What [philanthropy] represents is a standing invitation to wealthy people to insert their private preferences into the public sphere. Or to put it more bluntly, it’s an invitation for plutocrats to operate in democracy.
– Rob Reich, Professor of Political Science, Stanford
Apocalypse…you see that, and you know….I’m just going to lay down and die. I’m not gonna thrive in that environment! I type for a living. I’ll be food for other, stronger men.
The invention of theories depends on our talents and other fortuitous circumstances such as a satisfactory sex life.
Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours
10,000 Year Clock, Long Now
It was winter 2014. Pharrell had just dropped Happy, the Rosetta probe landed on a comet, President Obama was opening diplomatic relations with Cuba…
…and here at Color, the bioinformatics team had a problem. Our pipeline — the data processing system that crunches raw DNA data from our lab into the variants we report to patients — was slow. 12 to 24 hours slow.
This wasn’t a problem in and of itself — bioinformatics pipelines routinely run for hours or even days — but it was a royal pain for development. We’d write new pipeline code, start it running, go home, and return the next morning to find it had crashed halfway through because we’d missed a semicolon. Argh. Or worse, since we hadn’t launched yet, our live pipeline would hit similar bugs in production R&D samples, which would delay them until we could debug, test, and deploy the fix. No good. Continue reading