I now prioritize writing for my Substack newsletter Qui Ante Nos. Older and more niche posts can be found below.
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This past holiday weekend I read John McPhee’s The Headmaster, a very short biography of Frank Boyden, who was headmaster of Deerfield Academy, which is now one of the top prep schools in the US.
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My wife’s parents were born in Greece, and all her blood relatives, except her sister, were raised in Greece. I was raised in a white, upper-middle class American family in New Jersey. As you might expect, I struggled to understand my wife’s family’s conception of time.
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Cross-posted from Biobot’s blog
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This post represents a joint effort with Tony Kulesa
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Cross-posted from Biobot’s blog
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A few years ago, I was on a family vacation, when we got into a situation. We had rented boats in the morning, when weather conditions were good. By the afternoon, conditions had deteriorated, but everyone was feeling happy after lunch. There were some family dynamics at play that made it hard to for us to realize that conditions were no longer good, and we all trotted along on our plan or re-embarking. The situation steadily became more heated, until a boat capsized, at which point it was clear that was a true emergency.
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I recently read Case’s and Deaton’s Deaths of Despair, a book about how America’s working class (more specifically: white, non-college-educated, middle age people) are suffering an increase burden of “deaths of despair” like alcoholism and drug overdose.
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As a sort of side hobby, I’ve started thinking about how political speeches could have been delivered better, or just differently. So I imagined how Biden’s speech about vaccination in spring and summer 2021 would have sounded like, if written by Larry the Cable Guy:
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I’m reading Legislation and Regulation, a law textbook about, among other things, how judges interpret written law (or “statutes”). I’ve been surprised by (1) how many important cases hinge on the reading of a single word in the text of a law, (2) how devoted the Supreme Court is in to trying to understand that single word, and (3) how funny they can be about it.
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I’ve been a many-years user of Macs, and so I was a little deflated when my job sent me a Windows machine, a Lenovo T490S. So I immediately installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot, hoping that I could live forever in Linux-land and closely approximately my Mac experience. Here was the result:
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My wife and I are budding croissant fans, and we’re trying to remember the places in DC/Arlington where we’ve had the best ones.
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This summer, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the 6-month mark, there was concern that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 would begin to wane, since immunity to other coronaviruses appears to wane at around 6 months after infection.
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As a graduate student and a postdoc, I often saw scientists deflated by statistics. All their delicate thinking and theorizing and all their very careful and painstaking experimentation has to, at some point, be subject to statistics, and the most commonly-used statistical tests simply ask, “Is this group of numbers bigger or smaller than that other group?”
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Alice picks up a penny, puts it behind her back where Bob can’t see. She asks, “What’s the probability that the penny is in my left hand?”
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Blind Willie Johnson was an early 20th century musician, a famous gospel blues singer, and perhaps the most brilliant slide guitarist after Robert Johnson. He is most famous for his song Dark was the night, cold was the ground, which was one of 27 pieces of music launched into outer space on the Voyager Golden Record.
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I’ve ridden the MARC train between DC and Baltimore a few times, and I got frustrated with clicking through the “Schedule” and “Timetable” interfaces to see train times. There’s a pdf, but it’s a pain to read: I only want to know which trains go between DC and Baltimore, and what times they leave/arrive.
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I saw this Comment on a paper in The Lancet Global Health and thought is was a lovely example of why logistic regressions can be confusing.
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My wife and I were married in an Orthodox ceremony in Thessaloniki, Greece this past summer. Many of our guests were not Orthodox, so we wanted to give them some context about the 30 minutes of ceremony in an unfamiliar liturgical language that we asked them to sit for.
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This post is in some senses a remix of a previous post about using purrr for analysis in R.
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I saw this puzzle in MIT’s Puzzle Corner and thought it was fun.
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In my postdoc work, I was running a lot of models on data. I found R really useful to doing the models, but I often struggled to write nice code around running many models. Until I discovered purrr.
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I mostly missed the kerfluffle about Oregon allowing a non-binary sex (“X”, rather than “M” or “F”) on its driver’s licenses. (Fox News, the link in the last sentence, somehow always unsettles me.) I think it’s worth a few paragraphs.
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There is a growing appreciation that microbes are not all pathogens. Some of them are important to our health, and many of them seem simply irrelevant to our concerns. It was only a matter of time before Purell put the following question and answer on their webpage’s FAQ:
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I was delighted and dejected when reading this interview (titled “Trump: Tribute of Poor White People”) with J. D. Vance, who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Vance came from a poor white family, spent time in the Marines, and is a Yale Law graduate.
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This post is a story that has been told many times and in many places, but I’ve told it in person enough time to want to tell it in writing.
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English speakers used to distinguish between thou, a word used to address a single person, and you, a word used to address more than one person. Just as kings used a royal, plural we when referring to one person, English speakers came to use a flattering you when addressing a single person. The Quakers retained thou to avoid elevating anyone with you. To non-Quakers, this standing on principle sounded antiquated and pedantic.
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I like git, and I like to use it with most of my projects. But I mostly need to use Word to write manuscripts because it what and my co-authors and journals know how to work with.