Birds know quantum better than me

research weeknote 2024/01/07

First research week recap of the year! This week I want to talk about my big picture for projects this year, then zoom in to talk about what I did, what I read and my takeaways (simple format inspired by Trang).

Big picture 2024

I enjoy thinking big picture so starting the year by putting my wishes down into elbaorations and timelines felt very satisfying and exciting.

You can keep me accountable! I will update you what I learn and experience along the way with you.

Choosing a program

The main timeline of the year is structured around the PhD application and related fellowships. I am in the process of keeping in touch with mentors who can help me criticize my application, suggest labs, and reach out to potential lab advisors to find a match.

Cell morphogenesis

My largest time commitment is to the current lab project surrounding the cytoskeleton-adhesion mechanism.

My biggest problem seems to be not executing and problem-solving the tasks at hand efficiently enough. That means the ideas and questions don’t get addressed.

Information swarming

My biggest interest would be to bring in my digestion and ideas to a young field that is easygoing to talk to and make this a discourse that also involves head down butt in chair kind of coding work.

Work from what I have

On a more meta level I strategized about how to go about these wishes. Besides coming up with goal states, I also faced the obstacles that have come my way in the past years surrounding these goals.

What I did this week

Chat with a comrade

I had a fun chat with my friend S this week. S is a friend who shares my interest in curiosity-driven science and the sustainable material lifecycle. Her approach is through chemistry and material engineering with a background in wildlife photography and a self-driven mindset. My approach is through modeling and a rhizome-like dispersion of interest and connections. As always I felt energized from a spontaneous texting hurricane with her.

She mentioned a game she is making up with her friend in which everything that is alive have spirits, not just humans. I shared with her the songs and stories that I heard from old people this summer, about people dying to become birds, and children lying to dungbeetles. Those songs have cultural origins.

That made me think about how I have little lived experience with real-world flocks of birds and fish, even though I am studying them through simulations. I wondered who in my network have more experiential knowledge about fish. Shuyi mentioned that the guide on a wildlife sighting trip could mimic bird calls and the birds respond. My friend Kyra is very good at catching fish and other creatures in the streams since she was little. I would like to consult her concrete knowledge about how they behave.

Shuyi and I thought about how ultimately what I want to know is what it really is like to be one of the fish in the shoal. Shuyi mentioned that she read a study about how a pair of magnetic proteins in a bird's eye triangulate the magnetic field. Since she is currently studying and working on a quantum chemistry project she was impressed by how the birds know quantum by instinct whereas she find the concepts quite foreign to internalize initially.

We also shared the buffet-like experience of attending conference or reading papers. The novelty satiates psychological hunger (before it becomes stuffing). For example, we are both interested in how fundamental research on material and ecological properties of biological matter can be useful for more sustainable manufacturing systems. She attended a talk from Prof. Markus Buehler’s lab for modeling and manufacturing of materials. They have compiled a database of biomaterials, their associated functions and processes to make them. My questions remaining about this direction is how does the net measures of sustainability add up for these materials, since just being synthesized from a natural thing doesn’t mean it’s better fitted into nature.

What I read this week

Visualizing Complexity workshop, Vienna

Last month there was a workshop that gathered complexity researchers and graphic designers / data visualization people in a workshop to share their works and collaborate briefly. I listened to the podcast of the workshop organizer. There were two things that interested me.

First the organizer Shu said that as she consult for more labs she sees the cliches in complexity studies. most studies have a time series plot that shows some kind of phase transition, or a bar graph that shows some kind of exponential distribution. Given the similar data type from experiments, she has also box cutter visualizations to communicate them. She felt stuck and wanted to get more ideas by bringing together different geographies and expertise. If the designers could understand the paper, data, model more, and the researcher gets inspired about more lines of inquiry or ways of representing and explaining their findings, then the hope is something nice.

I also found Dirk Brockmann’s commitment to making lengthy explanations of interactive simulations very nice. In static pdf papers the models are most often depicted with equations and then results. But in his complexity explainers, the reader can easily tune the parameters and see what happens.

I would want to make a thoughtful visualization for the flocking paper we are working on currently. I would like to read more from and get feedback by people who think about it a lot such as Shu.

Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.

This is a workshop paper that reviews theories and studies around how groups of human organize and make decisions. They propose to think of social phenomenon as a group adapting its network structure and integration strategy (how individual transforms social information into their own belief or behavior) to its environment or problem.

I have been wanting to understand what happened with COVID lockdown in China and what could have been done differently that considered the people. I found the framework too abstract to understand the nuances of COVID policy obedience, or rather I had difficulty generating new insights by applying this framework.

When I discussed this with my friends M Z E, there is some interesting insights. First is that the academic lens does not always provide an answer. Especially, one framework or model cannot explain everything usefully. Furthermore, the academic lens doesn’t help with finding new case studies and possibilities beyond the common characterized ones. What I learned most of all was that I am interested to learn more about how people achieve their goals together in the face of many structural problems.

Takeaways

Research can be like eating, it’s another human activity. It can be for many purposes, fun or necessary. To ask a question then get an answer through experimenting, reading or discussing is like getting a craving fulfilled. Getting an unsupported conclusion is like a not quite filling meal. To delay on trying for the core problem is to starve. To hear new ideas and broad horizons is to come to a harvest.

I benefit from having the urgency and time blcok to read a paper and annotate the figure for what the experiment and the answer is & how I respond to them They inspire discussions and new observations. I would like to do it more frequently.