gaurav_v

Which school was this, and when did you attend?

Trisk Bio | Software Eng, Hardware Eng, generalists, ops | London, England | Full-time | ONSITE

We are looking for: hardware and software generalists; general generalists; mechanical, fluidic, and biochemical engineers; biologists; bioprocessing scientists.

We recently raised an $11M seed round, from top-tier investors and founders from the USA, mostly SF.

We are building in Stevenage, UK (https://twitter.com/gaurav_ven/status/1489891501459091458?s=...) - a short train commute from Central London (28 min), or East London (21 min), or Cambridge (37 min). Being on-site is important for what we do. We sponsor visas and hire globally.

We're building a new kind of fully-automated 'scale-out' manufacturing facility for biologics.

Our goal is to allow therapeutics companies to manufacture production-scale batches of product in many parallelized, benchtop-scale pieces of kit. This matters because 'scaling-up' from bench-top to production is crazy difficult and stochastic, and causes biological innovators to lose control over their products.

We are a very small team with expertise across biology, regulatory affairs, mechanical engineering, and physics. We intend to keep the team small through construction of our first manufacturing facility. We have a history of working together to accomplish difficult things, including getting mass Covid tests deployed across the UK (https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1410734875708063746).

We hire people above roles. And we hire for values above specific skills. We value: courage; curiosity; motivation; resourcefulness; taste; commercial orientation; playfulness; technical excellence; the ability to both ideate and execute, and the judgement to know when to do which.

So reach out! We very much look forward to hearing from you.

Gaurav Venkataraman / CEO and cofounder / gaurav@triskbio.com

There is a very good book on the origins of life on earth by Eric Smith, called "The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth."

Here's a YouTube talk with some of the arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE

Gallistel wrote a book 'Memory and the Computational Brain,' in which he argues that neural storage and computation via synaptic strengthening alone is implausible, and that the brain must have a real read/write memory. He points out that genetic material is an ideal substrate for such a capacity...

Indeed. There is even stronger recent evidence for the role of RNA in intracellular storage of behavioral memories: http://www.eneuro.org/content/5/3/ENEURO.0038-18.2018

Not to mention quite strong but now forgotten evidence from the 50s...

Can you email me at gauravvman at gmail? I have been working on demonstrating that neural computation is RNA based; would be interested in hearing your take on the field.

Indeed. Eva is a spectacular scientist, and one of the pioneers of this field.

Yes! That is the paper I had in mind! Thanks.

I didn't downvote, but the reason is likely because your comment is off-topic. The parents are talking about experiences un-learning one-sided equality that they picked up programming before learning algebra; your comment is about programming a T-83 to help with schoolwork.

There was a recent interesting paper on the arXiv which argued that the ubiquity of small-world networks was vastly overstated.

Can't find the paper anymore - did anyone else see this / have a link?

I did some accidental market research on Snap with my girlfriend's 9 year-old cousin this weekend.

She had tons of snaps, but informed me that they were almost all blank images. She and her friends send each other these blank images to maintain 'streaks,' which count the number of continuous days that two people have messaged each other.

So attached to these streaks were the cousin and her friends that if the 24 hour mark was approaching and the cousin hadn't sent a blank message to her longest streak, the counterparty would log-in to the cousin's snapchat and send _herself_ a message, to make sure the streak continued.

My cousin said that the blowup in (blank) picture messages had slowed the app to a crawl, leading her not to use it anymore, aside of course for streaks.

Not the kind of of daily-active-users that advertisers crave. I'm 28; never heard of streaks before this.

Could you give some examples?

You have excluded the sentence which immediately follows his stated income: "The median-priced home in San Francisco costs $1.5 million, and a person needs an annual household income of $303,000 in order to afford the 20% down payment on a home that expensive."

I agree that it is a bit tone deaf.

Interesting paper. Do you work in the area? I'm working on proving that memories are in fact stored in genetic material, as was believed back in the 60s.

Drop me an email (gauravvman at gmail) if you're interested in this kind of stuff! Would like to know how you came across this paper.

You are of course correct. Unfortunately, the OPs suggestion that 'big data' is changing science has become the common belief in many fields, particularly the most prestigious. Several groups now operate under the protocol: collect big datasets first; spin a scientific story second. These fields often focus on and reward ever increasingly fancy (and expensive) methods to collect more data at 'better' resolution, with respect to some metric.

The hypothesis is often a forgotten tool.

The Nature of Computation is really good.

I'm working on extending this work, now. For those of you interested in the history of memories outside of the brain, I would suggest reading the first chapter of 'The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science': http://cstpr.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/collins_the_gol...

The idea of memory outside of the brain originated in the 1950s, when it was believed that memories may be stored in genetic material. This idea was discredited for interesting sociological reasons which the book explains well.

For those of you asking if the worm brain is a decent model: the work was done in planaria, which is the simplest organism known to have a centralized, two-hemisphere nervous system. So there really is a 'brain' up there in its head, the worm shows little behavior without it.

You can email me if you'd like to know more.

"Scope of the concept of even baby integration of a function is much much larger, and OP is talking about that."

The OP said the opposite, that differentiation is harder 'more finicky.' I agree that the concept of integration is much richer.

Also, I didn't mean 'closed form solution' when I said 'analytic.' I also didn't mean 'analytic functions.' I meant that the analytic machinery you have to develop in order to have a theory of integration is far richer than for differentiation - i.e, proving the multivariate change of variable theorem.

More like `from a computational point of view.' Analytically, integration is much more difficult and richer than differentiation!

Not only that; in response controversy arising from the 2009 essay he explicitly stated that "It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us."

See addendum to the essay at bottom: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Lazy editing by the NYT.

He clarified that he didn't want to revoke rights to vote explicitly as an addendum to the essay (see bottom):

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism.

There is a nice book about Carlson and his invention - 'Copies in Seconds.'

I broadly agree with you, but I think the issue is more subtle. Ambitious people will always work very hard; the danger of working hard is that it necessitates a degree of path-dependent myopia that can lead one to miss huge opportunities.

The most ambitious people are quite concerned about this, and try to use leisure as a comparative advantage. The article is pretty fair in painting this portrait: the author admits that the scientists construct their lives around their work (Darwin worried about getting married, for instance), but points out that constructing their lives around their work involves the construction of leisure.

This article is not exactly like the others on the front page. Quanta magazine is in general extremely good science reporting. (It's an editorially independent branch of the Simons Foundation.)

The title is sensationalized, but I found the rest of the article to be an honest description of (what I understand of) England's paper. I particularly liked the way that the article discussed the (technical) work that led up to England's.

Is there something about this article that you really didn't like?

The best way to network in science is to be earnest and unafraid.

Earnest in that you take a genuine interest in understanding (and not just undercutting) other people's work, and unafraid in that you're not afraid to email anyone questions, talk to them at conferences, or ask to stop by and chat when you're traveling through their city.

After doing this for several years I basically accidentally found myself 'highly networked.'

Model performance is discussed in their full paper, here:

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/devisag...

I work in a 'top' neuroscience lab in which we study the nature of neural computations theoretically and experimentally, the kind of thing that you may consider Super Duper Really Serious attempts To Innovate.

The things being dismissed in this thread as 'toys' and 'old stuff made prettier' make our work easier.

Scientists communicate on twitter and via blogs; the open-access movement is picking up steam this way. It's much easier to decide to move across the world to work with a particular experimentalist if your mom knows how to use Skype and you can talk to your grandma from the hospital on her iPad.

Innovation happens in the world, not in a bubble. Making things easier to use and more appealing to the mainstream is real, extremely valuable progress.

Not to mention that all of the mathematics we use was developed by mathematicians purely as new, purposeless shiny toys. :)

I work in an area tangential to MD; I would say that a list of 'experts' would include: DE Shaw, Benoit Roux, Vijay Pande, David Baker (and associated people in their labs).

You say: I'm sure I can't just email these professors and say "hey, want to chat?"

I am not yet a graduate student and I do exactly that relatively frequently. It has very often led to great talks about science. You should be informed and knowledgable about the work you want to discuss (and be specific with your queries), and I think you'll find that most academics are more than happy to talk about their own work. You can learn a lot about a subfield this way.

Googling the cosignatories names revelas that several work for Exxon. I don't see how the WSJ didn't consider this relevant information to disclose, instead presenting them only as 'distinguished scientists.'

Well, I think to be a PI on a grant of any decent size what you need is a tenure or tenure track faculty position, which requires a "PhD or equivalent."

As far as I can tell, "or equivalent" means that you've made so many contributions to your field that institutions are fighting with each other to give you a tenured position anyway. Freeman Dyson, for example, never got a PhD.

Like everything in science, it's just about publications. If you somehow manage to publish a lot of significant papers, nobody is going to blink over the "PhD" qualification. That being said, the easiest way to build up a publication record is via the PhD-postdoc pathway (at least given the current system).

The prevailing attitude in my lab is that "if you need statistics, you did the wrong experiment."