Radiation equipment

John Tukey said that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard. This morning I got to play in IsoTherapeutics‘ backyard. The most photogenic thing on the tour they gave me was their box for working with highly radioactive material with robotic arms. (There was nothing hot inside at the time.)

 

Time exchange rate

At some point in the past, computer time was more valuable than human time. The balance changed long ago. While everyone agrees that human time is more costly than computer time, it’s hard to appreciate just how much more costly.

You can rent time on a virtual machine for around $0.05 per CPU-hour. You could pay more or less depending on on-demand vs reserved, Linux vs Windows, etc.

Suppose the total cost of hiring someone—salary, benefits, office space, equipment, insurance liability, etc. —is twice their wage. This implies that a minimum wage worker in the US costs as much as 300 CPUs.

This also implies that programmer time is three orders of magnitude more costly than CPU time. It’s hard to imagine such a difference. If you think, for example, that it’s worth minutes of programmer time to save hours of CPU time, you’re grossly under-valuing programmer time. It’s worth seconds of programmer time to save hours of CPU time.

What would Donald Knuth do?

I’ve seen exhortations to think like Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein, but these leave me cold. I can’t imagine thinking like either of these men. But here are a few famous people I could imagine emulating when trying to solve a problem

What would Donald Knuth do? Do a depth-first search on all technologies that might be relevant, and write a series of large, beautiful, well-written books about it all.

What would Alexander Grothendieck do? Develop a new field of mathematics that solves the problem as a trivial special case.

What would Richard Stallman do? Create a text editor so powerful that, although it doesn’t solve your problem, it does allow you to solve your problem by writing a macro and a few lines of Lisp.

What would Larry Wall do? Bang randomly on the keyboard and save the results to a file. Then write a language in which the file is a program that solves your problem.

What would you add to the list?

 

Erasure coding white paper

Last year I worked with Hitachi Data Systems to evaluate the trade-offs of replication and erasure coding as ways to increase data storage reliability while minimizing costs. This lead to a white paper that has just been published:

Compare Cost and Performance of Replication and Erasure Coding
Hitachi Review Vol. 63 (July 2014)
John D. Cook
Robert Primmer
Ab de Kwant

Open source dissertation

Three cheers for Brent Yorgey! He’s finishing up his dissertation, and he’s posting drafts online, including a GitHub repo of the source.

Cheer 1: He’s not being secretive, fearing that someone will scoop his results. There have been a few instances of one academic scooping another’s research, but these are rare and probably not worth worrying about. Besides, a public GitHub repo is a pretty good way to prove your priority.

Cheer 2: Rather than being afraid someone will find an error, he’s inviting a world-wide audience to look for errors.

Cheer 3: He’s writing a dissertation that someone might actually want to read! That’s not the fastest route to a degree. It’s even actively discouraged in some circles. But it’s generous and great experience.

Twitter news

Starting next week, @MedVocab will post two tweets a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon (CDT).

I’ve stopped posting to @DailySymbol. It was a fun experiment, but it was time to wrap it up.

My most popular account, @CompSciFact, now has over 100,000 followers. It’s interesting how some Twitter accounts take off and some don’t. CompSciFact has done quite well but I’ve shut down several other accounts that never gained much of a following.

You can find a list of my accounts here with a very brief description of each. Some of the accounts are a little broader than the name implies.