Marine biologist Dr. Steven Haddock joins the show to share the alien, glowing, and transparent wonders of the deep ocean. We discuss his beautiful new book, The Radiant Sea, and explore the complex engineering and high-sensitivity optics required to capture living deep-sea creatures. Steve walks us through the evolutionary logic of biological light, how vantablack organisms trap photons in the dark, the horizontal sun-compass navigation of jellyfish blooms, and what it's like to play games underwater with giant Pacific octopuses and jumbo squids.

Dr. Steven Haddock is a Senior Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and an adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz.

• Bioluminescence in the deep sea: How and why do animals create their own light? Steven Haddock explains the diverse and striking functions of light emission in the ocean's twilight zone. (So many pretty pictures!)

• Mysteries of the Deep with Dr. Steve Haddock — Bioluminescence! Long-form lecture on the physics and evolutionary biology of bioluminescence.

• Live Blackwater Diving Q&A with MBARI and Aquarium Scientists! | Into The Deep Q&A with scientists about diving in the middle of the ocean at night.

• Rarely Encountered Seven-Arm Octopus in Monterey Bay: Footage captured by Steve Haddock and MBARI's Biooptics team shows an octopus with a jelly snack.

Steve's Books:

• The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World by Steven Haddock and Sönke Johnsen

• Practical Computing for Biologists by Steven Haddock and Casey Dunn

Scientific & Marine Mentions:

• Steven Haddock's Wikipedia Page

• Steven's MBARI home page. His lab is the Biodiversity and Biooptics Lab

• Electric Disco Clams Exist—Watch Them Light Up This Coral Reef | National Geographic

• Disco Snails (Official Video) - Music

• Jelly-like Siphonophores Astound with Breathtaking Beauty: A close-up collection of the incredibly complex, colonial siphonophores that Steve mentioned, showing off their bizarre structures and flowing shapes in the pitch black.

• How the Disco Clam Uses Light to Fight Super-Strong Predators: See the "electric" flashing effects inside the disco clam's mantle up close, alongside an explanation of how their silica spheres scatter ambient light to startle predators.

• Absurd Creatures: Comb Jellies Are Ready to Rave – A fun, fast-paced video exploring the "Skittles" rainbow iridescence caused by the moving rows of cilia on ctenophores under white submersible lights.

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Tyler Hoffman returns to the show to discuss diagnostics and observability data in embedded systems. We catch up on his life after startup acquisition, explore the hows and whys of keeping product data separate from operational data, and consider the realities of fleet management at scale.

Tyler is the co-founder of Memfault. Memfault was acquired by Nordic Semiconductor about a year ago. While Nordic has nRF Cloud as a smaller scale solution for Nordic devices (~100 devices), Memfault will continue to maintain support for non-Nordic platforms as well.

During the discussion, Tyler advocates for a "device-in-control" philosophy, emphasizing that edge devices should retain the intelligence to manage their own firmware updates and telemetry. We also discuss the practical constraints of remote fleet debugging, outlining why tools built for high-bandwidth web infrastructure will quickly bankrupt an IoT company, and identifying exactly when a project is too low-bandwidth, or too small, to justify an external observability platform.

Christopher shares his recent experiences with Memfault which leads to a discussion of chunks, flash memory buffers and MDS. The Memfault Diagnostic Service (MDS) is a standardized way for BLE devices to send the chunk payloads to a gateway device (mobile phone) which can then forward the data to the Memfault cloud.

If you want a deep dive into the reasoning around starting Memfault, Tyler was on Embedded.fm episodes 390: Irresponsible At the Time and 395: I Can No Longer Play Ping Pong.

Reaching back into the archives, Elecia, Tyler, and Phillip Johnston were on the Memfault Coredump Sessions podcast, a special crosspost with Embedded.fm, episode 451: From Concept to Launch

You can also find technical deep dives on Memfault's Interrupt blog.

"What we do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Dr. Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.

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