Gordon's Notes

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS...

I haven’t read Picketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century . I’ll skim it in the library some day, but I’m fine outsourcing that work to...

My 16yo is having his wisdom teeth removed tomorrow. Blame it on human domestication. The Economist explains the process . Domestication, w...

Eight years ago, I wondered if European Distemper killed the Native American dog  and added a footnote on an old personal hypothesis ... H...

I haven't done a Drake/Fermi Paradox post for ages. A lot has happened in the meantime; in particular estimates of the number of potenti...

Biologists study evolutionary "strategies", such as r and K selection . These are the strategies deployed the Great Programmer as...

There may be atheists in foxholes, but there are few realists in the C-suite - or the White House. Optimists rule, and they scorn realists ...

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought. Yes,  influ...

Steve Jobs bachelor party consisted of him, a reluctant Avie Tevanian, and one other guy. At that point in his life, he had no true friends....

I missed something new and important when I wrote ... Complexity and air fare pricing: Houston, we have a problem ... planning a plane trip ...

Smell, aka the application of algorithms for molecule classification, uses "quantum" effects ... BBC News - Quantum physics expla...

Charlie Stross says emergent corporate entities control America . Krugman says wealth alone is sufficient explanation , emergent entities ar...

Brad DeLong, my favorite economist, has published the latest edition of his annual Econ 1 Berkeley: September 29 2010 Economic Growth Lectur...

Which animal is biggest? Smallest? Fastest? Good questions, and there are lots of answers. It's the sort of thing we talk about over br...

It took me a day to realize that this comment on  Gordon's Notes: Apologetics: God and the Fermi Paradox was a spam comment (Spomment):...

Laypersons think of wolves and dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) as different species. That is not so, though the taxonomy is confused (see  wik...

Consider these three recent articles together ... One ... Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: Brains to Hand-axes quoting Science Daily Stone ...

Economists used to wonder, from a theoretical perspective, why "firms" including companies, and especially large corporations, exi...

Anthem, so someone wrote, puts the Hell in Health Care . Today's particular slice of Hades is a lovely example of how  fraud evolves whe...

Another of my speculation is cheap (but fun) posts. I searched Google Scholar today with the terms guided evolution cancer . I didn't ...