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new post: on modeling molecular systems from their quantum mechanical origins curiositycomposed.substack.com/p/ab-initio-ab…

new post: a mildly mathematical introduction to chemistry’s coolest hypersurfaces curiositycomposed.substack.com/p/potential-en…

substack should really support inline latex

fucking insane. some fish use electrical signals to navigate; if two fish on the same frequency encounter each other, they automatically switch frequencies to avoid "signal jamming" each other. exactly like how your wifi router does at home. wow.

@0naama @Hermissendaopal the vehicles themselves are engineering marvels the systems they operate within are fun observe and model most everyone has spent time in or around them

@Hermissendaopal @erikabytes

This is really awesome, why DO autistic people have such a strong connection to transit?

Guy Who Memorizes horrified to discover that Guy Who Simply Gets It incidentally remembers just as much

i can always count on uk rap to tell me how many people were in the car

i think one of the things you need in life if you're a certain kind of nerd is one domain of knowledge, almost doesn't matter what it is, that you just know cold, like the back of your hand. a sort of intellectual home base that you can return to and draw strength from, the foundation your nerd power radiates outward from. and i sometimes run into nerds who are clearly very smart but don't quite seem to have this and i feel like i can see this sort of... groundlessness or something that it produces. i might be overgeneralizing from my own experience but i feel like i've benefited enormously from having one of these myself. any of y'all know what i'm talking about? does this seem like a thing?

@0naama @zekedup extremely sexy

@zekedup @erikabytes

@prtwoa i point out the lens because bad framing can often be the culprit for lack of sustained interest as well i think one of the goals in informational writing is to converge upon a framing of problems and ideas that consistently piques your own curiosity

@prtwoa i think writing is a pretty good way to figure out how much curiosity you actually have about a topic vs how much you simply like the idea of it, and that alone makes the attempt worthwhile the right topic through the right lens tends to feel infinitely mineable to me

writing an info piece about the thing you’re learning is a great way to hold yourself accountable for abstractions you haven’t earned the right to use yet

rather than trying to avoid feeling this sort of discomfort, you ought to observe under what conditions it arises and identify those as areas for fortification via further practice/preparation

i think it is actually quite difficult to be over-prepared and feel like a fraud, even if you are unsuccessful by some external measure not knowing the answer to a question, for instance, plagues your self image only when accompanied by the belief that you very well could have

I suspect that the root cause of most ‘imposter syndrome’ is actually just under-preparedness, and so it is no surprise that addressing it with self-validation techniques is not particularly effective

@onlyfootnotes @anuatluru totally agree! i have this adjacent concept that floats around in my head regularly and goes something like: if you’re feeling bored, it’s a sign that there is opportunity to engage more deeply (or more cleverly perhaps) with the elements of your current environment

@erikabytes @anuatluru Yes! I view this precise skill of “finding what’s interesting” about anything as a sign of intelligence (or a dimension of it I value very highly at least)! I call this “finding your own lessons”.

“Smart people” who only consume “smart things” are just prisoners of their own self-image.

@EliasGzo totally, and in science especially it seems that even known good abstractions require frequent recalibration or they can quickly become misleading in the face of new information

@erikabytes Similar in many ways to doing science in that it forces you to evaluate which abstractions are actually generative and useful

whatcha know about encoding chemical structures? wrote a short(er) piece on molecular fingerprinting algos while my cryo-EM x molecular dynamics post composes itself