May 2011
5 posts
2 tags
“In my one-day course, I show 3 rare books: a 1570 Euclid, a 1613 Galileo, and a...”
– “Whites gloves = Don’t touch,” Edward Tufte, 6 March 2004
1 tag
Language and spatial sense →
Lera Boroditsky (Professor of Psychology, Stanford) talks about the old “does language determine how we think” question on Edge. Conducting experiments with the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal people in northern Australia, she finds some remarkable things.
The Kuuk Thaayorre have an extraordinary sense of space. In their language, they speak not of turning left, right, ahead, or back,...
Best WiFi Passwords for Coffeeshops
Number 1: hardtospell
Number 2: noneofyourbusiness
Number 3: whywouldwetellyou
Number 4: itshiddenunderthesink
March 2011
5 posts
“The patients loved us for what we told them, not for what we could do for them.”
– —Charles Janeway, Jr.
How to 'deep link' a YouTube video (for Gin!)
A useful trick for YouTube nerds: Deep linking. A weird name for a simple idea: Linking to a specific time point in a YouTube video. Here’s how it works.
Say you are watching the YouTube video where David Letterman is interviewing Borat Sagdiyev. You see that the address is,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQScRuZj9s
Now say you want to show your friend the part where Borat high fives...
“Formerly the self-reliant man looked inside himself for strength to accept the...”
– The American Virtue – a reading list of classics on self-reliance — In Character, A Journal of Everyday Virtues by the John Templeton Foundation
February 2011
7 posts
“The act of creation is maybe the most frictive thing going. Using the stuff is...”
– —Devin Friedman
An undergraduate tries a hard and unfamiliar computer course. | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2011
“Writing is easy. Just put a piece of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.”
– —Thomas Wolfe
Yale expert Fred Shapiro’s pick of choice Harvard quotations | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2011
“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study...”
– —John Adams, May 1780
Yale expert Fred Shapiro’s pick of choice Harvard quotations | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2011
“Rituals are about transformation, the crossing of a threshold, and in the case...”
– —Abraham Verghese
From Treat the patient, not the CT scan in the NYT
A text exchange
Me: Pick up your phone
Paul: I'm at the collegiate church convention
Me: Oh right. Cool. Have fun. Find God. Tell him I need my calculator back.
Paul: Will do
“It’s a man’s right to love women with ecstatic fish heads.”
– —Salvador Dali
Amazon.com: Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights (9780385529693): Jessica Kerwin Jenkins: Books
January 2011
3 posts
December 2010
10 posts
1 tag
1 tag
The BioBricks Foundation →
Creating and distributing the modules of life.
2 tags
Leaving Mozilla, Starting Massive Health « Aza on... →
Anyone that’s been sick, overweight, or had to deal with a doctor knows that health is a field in dire need of humane design.
Mozilla’s creative director on his new startup, Massive Health.
2 tags
“What’s really interesting is that this locksmith was penalized for getting...”
– Dan Ariely » Blog Archive Locksmiths «
“In 2006, a team of Endy’s undergraduate students used BioBrick parts to...”
– Synthetic biology and evolution : The New Yorker
“Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to God, but...”
– Synthetic biology and evolution : The New Yorker
“It is only a matter of time before domesticated biotechnology presents us with...”
Synthetic biology and evolution : The New Yorker →
A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with hair samples from two woolly mammoths—one of them sixty thousand years old and the other eighteen thousand—has tentatively figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant’s egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. “There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly...
““Sound design is what wakes me up in the mornings,” said Mr....”
“To listen to enough Radiolab is to see that scientists haven’t simply...”
November 2010
6 posts
“You are welcome in the lab, but be certain that there is no theory in biology...”
2 tags
The geometric mean is a nice guy. →
The nice thing about the geometric mean is that it offers a good measure of central tendency for high and low extremes. Say you are trying to calculate something which involves the height of some very large cliff. You guess that the cliff is at most 100,000 feet and at the least 10,000 feet.
You could take the arithmetic mean:
( 100,000 + 10,000 ) divided by 2 = 55,000 feet
But notice that...
Watchjetting.mpg (video/mpeg Object)
October 2010
25 posts
“Physicians have worked long and hard to earn the right to be stupid.”
– — A doctor’s doctor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time →
On February 13, 2009, at exactly 23:31:30 (UTC) the decimal representation of Unix time was equal to 1234567890. Parties and other celebrations were held around the world, among various technical subcultures, to celebrate the 1234567890 day.
“He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine...”
– Ibid.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science →
We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There...
“Sprawled around a large table were Tatsioni and eight other youngish Greek...”
– http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269
“It’s somewhat terrifying,” writes a 25-year-old named Jennifer, “to think about...”
– Limiting your options can be a good thing. Don’t be too good at too many things, kids. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=all
“You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.”
Graph paper pinball →
Fun enough to post.
“In another experiment, she showed that merely inverting an eye chart so that the...”
– http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/09/the-mindfulness-chronicles?page=0,4