sarah schenck

Director “The Invisible Extinction”- how our microbes make us human. Lover of meditation, art, science.

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Alan Alda’s Solution to Eroding Trust in Science: More Improv https://t.co/prWTVTYdkN

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Tracking Indian Communities : When the goddess bleeds… https://t.co/bCON9Un4JJ

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Engineering the gut microbiome to cure disease | 101 in 101 https://t.co/JcxBkNZ1Ur via @YouTube

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A mathematician at Bell Labs noticed that the scientists who won Nobel Prizes and the ones who never amounted to anything were equally smart, equally hardworking, and equally credentialed, and the only thing that separated them was a single question almost nobody is brave enough to ask themselves before they die.

His name was Richard Hamming.

He spent 30 years at Bell Labs, in the same building as John Tukey, Walter Brattain, and a long list of physicists who took home Nobel prizes for work they did down the hall from his office, including the legendary Claude Shannon.

His invention of error-correcting codes made modern computing possible. He has won the Turing Award. And all the while he was creating his own legacy he was secretly doing a study on the people around him.

The study was straightforward. 2 Teams. The legends and the lost. Same I.Q.s. Degrees same. Same desk hours. Same access to the world’s best resources.

And yet, at the end of 40 years in their careers, one group had changed entire fields, and the other group could not be remembered by their own colleagues five years after retirement. He wanted to discover what the actual difference was.

In March 1986, he stood before 200 researchers in a Bellcore auditorium and told them what he had seen.

He said it all came down to one question. And hardly anyone he ever met was willing to ask it directly.

He called it the Friday-afternoon ritual. He spent years blocking out his Friday afternoons and not doing anything productive with them every week. No experiments. No meetings. No deliverables.

He called it Great Thoughts Time. He sat down with a notebook and asked himself a couple of questions in order. What are the most relevant problems in my discipline? And why I am not working on either of them.”

Most weeks, the answer was the same, he said. For a week now he had marched confidently in a direction he did not think was the most important direction. He was a goer. He worked a bit. He was getting clean results that would publish in respected journals. (

And for five days straight he'd been lying to himself about whether any of it mattered.

The reason almost nobody does this ritual is because the honest answer is unbearable. The thing is that if you sit down on a Friday afternoon and say out loud that you are not working on the most important problem in your field, now you have to do something about it.

You have an immediate change in direction, or you have to keep lying to yourself every week from that point on. Most people choose the lie.

In the short term it’s cheaper, but over a career it’s more expensive.

Hamming took the ritual a step further in the Bell Labs cafeteria. He began approaching scientists he barely knew, asking them what they thought the most important problems in their field were.

A week later he would ask them why they had not worked on these problems. Eventually people wouldn't have lunch with him. “I had to keep finding new tables,” he said.

Nobody had a good answer for that, and being around someone who kept asking it made every meal feel like a performance review.

The line that broke me is the line that most people skim over in the transcript. His words: If you do not work on an important problem you are unlikely to do important work.

That’s not motivational line. It is a rational one. You cannot make a great result from a problem that does not matter. Input restricts the output. The choice of the problem is the ceiling of the career.

The transcript has been freely available on the internet for almost 40 years. Stripe Press published the complete lectures as a book. Naval Ravikant quotes it all the time. It’s still given out to new hires at every serious engineering lab in Silicon Valley.

Most people will not run the ritual this Friday. They will be busy. They always are.

[AilaunchX @Ai_Tech_tool]

Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.

[Rohit @ai_rohitt]

🚨 Anthropic just showed a 27-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Sulekha Tripathi @sulekhat95]

INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX TONIGHT.

This 60-minute Cambridge lecture by Demis Hassabis will teach you more about the future of AI than most people will learn in the next 5 years.

Bookmark it and give it an hour, no matter what.

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Study reveals promising diet for managing Crohn’s disease | Stanford Report https://t.co/JwrhS9VbPi

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

.@StanfordMed Supplements can be harmful. If you do use supplements, make sure they are vetted by independent groups, such as US Pharmacopeia, NSF, or Consumer Lab. https://t.co/wHpJWW4WtY

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

super useful and important overview of postive changes re: menopause in med school curricula etc. From @katiecouric What's Next for Menopause Legislation in Your State? https://t.co/PBVs7tlg30 #kcm

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

For those of us without the ability to convert to induction stoves, a regular electric stove still might make more sense - from a health perspective: https://t.co/3Lg1C3Mi39

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Perhaps shifts in gene expression during brain evolution relate to neurodevelopmental variation including autism and schizophrenia: https://t.co/tcMlJpq2sW

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

To Restore Your Gut Health, a Healthy Diet Matters Most https://t.co/EKc6Uj2jJx via @SimonsFdn @InvisibleExtDoc

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Can You Believe the Documentary You’re Watching? https://t.co/P8JZLPV8VE via @NYTimes

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Personalized pre-surgery coaching boosts immunity, cuts complications | Stanford Report https://t.co/ooXvWIYDc1

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Medications change our gut microbiome in predictable ways | Stanford Report https://t.co/jDGLHupGWo

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

“The replacement fertility rate is 2.1 births per female for most developed countries (in the United Kingdom, for example), but can be as high as 3.5 in undeveloped countries because of higher mortality rates, especially child mortality.”-2023 data from Population Research Review

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

Yummy ways to add pulses (ie beans, peas, lentils)and please your microbiome! @InvisibleExtDoc Want to eat healthier? Add half a cup of this food to your daily diet. https://t.co/luJ4XXdl05

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

About a Poem: Pico Iyer on a haiku by Kobayashi Issa https://t.co/cAeBiGs0eB

[sarah schenck @sarahspectacle]

super super super cool! excellence in data design - Flow Map of Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia https://t.co/tBgmAENlSr #waterloo200