fastaguy88

Good luck getting any kind of scan from your doctor/hospital for $100.

I find it surprising/annoying/frustrating that many README's start of with how to download/install the software, without ever telling you what it is designed to do. (Perhaps you must have some inkling of what it does to be motivated to read the README.)

I have 'C' code that was written in 1985 that runs today, mostly after moving function parameters from inside the function to inside the argument list.

'C' seems to be a language that makes it easy to write incomprehensible statements, but it's not that hard (or it was not that hard) to write code that is trivial bring up to date. Perhaps it was easier for me because I started with Fortran.

The idea that "courts" are equipped to address scientific questions is ridiculous. Perhaps French courts are better -- in the US, it is very much about decisions based on a confrontational presentation of "evidence", something like "debates" about evolution or vaccine injuries.

Debates are about persuasion, not reality. And, in some contexts (like whether you should go to jail), there is a process argument that there needs to be a debate-like process. Science deals in facts and statistics that have associated uncertainty. For scientific questions, there should be better decision making processes than courts.

There is a fixed (decreasing) budget for research.

What should be the balance between repeating things that have already been done, and expanding knowledge?

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 not related in any way" (as in, does not share a common ancestor).

Yes, they are "totally unrelated" in the sense that I am likely totally unrelated to you, but this not a very evolutionary sense of the word "related".

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, where as Cedrus refers specifically to the genus which contains the species C. libani, C. deodara,  and C. atlantica."

Actually, those 8 different plants are hardly "totally unrelated". They are quite closely related in the evolutionary scheme of things (plants have been around for 1.6 billion years). Red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and Cedrus (Cedrus atlantica) are both plants, but also Pinidae (conifers), and diverged about 250 Million years ago (time tree.org), so more distantly related that mammals (~80 y), but midway between humans/platypus (200 My) and humans/ducks (320 My). Hardly unrelated.

Minor:

   "Why is it [taxonomy] cool? Because we now group things according to how evolutionarily related are, and how they evolved."

Yes, we group things by how closely related they are, but not necessarily by how distantly related they are in time. Taxonomy is about branch order, not distance in evolutionary time. The same species in a genus may include organisms that diverged several million years ago, but other species may have diverged much more recently. Taxonomy is a kind of evolutionary history that need not have a very regular clock.

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 paying for the faculty (about 6 people) to spend a week teaching, the budget also paid to purchase an SGI server, which was a standard machine to run the bioinformatics software. The course ran for a week in January, 1999, and we had ordered (and paid for) the machine by July, 1998.

A group of us arrived in Sao Paulo on Thursday (before the course was scheduled to start on Monday) to begin configuring the machine -- downloading/transferring software and databases. We did not trust the internet, so we brought the stuff we needed on a laptop.

We got there thursday, to find out that despite a 6 month lead-time, the machine had not been delivered. Not only that, the weekend we planned to configure the machine, the power to the campus was scheduled to be shut off so that some of the 60+ year old infrastructure could be replaced (our host got a special dispensation to keep the power on in the building we were using). After many frantic calls, the machine was delivered around 5:00 pm on Friday. We worked frantically through the weekend, and managed to get a few things working, a few hours before our first computer lab. Fun times.

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 see how other languages do.

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 generosity of their Deans (who got the money from indirect costs from grants) or their own indirect costs. And they will not be admitting students if they do not see a clear path for them to be externally funded after their first year or two.

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 directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty do not have the grants, their departments cannot admit students.

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