Welcome to my blog
02 Jun 2024 - Andrew Landau
I’ve been wanting to make a blog for a while. I have a few reasons for wanting a blog, so I thought I’d lay them out here in my first post as a sort of mission statement and a nice way to remember the original motivations for comparison and reflection later.
Making things real
Writing things down is a way to make things real, and that’s almost always a good idea. Even for something as simple as a to-do list, having it written down makes it concrete, and also makes it that much more satisfying to cross things off.
Writing things down that you’ve learned can make the knowledge that much more crystallized. It’s a two-fold crystallization, actually. Having something written down as a note is helpful for looking something up later, but the act of writing it down itself increases the strength of a memory on it’s own. (Especially if you can write it down from memory, a concept I learned a lot about from the awesome book Make It Stick).
Lastly, making a finished product out of work you’ve done is important, because a lot of the time that’s what makes it matter to the world. For example, a scientist that makes great discoveries but never publishes is equivalent to a monk that lives their whole life isolated in the mountains. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it just has a different effect on the world. So if you’ve learned something, sharing it through writing makes it useful to other people (which other people might often just be yourself in the future).
Writing goals for the blog
There’s a few things I’d like to realify that I envision going in this blog. Firstly, it would be nice to just have an outlet for putting thoughts in writing and not having disappear in my computer somewhere. But in addition, I’ve got multiple projects that I’d like to share in a slightly formal way.
Neuroscience and Machine Learning
I’m a neuroscientist by education and am teaching myself about machine learning research as well. I’m often working on hobby projects that are very fun, teach me a lot, and hopefully lead to interesting findings about the world, even if the findings are small. I plan on making short reports of this work here. For my ML projects, it might be the best place to share and document the things I’ve learned and what I’m thinking about. For neuroscience, it’ll be a good place to share big-picture (and just some fun) ideas that aren’t really appropriate for standard publications.
Endurance Sports
I’m a runner and am constantly trying to improve both my running fitness and my knowledge of how exercise physiology and training work. I’m an avid consumer of books and podcasts about these topics, and am at a point now where I know a lot of the basics, but need some more structure to further my knowledge. Enter the blog. I hope to include two kinds of posts here about endurance sports: 1) journal posts about my own training, hopefully with some quantitative data!, and 2) posts about topics in exercise physiology as a way to formalize my knowledge.
Paper Reviews
Reading scientific papers is so important to a rich and fulfilled experience as a scientist. But then it’s so easy to read (or skim) a a paper and completely forget about it. I read a nice blog post about the benefits of reading many papers and writing about them, and couldn’t agree with it more. So here’s to me documenting my readings through this blog.
Recipes!!!
My partner and I love to cook, but all to often we make things that taste excellent and then their recipes disappear. Time to change that. Goal: Everytime we make something that I may want to have again, it goes in the blog.
Organizational structure
As of writing this, I only have two introductory posts in the blog, so the “blog” page is just a single page listing those two posts. However, since I’ve got plans to post things here on a few different topics, I imagine I’ll start dividing the blog into sublogs, each with their own header. That’s just engineering, of course, but my motto here is that the blog is a work in progress, just like me, so updates and restructures are probably going to be a perpetual theme. In addition, I’ll try to be organized about adding tags to blog posts that associate each post with certain tags. Hopefully I can build some nice features that make it possible to show a list of posts by topic or by tag. But that’s for another day.