper.

I think the biomechanics of walking and running makes this a little more complicated than that. The efficiency of moving your body in different ways is different. I’m certainly no expert, but if I’m reading this study right (it’s open access so feel free to check me), then walking will pretty much always use less energy to cover a given distance than running/jogging, unless you force yourself to “fast-walk” at high speeds where a running/jogging gait would feel more natural.

I’m also pretty sure that for a given distance you would count fewer steps while running than you would if you walked the same distance, since each step covers a lot more distance when you run. So in terms of step counting, steps taken while running should be “worth” a lot more in terms of exercise than steps taken while walking.

In either case, my understanding of the evidence is that it has pretty consistently been shown across many different studies that almost any amount of daily exercise – walking, jogging, cycling, etc – is way, way better than no daily exercise at all. This study seems to fall nicely into that pattern.

Automated drug discovery is a very interesting area at the moment, especially for cases like these where you’re confined to a relatively small subset of possible biomolecules. This kind of thing works much less well in other kinds of settings where the process chemistry can vary wildly between seemingly similar compounds. It’ll be neat to see how far they can take this idea!

I’d not heard of him before reading this, is he a big name in climate dynamics research?

Ah I had a suspicion this article would be about Ambri! I applied to work there once while I was in undergrad (didn’t get the job). Very cool tech, glad to hear that their work is coming to fruition. Good grid-level energy storage will be an important enabling technology for wider adoption of renewables.

I’ve been watching a lot of her videos lately! I found the one on Gell-Mann amnesia to be really interesting and linked it here the other day; maybe a good one for a next watch if you haven’t picked yet.