Do you set goals for the heck of it?
Last November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, a month long writing frenzy with the sole goal of writing 50,000 words (“quantity, not quality”). Not on...
Author: charlie
Ego play: My Erdős–Bacon number is 7, sort of
Paul Erdős was the most prolific publisher of mathematics papers (more than Euler). Much like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, mathematicians have an number to conne...
Brief commentary on App.net, the new social network “that aspires beyond chat and ads”
I’ve been meaning to comment on App.net, a new for-fee social networking service. To me, it seems that App.net is trying to build an alternative social we...
Ideas are not unique, no matter how far-fetched – a personal story
Last Christmas-time, I was driving to go get my parents (they live a few states away) and was listening to a Science Friday about Mars. The guest was an advocat...
Saturday morning thoughts on the evolutionary history of IBD in Eastern European Jews
Of course, as is usual with me on the weekend, I started reading all my open tabs in my browser. And the first one I read was a paper where they crossed two pur...
Mixing meaning into disease research – Treato
I wasn’t so sure how to describe Treato. It’s really interesting – mixing semantic analysis, social media, medical records, and analysis ̵...
Big Data, healthcare, devices, and quantified self
When I was at SXSW, I spent most of my time at either Big Data or Healthcare sessions. The interesting thing is that the Big Data sessions always devolved to ta...
Finally got around to reading Sterling’s “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”
“That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters. When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with t...
We interrupt our usual program …… Down With Everything
Thomas Friedman recently wrote about a discussion he had with Frank Fukyama on the two-volume opus Fukyama is working on “The Origins of Political Order.&...
Repeated evolution in sticklebacks, and adjacent possibles
“Researchers have documented repeated evolution in other organisms, but the sticklebacks are unique because the freshwater transition has occurred so many...