Algorithms are really easy to mess up. Take your pick for how: overfitting to training data, having bad training data, having too little training data, encoding human bias from your training data in the model and calling it “objective”. Feeding in new data that’s in the wrong format. Typos, subtle typos, nightmarishly subtle typos. Your …
NOOOOOO!!!! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!! (To hear our actual stance on permanent DST, check out this blog post. Short version: we love getting rid of the seasonal time change, as long as we end up on permanent standard time, not permanent DST.)
Sync by Steven Strogatz For our second book of the month, we picked Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, by Steven Strogatz. This might seems like a bit of an oddball choice for a company that’s working on consumer apps in the health space. Why pick a math …
In my last blog post, I talked about the power and potential for biophysics engines to contribute to clinical care and ragged on my own ability to play video games. The short version of it, if you don’t have time to circle back: If you’re going to make a digital twin of somebody, base it …
One of the highest stakes moments of my life was the time in graduate school when I was (badly) playing Donkey Kong at Pinball Pete’s Arcade, and a very, very good Donkey Kong player came over to watch me play in silence. I’d just spent six dollars worth in quarters dying repeatedly on the first …
The first thing I want to say about naps is that I’m almost always for them. Naps can help you recover from sleep deprivation. Naps are good. But let’s talk about that almost always. When might you want to avoid napping? Well, maybe you’re trying to shift your personal time zone and are at a …
Why do you go to sleep when you do? Sure, there’s a big part of it that’s physical: You go to sleep because you’re sleepy. But you might also stay awake, even when you’re on the verge of collapsing from fatigue because you have work to get done. Or because your neighbor is practicing a …
Meme #1 Here we see Squidward staying up and reading instead of going to sleep. Squidward himself might smugly point out that he’s reading a book, not looking at a light-emitting screen, and use that as an excuse to feel superior. If so, he would be tragically mistaken. There are clearly lights on in the …
Here’s a fun fact: You probably get way less light exposure during a normal work day than you would if you were out camping. “Sure,” you say. “That’s no surprise. At home, I have walls around me to block the sun. If I’m camping, I presumably have fewer walls.” “You don’t understand,” I say, leaning …
I recently got some blackout curtains for my bedroom. This was pretty long overdue: about thirty feet from my bedroom window is a cheerfully bright, energy-efficient street lamp, which—while great when I’m taking the dog out for a nighttime stroll—is the photic equivalent of somebody standing in my azaleas and playing “Seventy-Six Trombones” while I’m …
