this week i

launched my r statistical programming tutorials website.  videos explaining one concept, two minute maximum.  http://www.twotorials.com/  you have always wanted to learn statistical programming. now is your chance.  tell everyone.

got picked up by the revolution analytics blog.  david smith describes my work a lot better than i do.  also joined the r-bloggers network.

aim to semi-replicate khan academy videos, but for the short attention span of a computer programmer.  and salman khan's ted talk shouldn't be missed.

e-mailed emma: "i am having dinner with bill frist on thursday how is mogadishu" ..and final report: both excellent.

strive for a razor wit and cuddly everything else.

watched it happened one night.  78 years old, one of only three movies to win all five.

ate late night krispy kreme.

attended physics is phun at u.m.d.  gives you hope for humanity that so many people have nothing they'd rather be doing on friday night.

saw buddha and frida.

read gawande's complications.  even more than his other books, he's just rambling.  he's perfected a calm, omniscient voice, so it's enjoyable to read.  but don't expect a thesis beyond: medicine is hard.

'wow, that must hurt,' i blurted out idiotically

conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how

among the most provocative stimuli for space sickness in astronauts is simply seeing another astronaut float by upside down, which can produce a sudden, nauseating perception that you are the one who is upside down

'an autopsy?'..'hasn't she been through enough?'

3/15

this week i

work hard to remain ever-skeptical of tradition.

created some works of r.

converted to a standing desk.

invested fifteen minutes in shakespearean pulp fiction.  best line: "we should have broadswords"  no, wait, best line: "have he the semblance of a harlot?"

donated to girard college at dad's request.  my father's education and my current paychecks both the products of philanthropy.

watched chungking express, two magically silly love stories in a cinematographer's playground.  and look: a grown man resting against a fish tank, pining, and combing his life-sized stuffed animal?

consider climate change the revenge of the titanic.

cooked.

read stiff, surely the best book about corpses that there will ever be.

kindly, dying southerners willed their bodies for the betterment of science, only to end up as practice runs for nose jobs?

he must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead

a rice grain mosh pit

in exchange for a price break in the cost of embalming and other mortuary services, customers agree to let students practice on their loved ones.  like getting a $5 haircut at the vidal sassoon academy, sort of, sort of not

john cavanaugh calls down that there's pizza upstairs, and the three of us, deb, matt mason, and i, leave the dead man by himself.  it feels a little rude.

seventy-three percent of flight 800's passengers had serious aortic tears

here is the secret to surviving one of these crashes: be male.  in a 1970 civil aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit).  adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive.  why?  presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.

you put your hand on your heart and you picture something pulsing slightly but basically still, like a hand on a desktop tapping morse code.  this thing is going wild in there..an alien life form that's just won a pontiac on the price is right.

druggists in the middle ages sold menstrual blood as maid's zenith and prettied it up with rosewater

it wasn't until about 1920..that the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter

3/8

this week i

write programming code from my cerebellum nowadays.  maybe even from the stem.  second nature is a great way to be.

made it to baltimore..

..and all my favorite buildings.

hustled in the end of the workweek.  c'mon siva, trash that syringe.  we can save lives - millions at a time - on monday.

watched an 18 year old imax serengeti adventure - complete with lion porn - narrated by james earl jones.. 

..at the always-magical science center.

ate two stories of pizza.

heard my favorite bluegrass tune.

didn't get the mcflurries we asked for.  worth a shot.  at least we tried.  you've gotta try.  this teddy roosevelt quote comes to mind.

woke up to the smells of honest nepali chai.

ventured into the world.

met aziza marie stablein.  know who’s really great at charades?  babies.  after all, they don’t have a choice.

sympathized with augustus gloop..

..sorry cutie pie, i ate all the cupcakes myself.

toured mica for the first time.

worked a little.

walked a little.

got down a lot.

thank you, baltimore.

consider this the stupidest commercial ever.  maybe the ugandan dept of tourism will issue one with a guy in a gorilla suit.

read the fluffy end of poverty.  intended for the same caliber of audience as clarissa explains it all, but with development economics.  maybe it's good if you've never heard the phrase 'international development' before.  a three-hundred page policy paper instead of a story, yet still dumbed down, repetitive, short on science.  advocating for debt cancellation doesn't require a book, just two words: marshall plan.  here's what i'd take home:

statistics that were, after all, lives in the first place

the world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss, but is rather a positive-sum opportunity in which improving technologies and skills can raise living standards around the world

the talents of a poor rural farmer in africa today, or in scotland at the time of adam smith, are truly marvelous.  these farmers typically know how to build their own houses, grow and cook food, tend to animals, and make their own clothing.  they are, therefore, construction workers, veterinarians and agronomists, and apparel manufacturers.

paper shackles

transmission of malaria in africa is roughly nine times that of india because of the difference of mosquito species

u.s. aid fell from more than 2 percent of gnp during the heyday of the marshall plan to less than 0.2 percent of gnp today

antimalarial bed nets, just to name one pertinent example, are used by fewer than 1 percent of rural africans living in endemic malaria regions

in a 2001 survey, the program on international policy attitudes (pipa) at the university of maryland reported that americans, on average, believed that foreign aid accounts for 20 percent of the federal budget, roughly twenty-four times the actual figure

got clued in on additional sources thanks to howard and laura  ..seems that he's suddenly grown teeth.  william easterly summarizes a lot of my criticisms.. and sachs replies, arguing more convincingly than in the pages of the book.

drew another tally line on my 'reasons the economist bites' chalkboard.  their review of t.o.o.p.?  "book and man are brilliant."  idiots catering to the lowest common denominator - which, btw, is a mathematically misleading phrase.

3/1

this week i

wonder how to live.  a perpetual question.

spent another weekend at dad's.  kathy and her sisters decided to come over for dinner..

..on the condition that they bring jamaican jerk chicken with them.  the cherry coke zero was my idea.

attended a history of cartography lecture.  best line: you need to tell somebody how to navigate the world and you can't take them there yourself.  reviewed the three main points of the cartographic method:

1) reduction: the world is a very large thing.  your map isn't.
2) transformation: the world is (basically) a sphere.  your map isn't.
3) generalization: the world is very complicated.  your map isn't.

realized, in addition to more important things, ethiopia looks like a profile triceratops head.  also, amazing how disorienting flipping north and south can be.

thumbs downed blood wedding at the intimate source theatre.  the post's critic panned the cast, but the script seemed like the problem to me.

used to believe in transparency in all things.  then moderated my views a bit.  now back to the extreme.  if i can do it with my life, surely governments can as well.

tripped out.  'what american english sounds like to non-speakers' is genius.

finished ernest hemingway's the sun also rises, about drunks in paradise.  he's often redundant, which makes it an easy read.  see underlines for examples.

 che mala fortuna! che mala fortuna!

to hell with people.  the catholic church had an awfully good way of handling all that.

you're an expatriate.  you've lost touch with the soil.  you get precious.  fake european standards have ruined you.  you drink yourself to death.  you become obsessed by sex.  you spend all your time talking, not working.  you are an expatriate, see?  you hang around cafes.

like certain dinners i remember from the war.  there was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.

he stood up and put his hand on the small of his back.  right through the back.  a cornada right through the back.  for fun-you understand.

a wonderful nightmare

2/23

this week i

published our map of the effects of the affordable care act.  try typing in your zip code.  accompanied by an op-ed in politico.

shared this r syntax with the national center for health statistics that replicates their multiple imputation technique but with free software instead of clunky old sudaan.

merged the medicare current beneficiary survey with health professional shortage area data to figure out how primary care physician shortages affect seniors.

ate american.  god bless the u.s.

remembered we had a secretary of state named eagleburger.  that’s not very patriotic.

spent the weekend at dad's and apparently enjoyed 1.3 steaks.

watched the last king of scotland, good and horrible.

signed up for researchgate after re-reading an older article about scientists believing what we want to believe and a piece highlighting what's being done about it.  researchgate looks like facebook to me.

halfway caught up on nyrb and lrb.

(1) the increasing feminine role in the success of our evolution

dominant males in a group are challenged from time to time by roving adventurers who can mate only by defeating them.  if defeated, the former leaders slink away, often wounded, while their successors attack and kill all infants under six months old.

competitive infanticide was seen as a dark side of darwinism

12 percent of men in central asia today have y chromosomes traceable to a man who lived around the time of genghis khan

(2) herman vain

(3) a public example of the difficulty of proving rape and ending speculation (in both directions) after the court verdict

(4) the fourth amendment and the digital age

united states v. jones is the most important privacy case to reach the supreme court in years.  it requires the court to decide whether the fourth amendment's safeguards remain meaningful in the digital age, when widely available technological innovations-including gps devices, cell phones, computer data-mining programs, and the like-make it possible to watch citizens more intimately and comprehensively than was remotely conceivable when the bill of rights was adopted.

should the long-standing police authority to search an individual upon arrest include reviewing all the texts and e-mails stored in his "smart phone"?

854,000 people have "top-secret" security clearances

the fears of terrorism are too deep, the technology is too advanced, and most people have already been seduced into forfeiting their privacy by facebook and other modern conveniences

the state, unlike google, can deprive us of our liberty, and is more likely to punish dissent; sharing information with google and with the government are therefore qualitatively distinct acts

it is not enough to shrug one's shoulders and say, "i have nothing to hide"

(5) human origins

blue eyes were sexually selected in europe around the peak of the last ice age, 20,000 years ago

males shared identical mtdna while the females did not; the likely explanation is patrilocality-females left their natal groups to join other bands

(6) lincoln's asterisk

congress voted $600,000 to be used for black removal - equivalent to nearly one percent of the national budget for 1861 - and lincoln attached colonisation to virtually every prospective scheme for emancipation

in 1868, the new york times told its readers that the us should annex cuba and deport the entire black population to the island

northern preoccupation with colonisation had severed abolition from integration

2/16