Earlier this summer a pediatrician friend of mine was asking about ideas for health care reform since Olympia Snowe was going to stop by her hospital and talk with the doctors there. Unfortunately Snowe cut her visit short, but this […]
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Quote: China on China
Via a NY Times article on the US-China financial relationship: Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who ushered in its market reforms starting in the late 1970s, famously gave his country the following advice: “Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with […]
On writing, and the beauty of archive.org
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]