A way to browse the web using pattern recognition and abstraction as opposed to links.  Is this how understanding and self reflection emerge in the first place??  Why not speed that up too! (via DataMining) TED Feb 2010 – Live Labs Pivot demo and the world beyond facebook: One way to put it, is to...

Rafe has posted about his aversion to supplements. I’d like to offer an opposing point of view, with some personal anecdata behind it. I’m a 42-year-old woman, 5′1″, and 113 lbs.. I work out 3x/wk. (cardio and weight training) and walk an average of 4 miles/day. Like Rafe, I am a...

In learning the history of various religions, it becomes clear that all religions are created to redress human suffering in whatever forms are ubiquitous during the founding. They are spread at a rate directly proportional to the suffering and directly proportional to the simplicity of the message. Given...

Michael Pollan, as always, making perfect sense: Now watch Will Allen on urban...

When a person walks into a village and blows it up along with themselves we call it terrorism. But when a person drops bombs from a $100M fighter jet and blows up a village it’s somehow not terrorism. Why is that? This is an observation Laura made tonight that stopped me in my tracks. I don’t...

Is it any wonder most people go through more than one relationship before getting married?  Do you really find the right person or figure out that it’s a system?  Hollywood, what are you doing to us?!: “(OPRAH.com) — Tricia was depressed. That was her only problem. Although her life had...

Highlights from a NYT article looking into emergence in happiness, obesity, drinking, smoking in a group of 15,000 people over three decades.  Friends of friends, directionality of friends, and even DNA seem to play a role in the network.  Pay attention to the details and read the entire 10 page article...

An article in July’s PNAS investigates the possibility of predicting a person’s Social Security number from their birth date and place.  Exploiting patterns in how SSN’s are assigned, authors Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross developed an algorithm which could correctly predict the first...

It is by now common wisdom that our current financial crisis is due in large part to misplaced incentives in our financial system. Analysts and fund managers were rewarded for short-term thinking and risk-taking. If we can rework our financial system to reward long-term, careful planning, it is often...

On Tuesday, my Erdos number dropped from infinity to four. That’s right: after four years of grad school, I am now officially published! The article, “A New Phylogenetic Diversity Measure Generlizing the Shannon Index and Its Application to Phyllostomid Bats,” by Ben Allen, Mark Kon, Yaneer...

This is just a brief note to let everyone know I’m spending the summer at IIASA, a scientific policy research institute located just outside of Vienna. IIASA focus on systems analysis of global problems such as climate change, land use, demographic changes, public health, ecology, and energy. They...

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the future prospects of Facebook and Twitter. Some of us even feel strongly enough to want to bet on it. Unfortunately, the companies are privately held, and unavailable to be bet on in the traditional way, via the stock market. It is not just household names like...