Scientific Credit

It looks like black holes are rather unremarkable in appearance (much more remarkable in context), but the hole you see in the center is about the size of our solar system.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the first ever picture taken of a black hole here it is. The image was assembled five days ago using data from a global telescope array that collected around 5 petabytes of data (1 million gigabytes) which was then compiled using this vast amount of data to give you the image you see here, now on my blog.

But I haven’t come here to discuss the implications of the black hole or the methods used to give us this image of a collapsed star located 55 million light years away from the nearest Krispy Kreme. Rather, I want to talk a little more about the process of science and the way things work now.

Interesting Books List: The Weird Ones

I’ve been sharing this around a few places as people have been asking me about books on cultural and human evolution. @Bottlenecked_Y specifically asked for a list of books I’ve found influential (meaning aside from evolutionary stuff), so I went ahead and made one. The list is a work in progress and I’m still building it, but you can find it below:

Dropbox Book List

As you go through the list you might come across a few that stand out as bizarre, so I’ll go ahead and explain the weirdest ones here.

A Capuchin Called Wayne

It was 2014, and I was in Costa Rica for my first field experience with the Maderas Rainforest Conservancy

Advice for Incoming Graduate Students

I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning drinking coffee and trying to narrow down which graduate programs I am going to be applying to this fall. We all know this is a stressful process, even more so for me right now since I have to do it again. Leaving my previous graduate program was ultimately a good decision, although through my frustrations have me thinking about how I might have done things differently at the beginning if I knew going into graduate school what I know now.

I’m going to give new and incoming grad students, the people who are crazy enough and fortunate enough to have the ability to go to graduate school, some unsolicited advice. Feel free to take it or leave it, these are mostly just based on things I learned both the hard and easy ways.