The power of names

The power of names is really interesting to me. Sometimes it seems like concepts that previously were muddled become much more simple to understand once you give it a unique set of phonemes that others can reference.

I'll give an example from work recently. A few weeks ago I was …

The Gaia Hypothesis

Somehow I stumbled upon the Gaia hypothesis a few days ago, a really interesting idea which I'd like to delve into a bit further. The theory goes like this -

The Earth itself is in a state of homeostasis where the biological systems are in symbiosis with its surroundings.

That's a …

How to add Bokeh plots to a Pelican blog

This is a little different from the normal brand of article I write, but it took me a while and surprisingly the solution wasn't easy to find on google.

First of all, you need to have bokeh set up on your local machine. Go ahead and generate a plot the …

Minimize the distance from idea to execution

My company is getting more and more 'political'. If you wanted to do something new, you used to have to spend weeks getting the proper permissions / sign offs from the relevant leadership, ensure they were bought in to the vision of your project, talk to the resourcing team to make …

Problems and solutions

Something I've noticed recently is that problems become a lot easier to solve if you describe them in detail. That is, attempting to solve a vague, multi-faceted issue is practically impossible, but cutting it down to a set of discrete problems seems to make it much more digestible. Part of …

PID controllers and cancer care

It's a very interesting time for progress in cancer care. Solid tumor patients can now expect to have their tumors sequenced and compared to normal cells in order to determine which targeted therapies are appropriate for their tumors. However, our ability to predict future behavior of an individual cancer is …

Get bored.

I've been thinking and talking about side projects for a long time. Now is the first time I've shipped something that 1) actually works and 2) has at least a snowball's chance of becoming something people use.

Why is that? I now get bored.

I didn't used to. It always …

Side projects

Over the past couple months I've been declaring all of my side projects to my current employer. It's been a very interesting experience, because, strictly speaking, I don't work for them as an engineer.

Joel Spolsky has written an interesting note about side projects. His main thesis is that, from …

Momentum equals habit

Novices to finance are always amazed at how powerful compound interest is. Once they become aware, it becomes much easier to explain why they should pay off high interest loans as quickly as possible, and not keep too much cash lying around that isn't gathering interest.

But people are always …

Holding it all in your head

Something I've noticed when working on larger programming projects is that my ability to add new code depends on what stage of the project I'm at. Early on, the code comes out fast. However, as time goes on and the project gets bigger, I find that it takes me up …