What I'm up To

This is a now page, inspired by Derek Sivers. It was last updated on 2 July 2024.

Academic

I’ve just finished my second year of medical school, and am soon to start an intercalated BSc in neuroscience. I am particularly excited for my lab project, in which I will be be analysing data from the OpenScope Project and thinking about the encoding of the visual field on a single-neuron level. This is a marked departure from my previous research interests, which have revolved pretty intensely around cognition and psychiatry. It’s refreshing to deal with visual neuroscience because any inference made from imaging or computational modelling can be (almost) deterministically validated against actual visual field data. Computational modelling of higher cognitive processes felt a lot murkier. You can never measure against the mind itself, only some kind of lossy heuristic: questionnaire responses, behavioural measures and so on. Ultimately, experience itself is totally enclosed to the experiencer.

Personal Projects

I have been enjoying making small, silly web-tools using LLMs. There remains something quite magical about cobbling together software in ~20 minutes and permanently solving a minor annoyance. I’ve made three so far:

• Passcode Guardian: a tool that generates a screen time passcode, obfuscates it during entry so you don’t remember it, and lets you send it to a friend for safekeeping.
• Lemonaid: a sane lemonade ratio calculator. Enter your quantity of lemon juice, and the appropriate gram amounts of water and a choice of sweeteners are generated.
• CoffeeCalc: enter a coffee-to-water ratio and either a gram amount of coffee (in case you’re trying to finish a packet) or the total liquid quantity of coffee you want, and the calculator will spit out how much coffee/water to use. Saves me about 10 seconds once a month.

Reading

I found out that Christopher Isherwood wrote a translation of the Bhagavad Gita – combining two of my great loves, American Modernism and Vedanta – so I have been reading that eagerly. I’m also re-reading The Hobbit as comfort food and slowly working through Lewis White Beck’s Kant Selections. Poetry-wise, I’ve been dipping into Christopher Shackle’s translation of some of Baba Bulleh Shah’s verse.

A Parting Quote

Your act is always applied to paper; for meditating without leaving any traces becomes evanescent, nor should instinct be exalted in some vehement and lost gesture that you sought.

To write—

The inkstand, crystal as a conscience, within its depths its drop of shadow relative to having something be: then take away the lamp.

You noticed, one does not write luminously on a dark field; the alphabet of stars alone, is thus indicated, sketched out or interrupted; man pursues black on white.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Limited Action