Essays

The biggest problem today [in our economic situation] is that nobody really knows what the value of anything is. Kermit Johnson (Why yes, Dad, I do listen!)

The New York Times has a piece up highlighting some of the fundamental flaws in the cancer research grant system. In short, they find that it tends to fund unambitious, incremental research proposals that are unlikely to fail, yet also unlikely to result in significant progress […]

Historically, there have been three ways to make progress within a scientific paradigm: Solve an outstanding mystery; Gather and publishing new data; Construct a new tool. Gathering and publishing new data has constituted, and will constitute for the forseeable future, the […]

Exponential advances in gene sequencing technology have produced an embarrassment of riches: we're now able to almost trivially sequence an organism's DNA, yet sifting meaning from these genomes is still an incredibly labor intensive and haphazard task. For instance, consider […]

One of the greatest insights of modern biology is the Tree of Life metaphor that all organisms share common ancestors if we go back far enough, and that we can understand a great deal about an organism based on which evolutionary forks it and its ancestors have taken. This has […]

Last summer I wrote about a potential link between high fructose corn syrup and some of the malaise of modern society. Here's a more general argument which I suspect is significantly true for how and why things like HFCS are likely bad for us. I believe in the next ten years […]

According to the U.S. National Debt Clock, our government is currently 9.371 trillion dollars in debt. Just how much money this is is actually pretty interesting. I emailed Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) for a rough estimate of how much (at current prices) it would take to […]

John Hawks, summarizing a recent study on the state of our science education: We're entering an age in which health decisions will be made based on genetic information when everyone may know their own gene sequences if they want to. New diseases are emerging, new crops are being […]

A couple months ago I transcribed Lessig's announcement of the Change Congress movement since then, it's just been sitting on my hard drive. So in the spirit of spring cleaning and making good things more searchable, here's the full text of the announcement. Lessig Launches beta […]

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, on working at Google: And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world's smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. I think it's a complicated situation, but I have […]