If I had to put together a list of the 7 Wonders of the Internet, archive.org would most certainly be on it. It’s the website of a non-profit organization which runs a huge server farm that tirelessly crawls the internet […]
Michael Edward Johnson
Posts by Michael Edward Johnson
Quote: on the economic situation
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!)
Our broken grant system
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 […]
Now leaving Era of the Mystery. All aboard for Era of the Tool.
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, […]
Brainstorm: Logarithmic Evolution Distance
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 the […]
Brainstorm: An alternative to the tree of life
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 […]
How processed foods, pesticides, and pollution are bad for us (aka, the “twinkies are like smallpox blankets” hypothesis)
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 […]
Our National Debt: 1/200th of everything in the world
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 […]
Quote: 13.7 hours of education
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 […]
Transcipt of Lessig’s Change Congress Announcement
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 […]