Aazad | آزاد @aazad@qoto.org

@lili

I'll give it a shot Lili, thank you!

@katiedimartin I'd say I see no difference, but then I realised I overshare and I'm overly honest no matter the media so it might just be me

@arshiya

I'm in the pipeline myself for a PhD track after I graduate this summer and much of the salient advice I've received amounts to two things:

1) And I'd argue this is the most important one, peer culture and mentors. A lovely PI and a healthy lab culture will do a lot more for your research track than anything else because ultimately, you're still trying to get your bearing together, academically, intellectually and socially. And the rat race is a marathon, not a sprint. Prestigious labs and programs, should they fit the bill outlined above would be ideal, but more often than not run through PhD candidates and postdocs like a chainsmoker running through cigarette butts.

2) As far as research areas go, what I've decided was to focus on programs that would significantly contribute to the skillsets I'd like to have to future interests, therefore adjacent programs with peripheral interests would also be ideal assuming the lab culture is healthy and the program is reasonably structured.

Ultimately, I would settle for a lab, even if the area didn't directly align with my interests, so long as there's some overlap and I get to operationalise the peripheral skillsets I'd need while building on existing knowledgebase. And of course, fostering social connections for the long run. Other considerations include those of a personal nature such as long-term personal plans that might entail family, personal obligations, financial situation, how the migration/settlement pipeline, etc. And of course this varies heavily on the country, the funding scheme, how transferrable your skillset is to industry and such.

any recommendations for literature review search engines?

Google Scholar is fine for cursory searches but lacking for deep dives

current workflow is asking people in the field for landmark papers, running them on ResearchRabbit and creating the notes in Obsidian

@FreyaSu

Hey, thanks!

@junosz Thank you for all the recommendations, looks like I know what my weekend's going to be upto.

And yes, I'm already acquainted with Yohan from discourse on Twitter, and I've bothered him enough via DMs to pick his brain about peripheral topics. Kevin's blog is a regular read as well.

Looks like I'm on the right track as far as converging all these threads go. Regardless, thank you again!

@vivekgani I'll give it a look, thanks Vivek

@teixi

Ohh I didn't know Bernard had a podcast too. Luis', I was already aware of, but Micah's is a new one.

Thank you again for the recommendations Teixi, really appreciate it

@Drmowinckels Not sure, I've never thought about it but I've mostly used 'prenatal/postnatal' to indicate a stage or phenomenon and 'fetal' to indicate the something pertaining to the actual fetus.

I don't think I have a linguistic basis for this though, just an intuitive sense of which goes where, and that could be entirely wrong.

@NeuroLeyla Thank you Leyla

Sorry I'd been swamped lately but I've finally got the time to go through this over the coming weekend

I'll see how it goes

I'm not sure if I'm using the correct terminology because I don't know the right words, but is there a theoretical morphospace model equivalent for cell development? like Raup's model for gastropod shells, etc.

So for the last year or so, I've been increasingly interested in complexity theory and chaos dynamics within the context of self-organization and emergence, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations on texts or landmark papers on this niche, especially with regards to the nonequlibrium dynamics of abiogenesis & cellular morphogenesis.

Bonus points if it specifically talks about self-organizational aspects of biochem systems arise because of certain physiochemical properties that seem baked into the laws of physics that make them tend towards the intertia of entropic gradients, etc. and how information theory might tie into it all.

I'm also interested in the upper limits of these self-organizational processes as far as thermodynamic entropy S Shannon entropy H go, I think these are called Bekenstein bounds but I'm not quite sure and I could be grossly misunderstanding the concept.

I'd appreciate any reading that might help me first pick up the words I'm looking for to figure out the interplay between what I'd like to look at because, despite the reading I've done so far, I'm not sure what I know and I'm even less sure about what I don't know or might be missing.

Here are some relevant texts I've read so, just for reference to avoid repeated recommendations and so anyone can sort of gauge my existing content knowledge:

I'd consider Schroedinger's Mind & Matter, What Is Life and Kauffman's World Beyond Physics, and Origins of Order as foundational texts for the trajectory I'm interested in
Nick Lane's Transformer and Oxygen
Strogatz's Nonlinear dynamics and chaos (heavy read, need to give it another few rounds but maybe after I get through the recs I get from here hopefully)
Mitchell's Complexity and Intro to Genetic Algorithms
Juarrero's Dynamics in Action was a major game change but this could use another read over too
I've also gone through some of Medawar's writings, namely Aristotle to Zoos and his lecture, An Unsolved Problem of Biology
Edelman's text on molecular embryology 'Topobiology' has been very helpful to orient myself as well

I think.. landmark papers might be ideal, I could probably use my ability to parse them and understand their significant as a useful benchmark to gauge where I'm at right now. But anything anyone thinks might help me orient myself would be appreciated. Even if it's undergraduate math texts, because I could probably use those too considering I'm pretty lacking.

Boosts would be very much appreciated since I'm not sure if I've managed to find most of the complexity folks from Santa Fe here yet.

Thank you in advance.

@lichtix Another notch for Brain Science, will do!

@bouromain Looks like Brain Inspired seems to be very popular. Thanks Romain! I'll start with giving that one a shot.

@lili They all sound like wonderful suggestions Lili, thank you so much.

@teixi

gosh, really appreciate the clarion call Teixi, thank you

@nataliepeluso

Yeah! The time zone difference was another issue since I'd miss out on a lot of discourse. But that would also depend on my N24 sleep cycle because it migrates around a lot.

As for the spreadsheet, yes, I might because quite a few of my mutuals are still on the bird app, right now I've mostly got both feet and each boat just incase because I'm not sure how things are going to go from here on.

If most of them make the move to the Fediverse, then I can probably do away with it, but if it ends up being a 50/50 ish split, I might use both platforms if only to stay in the loop on discourse.

Fortunately, most of our neuro mutuals are on here now so that's something. But most of my evo.devo. and psychology mutuals are still reluctant to make the move, especially those with large followings.

But honestly a lot of props to @NicoleCRust for facilitating much of the transitition for a lot of people by way of boosting intros here and spreading the word on there. Her mastodon TL alone helped connect with most of our neuro mutuals, especially since it's trawling for profiles is a little finnicky here, especially across multiple server instances.

@LeonDLotter

And this might be a long shot but any suggestions that cover complexity theory within the natural sciences? Or maybe just chaos dynamics in general?