kurżita (2025-W10)
created on Mar 6 2025Wanna start curating some of my favourite discoveries each week—things I’ve read, watched, listened to—into (hopefully) weekly roundups.
In case you’re curious, ‘kurżita’ is the Maltese word for ‘curiosity’.
Supersonic lunar soil
Firefly Aerospace successfully landed their Blue Ghost lander on the moon on March 2, 2025.
If you skip to 1m18s in the footage below, as the lander is touching down, you’ll see what looks like a cloud of dust settling. Though, it seems, that without an atmosphere to slow them down and weaker gravity, the dust being blasted by the rocket engines is racing away from the lander at incredibly fast speeds, and not actually settling back down to the ground.
If you pay attention (lower left corner at ~1m28s) you’ll even see a seemingly pretty big rock being flung into the distance. Thought this was pretty neat to watch.
When you see that “cloud” seeming to “settle” fast, realize it isn’t a cloud and it isn’t settling. It is a supersonic sandblasting spray flying ballistically away from the camera at 2-3 kilometers per second, crossing the horizon and impacting many kilometers across the Moon. https://t.co/yXkQi5QtRT
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) March 4, 2025
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
On a friend’s recommendation, I gobbled up James Gleick’s biography on Feynman, ‘Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman’. Out of all the Feynman-related books I’ve read, I felt that Gleick’s did a wonderful job of portraying Feynman’s life and relationships with those around him, and his contributions to quantum electrodynamics and the various other fields.
If there’s one take-away from this book, it’s that wilful ignorance of existing methods and models can make room for original approaches to problems.
Neurons
Dmitri Chklovskii and colleagues proposed the ‘Direct Data-Driven Controller (DD-DC) theory of neurons’, suggesting that neurons might function as feedback controllers, actively influencing their future inputs, thereby steering the environment towards desired states, rather than solely predicting inputs.
This work seemed intriguing as it builds upon neural theories I’ve been interested in, like predictive coding and Friston’s ‘Free Energy Principle’, while avoiding implicit models of the environment and the things being predicted. It also seemingly explains various neural phenomena, including the switch between potentiation and depression in spike-time-dependent plasticity, and the inherent stochasticity of neural signals.
Read The neuron as a direct data-driven controller, watch a lecture Dmitri gave for the Charles F Stevens Conference 2023 Simons Foundation and New York University, or listen to Dmitri on the Brain Inspired’ podcast, episode BI 205 Dmitri Chklovskii: Neurons Are Smarter Than You Think.
Annual reflections on our intuition about the brain
“How does the brain work and how can we understand it? To view this big question from a broad perspective, I’m reporting some ideas about the brain that marked me most during the past twelve months and that, on the other hand, do not overlap with my own research focus.”
Since 2018, Peter Rupprecht has been publishing an annual report on his intuition about the brain. Read their Annual report of my intuition about the brain (2024).
I found it particularly interesting and useful as I prepare to start my PhD in the neurosciences, making me reflect on things like how to approach scientific research, the assumptions and principles behind different neural theories, and neurons as the fundamental unit of computation.
note to self: might be a good idea for me to write frequent reports on how my views of neuronal computation develop during my Phd.
Max Cooper - On Being
If you haven’t heard of Max Cooper, he’s an English electronic music producer who’s got a catalogue of emotional, soundscapey melodic music. The visualisations he works and collaborates on are mesmerising.
If he’s on tour nearby I’d highly recommend going to his show. Him and his team orchestrate a beautiful audio/visual experience. I was lucky enough to see him play SEME at The Barbican in March 2024.
Compilation of Maltese electronic music
Released in 2021, Malta’s Wirebox Records curated and released a compilation of electronic music produced by Maltese artists, titled ‘TEKNOLOGIJA - Vol. 1’.