Ccc1685

LATEST ARTICLES ( 295 )

• Nonuniqueness of -1/12

  

  I’ve been asked to give an example of how the sum of the natural numbers could lead to another value in the comments to my previous post so I thought it may be... Read more

  Posted on 11 February 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Sum of the Natural Numbers is -1/12?

  

  This wonderfully entertaining video giving a proof for why the sum of the natural numbers  is -1/12 has been viewed over 1.5 million times. Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• (Lack Of) Progress in Neuroscience

  Here is what I just posted to the epic thread on Connectionists:The original complaint in this thread seems to be that the main problem of (computational)... Read more

  Posted on 27 January 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Brain Discussion

  There is an epic discussion on the Connectionist mailing list right now. It started on Jan 23, when Juyang (John) Weng of Michigan State University criticized a... Read more

  Posted on 27 January 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Non-cynical View

  Read the 2014 Gates letter to get the non-cynical view of progress for the poor. I’m actually on the more hopeful side of this issue, surprisingly. The data... Read more

  Posted on 23 January 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Stephanie Event

  You should read this article in Esquire about the advent of personalized cancer treatment for a heroic patient named Stephanie Lee. Here is Steve Hsu’s blog... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Myth of Maladaptation

  A fairly common presumption among biologists and adherents of paleo-diets is that since humans evolved on the African Savannah hundreds of thousands of years... Read more

  Posted on 09 January 2014 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Bitcoin Economy

  The electronic currency Bitcoin has been in the news quite a bit lately since its value has risen from about $10 a year ago to over $650 today, hitting a peak o... Read more

  Posted on 24 December 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Symplectic Integrators

  

  Dynamical systems can be divided into two basic types: conservative and dissipative.  In biology, we almost always model dissipative systems and thus if we... Read more

  Posted on 12 December 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Counts as Science?

  Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 there has been some discussion about whether or not economics is a science. Some, like Russ Roberts of Econtalk,... Read more

  Posted on 11 December 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Fred Sanger 1918 – 2013

  Perhaps the greatest biologist of the twentieth century and two-time Nobel prize winner, Fred Sanger, has died at the age of 95. Read more

  Posted on 21 November 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Michaelis-Menten Kinetics

  

  This year is the one hundred anniversary of the Michaelis-Menten equation, which was published in 1913 by German born biochemist Leonor Michaelis and Canadian... Read more

  Posted on 18 November 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Talk in Taiwan

  I’m currently at the National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Math Division, on the campus of the National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu for the 2013 Conferenc... Read more

  Posted on 02 November 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• New Paper on Neural Networks

  Michael Buice and I have a new paper in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience as well as on the arXiv (the arXiv version has fewer typos at this point). Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Paper on Compressed Sensing and Genomics

  New paper on the arXiv. The next step after the completion of the Human Genome Project, was the search for genes associated with diseases such as autism or... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Happiness and Divisive Inhibition

  The Wait But Why blog has an amusing post on why Generation Y yuppies (GYPSYS) are unhappy, which I found through the blog of Michigan economist Miles Kimball. Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Cost of the Shutdown and Sequester

  People may be wondering how the US government shutdown is affecting the NIH. I can’t speak for the rest of the institutes but I was instructed to not come to... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Heritability and Additive Genetic Variance

  Most people have an intuitive notion of heritability being the genetic component of why close relatives tend to resemble each other more than strangers. Read more

  Posted on 04 October 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Government Shutdown

  As of today, I am officially furloughed without pay since the NIH is officially closed and nonessential employees like myself are barred from working without pa... Read more

  Posted on 01 October 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Epic Comeback

  Well, I spoke too soon in my earlier post on the America’s Cup.  Oracle Team USA has since won 7 races in a row and now it is 8-8 in the best of 17 match... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2013 BIOLOGY, SCIENCE