j_b_s

better than planned uncontrolled burns

DeLillo may not believe it, but I do. From the start of the interview:

"INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea what made you a writer?

DON DeLillo: I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them."

Don't hate the player...Game on!

In a previous life, I became a scuba instructor that kept me in the latest dive gear. (This was along side working towards a Ph.D.)

Eventually it burned me out -- instructing is a stressful "service" gig; and it turned me off of diving for years. This is something that I've observed with other folks in "lifestyle" businesses, e.g., I know yoga and martial arts instructors that ultimately quit not only the instructing, but the hobby.

If you love something, be careful about teaching it!

It'll help with re-sale (still 22 years to go!) - one likely outcome before you kick it.

"...keeps publishing biased articles about the drawbacks of doing a PhD"

I think that startups have a lot more interesting and important things to do than support or promote hit pieces on PhDs and academia life.

Bay area (Emeryville and East Bay are pretty interesting, in addition to South SF), and Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). Seattle a bit.

I built a little tool to audit objects in your R pipeline here:

https://jabustyerman.com/2017/09/29/auditing-your-r-data-pip...

This basically allows you to tag (wrap) intermediate functions in your pipe, and then inspect the objects generated by that function later.

Curious to know why you landed on snakemake for bioinformatics? Were you considering other workflow engines?

Nice! Look into tufte style class for book layouts. It's particular and if you like that type of particular then you'll love it.

You can present to people, or be present to people. Sales would be much better if it was much more of the latter.

Ira Glass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE

This guy is perfect.

Completely agree. From the article:

"It's all about the amount of glucose, or sugar, in the plant," Lavine said. "Rice plants with higher glucose levels are older and dying. That increase in glucose causes adolescent brown planthoppers to develop into the long-winged adults. The plant really is telling the insect how to grow."

The last sentence is just bad.

If plants had their way, they'd be telling the insect pests to GTFO from the get-go. The whole point is that plant sugar levels are an inevitable and reliable indicator of host status, with higher [glucose] indicating poor (and deteriorating) host quality. Evolution (in insect pest populations) by natural selection has led to insect populations evolving plastic developmental programs (Stay-or-go, via wing size) in response to that inevitable and reliable signal of deteriorating host quality.

The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei (2016). Chinese author and setting (contemporary Beijing).

Following the theme of the solitary male antihero...a la Murakami.

We don't want to do it unless it's going to move the needle.

Nope! Base R works great. Old-school vi to edit scripts, and R base installation to run them (or REPL around). Of course, the IDEs do offer a lot of support, and RStudio is great for making your R functions into packages that are easy to share.

What service do you use for options trading? (would you recommend them?)

cycling through 1936 - 1945 (year by year) is pretty interesting.