Peak retired academic moment.
1. One of those emails: Are you the R Watt who wrote xxxxxx?
2. Nope, but it sounds vaguely interesting. Wonder what they found.
3. Google - read it and discover that I did write it.
We're excited to share our new study on decoding brain activity in participants with post-stroke aphasia! We think this is an important step towards cognitive brain-computer interfaces for patients with language disorders
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/8
A gabor of vision scientists.
Somehow this must be useful for vision science 🧠
Very cool. The white matter connectivity of early visual cortex recapitulates the polar angle variation of retinal structure.
One look at this figure and you know you are in the world of retinal meridians and that Marisa Carrasco will be making an appearance.
I am standing for election to the VSS board. The slate of candidates [with 25% immodesty] is fantastic. Please consider engaging in the difficult decision process of identifying a just-noticeable-difference in great folks who are eager to serve vision science.
Man I missed out on being on that 900 author paper. I’m holding out for a 9000 author paper.
Plot of the maximum number of authors on a paper in each year from 1970 to current day, with an exponential fit to the data between 1970 and 2015 (log y-axis). Plot generated using Gemini, so that this with an AI-sized grain of salt.
The mega-author biz has been falling off. As of 2015 we were on a good trend to hit a 100k author paper by 2041, but then the physics community became more insular and retreated to 3000 author papers.
Yah. Not a good policy change.
A very influential book for me was “Animal Eyes” by Nilsson and Land. It led me to understand how exquisitely visual systems are engineered to squeeze every bit of relevant information for a given ecological niche.
IN GOLDFISH !!!
I read bioRxiv titles in all caps as the scientist excitedly yelling the result to their colleagues. Can you believe it?? SENSORY MAPS IN THE TELENCEPHALIC PALLIUM!!
Congratulations to @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, winner of the 2026 Ken Nakayama medal from @vssmtg.bsky.social! Nancy is not only a brilliant scientist, she has also been an inspiring mentor to several generations of vision scientists (including me).
@neuroskeptic.bsky.social. You are our only hope.
Beautiful essay from @samhenri.gold about the joy of hacking, disguised as a review of the MacBook Neo.
samhenri.gold/blog/2026031...
Ah, thank you. I will go back and read this again more carefully.
I'm enjoying reading this. FYI: I think there is a typo in the second paragraph of page 3, in which an r value is given as 0.56 twice. If not a typo, then I have trouble understanding the associated p values.
The BCBL would be an amazing place to work. Great colleagues in a gorgeous location with some of the finest food in the world.
Amazing and congrats!
Set up a table right there and start doing some subway science. Put out a hat, and busk for lab funding.
An apparatus of some kind!
There’s an interesting lawsuit out of Connecticut I’ve been following that rests on the question of whether darkness — yes, darkness, the primordial Erebus himself— is a natural resource. Here’s why that’s potentially a big deal.
There are also temporal processing differences between L/M cones and S cones (and in the post-receptoral red-green vs blue-yellow channels). I am curious if this could give rise to such effects.
Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly
How many menorahs have you got going here?
Happy VSS deadline extension to all the vision scientists out there.
Remarkable data. Really unusual clinical circumstance to place electrodes in the LGN for occipital epilepsy. And to have TWO patients! Any chance you can record from the DBS electrodes post op? So much more to measure!
I read this as saying that there will be a date in the near future by which one could submit (e.g.) a new R01 proposal, and that the proposal would still be considered as part of the October / Cycle III due date. That would be remarkable.
This is really cool. There is some interesting thinking to be done regarding optimal temporal experimental design within this framework.
Closely following this thread