QOTD

The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

– from “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Neal Stephenson

Announcing BioBits

Lately, I’ve been struggling with the fact that I’ve been writing for two different audiences on my weblog. The first group consists of my family, friends, and people that have similar tastes in politics and culture. The second group are fellow scientists and techies who may be interested in what I’ve been up to in lab, or what new bioinformatics tools I’ve been using.

In the interest of pleasing both audiences and allowing you to more easily sort the wheat from the chaff, I’m moving my science writing to chrisamiller.com/science while maintaining my personal blog right here. I want to emphasize that this isn’t about separating my personal and professional lives, as that’s a near impossibility in this age of the internet. Rather, it’s about offering focused content to just the people that want to hear it.

I’m also making a resolution to post on a near-daily basis over there, to get that site off on the right foot. Some days it may just be a code snippet, or a good quotation, but I’ll try to keep the content flowing with some more meaty posts about bioinformatics, article reviews, and thoughts about scientific culture.

Linkdump for January 28th through February 4th

On Conservatives and taxes

You see, a conservative is someone who would rather pay $5,000 for police and fire protection that’s only for paying customers than $2,000 for police and fire protection that helps everyone, even people who didn’t pay anything, even if the quality of service is exactly the same in both cases.

See also health care reform, school vouchers, attempts to mitigate the housing crisis (“We can’t do something that helps all of us! Someone might get something they didn’t deserve!”)

via straight on Mefi

Linkdump for January 12th through January 28th

Importing iTunes Ratings into Guaydeque

Guaydeque is a nice lightweight music player for linux that supports smart playlists. I wrote a little ruby script to gather all of my ratings from my iTunes database and import them into Guayadeque, so that I can use some of my advanced filters on songs. At some point I’ll probably extend it to import other metadata (last played, date added, etc), but this is a functional first stab at it.

You can download it on Github: iTunes-to-Guayadeque

Linkdump for December 31st through January 5th

My Year of Travel

Cities I’ve spent at least one night in this year:

  1. Houston
  2. Galveston
  3. Los Angeles
  4. San Francisco
  5. St. Louis
  6. Rocky Mount, MO
  7. Munich
  8. Berlin
  9. Paris
  10. London
  11. Dublin
  12. Chicago
  13. Cold Spring Harbor, NY

Next year should be a little less hectic.

Linkdump for December 15th through December 28th

QOTD

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

– Bertrand Russell

Linkdump for December 4th through December 5th

Linkdump for November 20th through December 4th

Paying for Pujols

A recent Post-Dispatch article asks the looming question: How much should the Cardinals pay to keep Albert Pujols a Cardinal for life?

The writers hem and haw about equivalent players, precedents, and what the team can afford, but I think this guy nailed it in the comments section:

You offer him Chesterfield. All of it.

If he balks at that, give him Ladue, with an option for Town & Country.

Bwaaahaha!

A fed-up student asks the physics prof who’s going over kinetics in protracted detail, what good is all this? What will I ever use this for? To which the professor, not even looking up from where he’s writing on the board, says “This stuff saves lives.”

The student balks for a second and then gets belligerent, demanding to know how first-year physics saves lives. The professor doesn’t even turn around, saying “it keeps idiots like you out of med school.”

via

Linkdump for November 13th through November 19th

The Ripple Effect

On AskMe, someone posted about their struggle to find meaning in life after deciding that atheism was for them:

I realize that, without “something behind everything”, it doesn’t matter one iota (speaking from a selfish perspective here) whether I build great things or just sit on my couch and rot, whether I live to be 100 or die tomorrow. It will matter to some, but not to many, and not for long.

I decided to respond:

Surely, you’ve known someone who has changed your life immeasurably for the better. This may be your parents, the guy who pulled you from that burning car, or the teacher who encouranged you to make use of your talents. I bet you wouldn’t say that their contribution meant nothing.

I promise that I’m not getting all hippie on you here, but both the love and hate you express tends to propagate through society, starting with the people you interact with every day. No, really – there has been behavioral research showing that this phenomenon exists.

Furthermore, your life choices, like quitting smoking, or losing weight make it more more likely that your peers will do the same.

As James Fowler puts it (as quoted in the above link):

“Everyone always tells me that this research is so depressing and that it means we don’t have free will. But I think they’re forgetting to look at the flipside. Because of social networks, your actions aren’t just having an impact on what you do, or on what your friends do, but on thousands of other people too. So if I go home and I make an effort to be in a good mood, I’m not just making my wife happy, or my children happy. I’m also making the friends of my children happy. My choices have a ripple effect.”

Now go out and start some ripples.

Linkdump for November 10th through November 13th

Meta

1) I fixed the linkdump script again, so updates should be trickling in every few days, instead of a month at a time (as you see below).

2) I’ve updated my landing page to a design I’m much happier with. If you’re using IE, you’ll see the page sans rounded corners and may encounter other quirks. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Get a real browser that supports web standards, like Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.

Linkdump for September 24th through November 4th

Insta-uploads

Clever:

Dropbox (file storage and synchronizing service) uses a lot of hashing behind the curtains. For example if you try to put huge but common file in your Dropbox (large patch or whatever) its hash is calculated. If file is already present on servers it is linked to your account. Without wasting time and bandwidth.

source

To be clear, this means that if I upload a 10 meg pdf to my space, Dropbox creates a unique id from that file and stores it in a database. If you later upload the same file, Dropbox is smart enough to just copy my pdf to your folder, saving you (and them) a ton of bandwidth.

Discovered via this AskMe question, where a user noticed that ~600MB of files uploaded almost instantly.

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