Brandon Rasman, PhD

🧫 Early career scientists: New seed funding opportunity for everyone working on the microbiome and systems biology related topics. 🧫 Projects may address fundamental or translational questions across all species and systems, including basic preclinical and bioinformatic studies, with relevance to health, physiology, or disease. Projects using existing datasets or cross disciplinary approaches are also encouraged! The goal is to provide seed funding for early career researchers to test creative ideas in the field of microbiome research that can generate proof of concept within 6 months and allow follow up funding. Eligibility: PhD students, postdocs, independent researchers, and early stage faculty worldwide These are rolling applications: Early submission is especially encouraged. Funding decisions are typically made within few weeks. Applications are short and can be completed within few hours. More details and application link in the comments. Feel free to share within your network, if you can!

Me when I submit a paper

study calculus. it’s not just math. it’s how you understand change. what it gives you: • derivatives → how fast things change. velocity, growth, gradients. • integrals → how things accumulate. area, energy, total effect. • limits → what happens at the edge. where intuition usually breaks. • differential equations → how real systems evolve over time. once you get calculus: • physics stops being memorization • control systems start making sense • optimization becomes clear • even machine learning clicks don’t just watch lectures. • solve problems by hand • struggle through proofs • derive results yourself calculus isn’t about passing exams. it’s about learning how the world changes.

Natural Frequency and Time Period of a Simple Pendulum.

Sums of sinusoidal functions visualized with epicycles. [🎞️ thebrainmaze]

257 years ago, Joseph Fourier was born on this day. In 1822, Fourier showed that any wave can be broken down into an infinite sum of sine waves, using a technique now called the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform is like a recipe generator. You input a complicated wave and you get back its ingredients, the amplitude and frequency of each component sine wave. Fourier analysis is an essential part of modern technology. Its applications range from JPEG compression and image recognition to quantum physics and MRI's. Fourier theory has two components: basic building blocks and labels. Imagine a child's toy castle. This castle can be disassembled into individual building blocks. And these building blocks can then be sorted by color into bins and labeled. Similarly, the Fourier transform disassembles a complex wave into individual sine waves. These are like the building blocks. Each sine wave can be labeled with its frequency, or how quickly it oscillates per second. The labels on the bins are more than just a way to organize things. They can be used to rebuild the original complex wave and as an efficient shorthand for communicating information. For example, when you send a voice message, your phone doesn't transmit an entire complex sound wave. Instead, it breaks it down and sends just the labels or frequencies of the component sine waves. The receiver's phone then reverses this process, converting the labels back into the contents of the bins to reconstruct the message’s original sound wave.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

Researchers trained a humanoid robot to play tennis using only 5 hours of motion capture data The robot can now sustain multi-shot rallies with human players, hitting balls traveling >15 m/s with a ~90% success rate AlphaGo for every sport is coming

In system theory, it is called "linearization"... which has been studied and used for decades. Honestly, folks, there is no need to invent or introduce any new terminology. Remember, there is rarely anything new under the sun...

Think in probabilities