Viewing profile — fastaguy88

I suppose "totally unrelated" might mean not in the same genus to some set of taxonomists, but for the larger audience to which this essay was directed, unrelated might mean "is no…

Two nits to pick, one major, one minor: Major: "Common names simply don’t work on a large scale. One common name (ie “cedar”) can refer to 8 different totally unrelated plants, whe…

Did I miss the part where you must be looking at your iPhone for it to work?

Download for mac. Find out I need a different subscription. Cannot quit program (must force quit). Perhaps I need AI to use it.

In 1998-1999, I was the organizer for a Bioinformatics course in Sao Paulo Brazil, funded in some indirect way by the National Academy of Sciences (as I recall). In addition to pay…

And yet, thousands and thousands of 'C' programs parse integers every hour successfully. Perhaps the right title should be "No way to parse pathological edge cases in 'C'" And then…

While it is true that departments often fund their graduate students for the first year (or possibly 2) out of their own budgets, their budgets are largely determined by the genero…

This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.

There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is direc…

Lugaru (??) emacs (epsilon) on CP/M in the early 1980’s

BioBank claims (1) only de-identified data was available and (2) none of the data was actually sold before the datasets were taken down.

Well, perhaps Orsen Scott Card does not need editors’ advice. But odds are you do.

Amusingly, 15 min ago, the animation did not work on my MacOS Safari (Sequoia), but it was visible on Chrome. Now (1600 UTC-4), it is animated on Safari.

Apple Keychain has a number of old bugs that have caused me to have to resort to this strategy several times. The most common problem is having a secure note that you can open, but…

>>> If I buy a can of soup and find glass in it, I have a valid claim against the manufacturer. It's a matter of holding someone accountable for fraud or negligence, not a matter o…

Re self-correcting science. In the area I am most familiar with (basic life sciences), correction happens pretty quickly. But I don’t worry about public policy much. But I’m comfor…

It is useful to distinguish between "effective" scientific fraud, where some set of fraudulent papers are published that drive a discipline in an unproductive direction, and "admin…

It is perhaps worth noting that the 25,000 bit flips/out of 470,000 crashes (in a week) are probably not coming from all Firefox users. It would be useful to know how many of those…

Nice display, but it starts off with misleading measurements of DNA. The spacing between DNA base pairs is 0.34 nm, so the 10 base pairs pictured are in fact 3.4 nm. But the DNA in…

Before Postscript, tektronix 4010 was the language of graphics, at least for biologists drawing phylogenetic trees or reassociation curves. The phylip phylogenetics package, introd…

You're kidding, right? (p++)[0] returns the contents of (p) before the ++. Its hard to imagine a more confusing juxtaposition.

When I think of things being in free-fall, I think of them going down. Not going up more slowly.

Sounds more like he was scammed by the dealer than a Tesla problem.

It really depends. Working on genome analysis, I once encountered/interrupted (by rebooting after a software update) a student who had been running an analysis for more than a week…

Really not a libertarian, but why shouldn’t Netflix have the right to choose who they distribute content to? They negotiated conditions with the creators, why shouldn’t they be abl…