In her scathing review of the pharmaceutical industry entitled The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About it, Marcia Angell methodically rebuts industry positions on research, innovation, politics and intellectual property. Dr. Angell worked for The New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, serving as its editor [...]
It’s laundry night for me tonight and I noticed as I often do that one settings on the dryer reads “Optimum Dry”. Wedged right between “Less Dry” and “More dry”, optimum dry jumps out at me every time. It’s not symmetrically between its neighbors as the other labels are. It isn’t defined [...]
Michael Gorman, who has held about 50 positions as head of library services, worries in a recent series of blog posts about Web 2.0, that the internet in general and Wikipeda in particular are ruining our education system.
“Do we entrust the education of children to self-selected “experts” without any known authority or credentials? Would any [...]
These last two weeks have been (thank God) much more relaxed than any two weeks I can remember in a long time. I have, as a result, returned to reading for pleasure.
I rarely remember how much pleasure I actually do derive from reading. I usually store it more as a little saying my mom made [...]
I just arrived in Seattle, WA, having flown from Washington D.C. My flight lasted about 5 hours, give or take, and I spent the entire time thinking about obesity.
The woman next to me weighed no fewer than 300 pounds and my guess puts her at closer to 330. When I arrived at my [...]
People interact with computers all day for all sorts of purposes. Long gone are the days where a computer was merely a tool to process data. We view photos, send emails, chat online and do millions of other tasks completely distinct from computing per se. The only tools available to us are the [...]
I had a nice hour long journey through the Apple store in Bethesda today. My iPod’s hard drive stopped working, and although I don’t expect the “geniuses” there to know my particular ability to diagnose such a problem, I also don’t expect them to take 25 minutes to diagnose it themselves. (By the [...]
…are absolutely sweet. I like to conceptualize things, which I subsequently can rarely explain. Usually I figure out how they could be expressed in a Venn diagram, and then everyone understands. How about ‘things I like and things Jake likes’? A normal one. Now I want to express that he [...]
Yeah no kidding. But I didn’t realize how true that was until tonight. I was at blockbuster and these three girls were talking. It was clear that one girl was the odd one out. I knew it right away. She would say things that seemed to fit in the conversation fine. “I like ice age” [...]
College Class Tactics
I’ve heard some odd suggestions for tactics in class during my time at school. For instance I’ve heard that you should always ask a question on the first day or first few days of class, presumably to get the professor to notice you. One kid in my Data Mining class just interrupted the professor during [...]