ALT A scientist works at his desk and another asks him, "Why is your desk so messy?" He replies, "I prefer to think of it as my shrine to failed ideas."

ALT A Venn diagram of "Science Writing" and "The word 'could'". The intersection is "Tenuous 'potential applications of this research'".

ALT A senior and junior scientist look up at the mass which is "The Literature". The junior scientist says, "So much has already been done..." while the senior one says, "So many gaps to fill!"

ALT A graph of "Potential to get nerd-sniped" versus "Time in math". The curve increases more and more quickly over time.

ALT A graph of "Tabs open" vs. "Time". The first curve gradually increases and then decreases, indicating "Successful learning". The second curve increases as well at first, but then suddenly drops off when the person gives up.

ALT A graph of "Comfort with a subject" versus "Time". The graph is linearly increasing way past the point of one's competence at the final exam. At a later point, there's an annotation: "Wow, I wish I was this good in the class!"

ALT A graph of "Time spent volunteering" versus "Feeling like you're part of a community". The graph steadily increases.

ALT Left panel (Good Writing): A person opens a package with an idea that fills the entire box. Right panel (Bad Writing): A person holds up a very small idea in a big box with plenty of filler packaging. They say, "This is it?"

ALT A graph of "Memory" versus "Time". The baseline curve (solid line) is just a smooth decay over time. The "Spaced repetition" curve follows the same decay shape, but periodically "resets" the memory to the maximal value and then decays more slowly. "The educator's dream" curve is dot-dashed and never decays.

ALT A graph of "Performance" over "Time". The "Lone wolves" trajectory increases at first, then plateaus. But the "Those in community" trajectory steadily increases, and even accelerates.

ALT Different levels of partitioning skills for readers. Level one: A fiction and a non-fiction book. Level two: Two fiction books. Level three: Two fiction books in the same genre. Level four: Two fantasy books.

ALT A graph showing two quantities over time. "What I know" linearly increases with time, while "What I don't know" increases even faster. The gap is "What I notice".

ALT A graph of "Complexity of notation" over "Time". At first, the complexity increases as you're learning a new topic. But then it decreases as you learn how to write equations in a simpler way.

ALT A graph of "Size of reading list" over "Time". The size steadily increases until the person declares "reading list bankruptcy" and purges the list.

ALT Someone asks their friend, "So, what's next after your PhD?" A thought bubble for the graduate student shows a timeline between now and graduation, with a bunch of question marks after graduation.

ALT A graph of "Information retained" versus "Time in presentation". The first (solid) curve is an increasing linear function (What you hope for). The second (dashed) increases at early times, but then goes down as time goes on (What happens).

ALT Left panel (Writing with an outline): The writer makes clickety-clack sounds as they type happily away at a laptop and says, "Wow, a thousand words in an hour!" Right panel (Writing without an outline): The writer scratches their chin and is not writing anything.

ALT A graph of "Desire to distract oneself" versus "Time in focus mode". The curve initially skyrockets, but the desire for distraction then comes down and approaches zero as one stays focused.

ALT Representing the boundary of "X" versus "Not X" with an edge. As one zooms in, the edge becomes more and more twisting and ragged.

ALT A distillery where the input is a vat full of "blood, sweat, tears, bugs, dead-ends, confusion, and time." The distillation process produces just a little liquid: a paper.