GenRAIT goes to PAG 30
Furthering the life science data revolution in plant and animal genomicsRazib Khan, Taylor Capito, and Santanu Das at PAG 30During the second week of January 2023, the GenRAIT leadership team attended the Plant & Animal Genome Conference in San Die…
Moving up the “technology” category
Believe it or not, my Substack is now #8 for paid newsletters in the “Technology” category. Substack allows you to put in three categories. I selected Genetics, History, and Technology. […]
Why Vox/Recode was telling you COVID-19 was less dangerous than the flu (1 month ago): Explained
I recently took to Facebook to explain why my family and I are self-quarantining. It’s not just like the flu. But many people disagree. Many, though not all, are “MAGA-people.” Middle-American types who trust Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh. Where are they getting their talking points? Some of it is from Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. […]
Dime-Store Genomics
Genetic testing will soon be cheap, routine, and ubiquitous.
The reign of {{{Sundar Pichai}}}
Where Will Sundar Pichai Take Google?: There were louder executives at Google. There were brainier ones. There were more aggressive ones and those who were doubtlessly better at throwing a sharp elbow, too. And many more political ones — even if those who have been running one of the world’s most powerful companies continued to …
Why I am very bearish on Netflix
I’ve been a subscriber to Netflix for 15 years. It’s a small cost. There are months I go without watching anything. But it’s there. And that’s how I want it. That being said, I just want to put it on the record (again) that I’m bearish on the future of Netflix. The proximate reason is […]
The masses hitting the internet
Back in the mid-90s people on the newsgroups and message boards we would complain about people with AOL addresses. More recently, I think one reason Twitter is a problem today is that so many people are on the platform, and that means more stupid people are on the platform. Another aspect I’ve noticed is the …
The republic of information
The above figure is from a blog post, What Did Gutenberg’s Printing Press Actually Change? In it, the author links to a paper, New Media and Competition: Printing and Europe’s Transformation after Gutenberg. What you see above is that 200 pages in 1450 went from “weeks of daily wages to much less than one day […]
The year personal genomics got personal
The data for the above chart was assembled from press reports of various personal genomic companies with a public profile. So the values act as lower bounds. Additionally, the total numbers are from a comment in Genome Biology that I coauthored in the …
More Indians on the internet than Americans
The image is from a WSJ story: Why Tech Titans Are Betting on India, in 14 Charts.
Slack killed IRC? (sort of)
Interesting piece channeling some early internet nostalgia, Picking Up The Slack: Internet Relay Chat beat Slack to real-time chat by decades and helped define much of our early online culture, yet way more people use Slack. Why is that?. The article caught my attention because I use Slack at work, and have for a couple […]
How Craigslist stays at 1 by not moving on from the year 2000
In the open thread, I made a casual comment that I’ve become a bit more skeptical of market efficiencies lately. Remember, in the perfect market, the profit of the firms should converge upon zero. Is this to anyone’s benefit? Obviously, it is to the benefit of the consumer. But what happens in the long term […]
Why SpaceX matters
Unless you were sleeping under a rock today you saw what SpaceX did. I don’t really follow Musk closely. My friends in Silicon Valley speak highly of him. He shares an interest in some of the same topics I do (he’s a fan of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence). But in general on an analytical level I […]
The rapid fading of information
If you’ve used Storify in the past, it’s time to save your stories before they shut down in May https://t.co/KQfOPZGhgL — Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) January 28, 2018 In Robert Heinlein’s uneven late work Friday the mentor of the protagonist mentions that because of a possible collapse of technological civilization he maintains a collection of paper […]
The iPhone killed commenting
Back when this domain received about 15 or 20 percent of the traffic it now receives there were many more commenters. What happened? One of the reasons the Sepia Mutiny weblog was shutdown was that as the commentariat withered after 2007 there was less motivation to keep a community going (there was none). The explanation […]
Samsung Galaxy S8 is pretty good
One of the more convenient things with having a blog that has more than a few readers is that you can ask questions and get some answers. Recently I was figuring out whether I’d go full-Apple, and get an iPhone. I got a lot of feedback, but ultimately I decided to to be boring and get […]
Dodging the Apple Premium (still)
Because of what I have been provided by my employers over the last few years I’ve been working on a Macbook Pro. These are fine machines, but they have not converted me to being a convert to all things Apple. I have two machines with Ubuntu at home that I have no problem with using […]
Smartphones killed the fabulist
In The Wall Street Journal Nicholas Carr has a bizarre but unsurprising op-ed, How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds: Research suggests that as the brain grows dependent on phone technology, the intellect weakens. By the title, you can immediately pick out tells that should induce skepticism. “Research suggests” is usually indicating that the author has a […]
Google still wants to be Apple (sort of)
Google Is Buying HTC’s Smartphone Expertise for $1.1 Billion. This, after Google has already bought and sold Motorola. Remember when Microsoft bought part of Nokia? The problem is that Apple and Samsung are starting to create a duopoly. And though most phones run Android, iPhones are much more profitable. There’s a reason many companies develop […]
America’s age of animated emojis
A few days ago I watched the unveiling of Apple’s new iPhone(s). Honestly, I was a bit underwhelmed…and I probably will stick with a Samsung. Of course, I know that the original iPhone was panned, and it created a whole sector and a lifestyle. We’re a bit jaded. But this focus on lifestyle in the […]