Caffeine and Lasers

I recently appeared on my friend's podcast "The Nerd and the Scientist".

1 How to take notes I've seen way too many people ask how do you use Obsidian, how do you take notes, it all seems so daunting.

Here's a pretty photo I made using Python and some neat mathematics and statistics.

Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction I never read John Green's YA fiction, since I was not a "YA" when I first came across it, BUT, I absolutely adored Crash Course History, and the way John thinks on Vlog Brothers.

Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction Fair warning, this is straight up propaganda (it even had to pass MI5 clearance to publish) and is written like Tom Clancy.

Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction The review they stick in the front describes it as "Part western, part Greek tragedy" and I think that is a really good description.

Just wanted to share a quick solution I realised about my relationship to "short form content".

This is a blogpost about my favourite aliens.

I just stumbled accross an interesting paper on organisations with an abstract I just had to share.

The other day I read this great blog-post about why you shouldn't anthropomorphise LLMs.

Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction A bit of a slog to get through to be completely honest, but also incredibly important.

Biology was never not cool to be honest, but I stumbled upon another mind melting phenomenon.

Shoutout to Heals for sharing their own workflow in a Mastodon post for inspiring me.

1 Blindsight, Transhumanism, and Surveillance Capitalism I can not stop thinking about Peter Watts novel Blindsight (2006).

Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction this was a very accessible book on philosophy, i have previsoly struggled with a lot of "traditional" philosphy, e.g. netzsche and camus which who i've attempted to read several times and keep bouncing off. admittedly, when i p…

The following is a paraphrased exerpt from Mark Rowland's book "The Happiness of Dogs".

As promised, I printed it in transparent PETG....

Here is a quick write up for method I threw together for getting my writing out of Obsidian and into my website.

Something I have been dealing with during my PhD, is that it is really hard to describe the 3D geometry of a photonic crystal just using words.

Just sharing another neat website out there.

While "fashion" has never been a hobby of mine, for most of my life I have prided myself on having something of a "bold" personal style, preferring big, colorful, and interesting-shaped outfits over the boring and overdone fashion trends of my time and cu…

I've spent the past week throwing together a new setup in my lab.

Has anyone ever studied the crystal lattice structure of a box of popcorn?

I found this topic from Jodie Ettenburg's Curious About Everything Newsletter, and considering the cool physics involved I had to re-share it here.

I wanted to share a blogpost by dbreunig which mirrors a desire I have in the develkopment of LLM tech.

NOTE: The following historic argument is more or less taken whole cloth from Yannis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism".

I added an extra feature to the reddit RSS feed generator to allow users to choose what timeframe to extract top posts for. i.e.

Yes I am aware of the wild shift in tone.

Rating: ⭐ Type: Fiction Blindsight falls into the club with the Matrix and the Three Body Problem, of being a piece of Sci-Fi who is primarily a piece of philosophy.

It's frustrating that nearly every niche interest and hobby's main online community exists on Reddit, because Reddit is fucking terrible for fostering genuine communities.

Podcast is the best medium for horror fiction If you ever watch horror movies, you know that the anticipation is scarier than the reveal.

Whoops, thought I fixed my RSS feeds last week, Turns out I just broke it again in a new way.

I want to talk about advertising for a second.

Another reason why libraries are great Everyone knows the main reasons why libraries are great.

I tried to compress Yanis Varoufakis "Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism" into 4 poorly drawn comic panels License: Treat it like some bathroom graffiti

Quiet few months.

One of my favourite sites on thie IndieWeb RainbowSpec focuses entirely on learning everything you could possibly want about the optics of rainbows.

Its kind of wild that Quantum tech has gotten to the point where folks are sharing Open Source schematics for N-V Quantum Magnetomer's with a total BOM of >$250AUD.

It is well known that Physicists have a special relationship with beer.

Rating: 🟧 Type: Non-Fiction This is a complicated one to recommend.

1 On the role of technical skills in fighting power I've been reading Yanis Varifakis's Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism and have been thinking about the pessimism a lot of progressives have in opposing oligarchy.

So, what on Earth do I actually work on?

I dont care about how it works, what do I need to do?

1 Background A while back, I wrote a quick explainer on how to set up your own RSS feed for your site.

How I do My Research (As a PhD Student) It has almost become a cliche amongst a certain kind of PhD student to explain Exactly your research workflow, and why it works.

Rating: ⭐ Type: Non-Fiction Varoufakis is a surprisingly great writer.

Rating: 🟩 Type: Non-Fiction I've readlly enjoyed his Youtube channel "Gary's Economis" for a while now.

Rating: ⭐ Type: Fiction Cixin does not miss.

Rating: ⭐ Type: Fiction Cixin Liu did that really cool thing where he managed to thread the needle between a scathing critique of capital, while also criticising a reactionary authoritarian communist attempt at redistribution

Rating: 🟥 Type: Non-Fiction I found this to be less interesting than I hoped.