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	<title>Fred Ross</title>
	<link>http://madhadron.com</link>
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		<title>An extremely short course on fractals</title>
		<description><![CDATA[[This was an email to a mailing list I'm on to provide background for another discussion.] Say you have a curve that you&#8217;re looking at under a microscope. You do your best to measure the length of the line given that your scope doesn&#8217;t have perfect resolution, so any tiny details get washed out and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/an-extremely-short-course-on-fractals</link>
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		<title>The problem with Silicon Valley&#8217;s libertarians</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m tired of hearing Silicon Valley techheads bitch and moan about laws and government&#8211;laws are slowing us down! Government is getting in the way of the advance of technology! Leaving aside the fact that computing and Silicon Valley were built almost single handedly by DARPA, it shows their ignorance of technology in general and computer [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-libertarians</link>
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		<title>Why we are afflicted with data science degrees</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A friend sent me an article about the masters and graduate certificate programs in data science springing up around the country. I think it was meant solely to stir me up. He knows me well. We&#8217;ll come back to the peculiar thing that is &#8220;data science&#8221; later. Let&#8217;s look at these programs first. They&#8217;re teaching [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/why-we-are-afflicted-with-data-science-degrees</link>
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		<title>A criticism of Ruby</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Introduction This is a criticism of the Ruby language and its community. Some of the criticisms point out fundamental errors in the language design, or poor choices in what historical examples to follow. Others are about errors in the process of developing the language that have reduced its usability. I have intentionally avoided all criticisms [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-criticism-of-ruby</link>
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		<title>Public comments considered harmful</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Around the time I left academia, I wrote a rant saying what I thought of bioinformatics. I send it around to my old national consortium in Switzerland, which was used to receiving my rants. My rant was well received. A number of my colleagues have been referring people to it over the last nine months [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/public-comments-considered-harmful</link>
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		<title>A rant about &#8220;what programming language should I learn?&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Someone asked on a forum what language they should learn for bioinformatics. I admit it, I went on a rant. Here it is, for your enjoyment: You&#8217;re asking the wrong question. This is understandable, since the skill level of the bioinformatics community is so low that most of them ask the same wrong question. I&#8217;ll [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-rant-about-what-programming-language-should-i-learn</link>
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		<title>Thoughts from Strange Loop 2012</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I. I&#8217;ve talked with more people than I usually do in a month. It&#8217;s run me thin. II. The most visible lack among attendees is historical ignorance of our not-very-old field: rumblings among the NoSQL adherents during Stonebraker&#8217;s talk on VoltDB, not realizing that he has experience implementing databases comparable to the whole NoSQL community [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/thoughts-from-strange-loop-2012</link>
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		<title>A better model of programmer temperment</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Steve Yegge stirred up a bunch of controversy recently with a simple model of programmer attitudes: programming has a political axis ranging from liberal to conservative. He declares static typing to be conservative, dynamic typing to be liberal, and a bunch of other such things. Of course, the model is wrong. To paraphrase Box, &#8220;all [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-better-model-of-programmer-temperment</link>
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		<title>Calculating pagination bounds for display</title>
		<description><![CDATA[tl;dr: How do you calculate the limits for a pagination widget like &#8220;« 4 5 6 7 »&#8221;? Number the pages starting from 0. Then the first page to display startPage and one page after the last page to display endPage (4 and 8 in the example above) are given by $startPage = [ (currentPage [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/calculating-pagination-bounds-for-display</link>
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		<title>Empirical evidence</title>
		<description><![CDATA[On a mailing list, someone asked: &#8220;Isn&#8217;t empirical evidence found anywhere? From anybody?&#8221; No. Absolutely not. Empirical evidence comes from doing the experiment yourself, or as close as you can get to it. If I take the average of the guesses of the peasantry as to the length of the emperor of China&#8217;s nose, why [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/empirical-evidence</link>
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		<title>Style in technical writing</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Several discussions with technical writers have shown me that I hold a very peculiar view: there is a uniform good prose style for technical writing in English. There are distinct voices within that style&#8212;no one would confuse Feynman&#8217;s writing with Dijkstra&#8217;s, nor the section by section layout of Landau and Lifshitz with Unix man pages&#8212;but [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/style-in-technical-writing</link>
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		<title>Getting organized, a letter to my girlfriend</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My dear, I think I haven&#8217;t explained what you&#8217;re trying to accomplish well. You&#8217;ve been reading the books and watching the videos, and no one has told you what all this machinery is for. It&#8217;s a way for your future self to promise something to your current self. Whenever something occurs to you, you can [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/getting-organized-a-letter-to-my-girlfriend</link>
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		<title>A farewell to bioinformatics</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m leaving bioinformatics to go work at a software company with more technically ept people and for a lot more money. This seems like an opportune time to set forth my accumulated wisdom and thoughts on bioinformatics. My attitude towards the subject after all my work in it can probably be best summarized thus: &#8220;Fuck [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-farewell-to-bioinformatics</link>
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		<title>Book review: Clay Johnson&#8217;s &#8216;The Information Diet&#8217;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Let&#8217;s get the worst out of the way: Clay Johnson&#8217;s &#8216;The Information Diet&#8217; isn&#8217;t worth reading. There. Since you&#8217;re still reading, I imagine you&#8217;d like to know why. It&#8217;s not because of what&#8217;s in it. Actually there&#8217;s a fair amount of interesting information in it. There&#8217;s an attempt to explain why our public discourse is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/book-review-clay-johnsons-the-information-diet</link>
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		<title>How to have a credible scientific literature</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My girlfriend took me to task after I wrote my rant on peer review: &#8220;You have to have some assurance that the scientific literature is believable.&#8221; I agree. In my rant, I publicly publicly promised that what I produced would be believable, my reputation on it. But she persevered, and I eventually disgorged my core [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/how-to-have-a-credible-scientific-literature</link>
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		<title>Why I don&#8217;t publish in peer reviewed journals</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I don&#8217;t publish in peer reviewed journals. Oh, my name is on a few papers where I&#8217;ve contributed, and I&#8217;ve written a few columns that appeared in otherwise peer reviewed journals, but I have never and have no intention of ever specifically submitting work that is primarily mine to a peer reviewed journal. This astonishes [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/why-i-dont-publish-in-peer-reviewed-journals</link>
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		<title>Measuring your energy levels</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I recently ran a brief experiment on myself. After becoming ornery about not having enough energy in the late afternoon, I finally decided to measure my energy level throughout the day. I formulated the simplest experiment that I thought would give me adequate data: once an hour writing down L, M, or H (for low, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/measuring-your-energy-levels</link>
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		<title>The sun and the moon</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I once saw the sun in the moon in the sky, with the moon&#8217;s dark side shadowed just so. The way they lay, though I couldn&#8217;t perceive the distances involved, I could grasp the shape of the triangle of sun, moon, and earth. The distance from earth to sun is roughly 1 AU. From the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/the-sun-and-the-moon</link>
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		<title>I cry shame&#8230;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Shame on these people: &#8220;One limitation of this modeling approach is that for some genes, there is a low degree of similarity between the observed expression profile and the one predicted by the most appropriate model. &#8230;It is possible that other curve-fitting methods&#8230;might also be applicable to this kind of data. However these methods do [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/i-cry-shame</link>
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		<title>A letter on monads</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sekhar wrote: &#62; I mentioned this article in the retreat I seem to remember reading something very similar a while back. Unfortunately, he doesn&#8217;t understand monads, as far as I can tell. They were a solution to syntactic problem, not a semantic program. Almost every language out there attaches a continuation to each statement, that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-letter-on-monads</link>
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		<title>My thoughts on the BIO2010 report</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The NIH and HHMI organized a much trumpeted report entitled BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists. It came out in 2003 to much acclaim. I read the crux of it (chapter 2, &#8220;A New Biology Curriculum&#8221;) last night. I don&#8217;t like it. I have some basic philosophical objections to their approach, and a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/my-thoughts-on-the-bio2010-report</link>
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		<title>Astonishing things in informatics</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some things astonish me more the longer I know them. Some examples from informatics: Reliable and complex from simple, brittle pieces TCP guarantees the arrival of intact data, short of the entire network fragmenting. Some telecom systems claim nine nine&#8217;s of up time. Large data centers expect disk failure (PDF). No single person understands the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/astonishing-things-in-informatics</link>
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		<title>A novelist&#8217;s yak shaving</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Yak shaving is a term for the seemingly unrelated things you end up doing while trying to accomplish some other task. I found myself with a delightful example while writing today. A character has been slippery. Very well, who is this person? I&#8217;ll digress and figure her out, tell her story to myself, so she [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-novelists-yak-shaving</link>
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		<title>The iniquities of the Unix shell</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Most bioinformaticists that I know regard the Unix shell as their interface to their computer. There are other things floting around out there in the depths of whatever Unix-like operating system they run, but in their minds everything passes through the shell as the milieu in which computing takes place. This is not only wrong, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/the-iniquities-of-the-unix-shell</link>
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		<title>A final rant for SyBit: the education of scientists</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I promised you all a final rant. Well, here it is: university science education doesn&#8217;t produce scientists. What&#8217;s a scientist anyway? Someone who pipettes all day, or stares through a telescope? That could just as well be a technician, and often is, even if hidden behind a title of &#34;postdoc&#34; or &#34;professor&#34;. Let&#8217;s take some [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://madhadron.com/a-final-rant-for-sybit-the-education-of-scientists</link>
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