The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

– from “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Neal Stephenson

In the interest of pleasing both audiences and allowing you to more easily sort the wheat from the chaff, I’m moving my science writing to chrisamiller.com/science while maintaining my personal blog right here. I want to emphasize that this isn’t about separating my personal and professional lives, as that’s a near impossibility in this age of the internet. Rather, it’s about offering focused content to just the people that want to hear it.

I’m also making a resolution to post on a near-daily basis over there, to get that site off on the right foot. Some days it may just be a code snippet, or a good quotation, but I’ll try to keep the content flowing with some more meaty posts about bioinformatics, article reviews, and thoughts about scientific culture.

You see, a conservative is someone who would rather pay $5,000 for police and fire protection that’s only for paying customers than $2,000 for police and fire protection that helps everyone, even people who didn’t pay anything, even if the quality of service is exactly the same in both cases.

See also health care reform, school vouchers, attempts to mitigate the housing crisis (“We can’t do something that helps all of us! Someone might get something they didn’t deserve!”)

via straight on Mefi

You can download it on Github: iTunes-to-Guayadeque

1. Houston
2. Galveston
3. Los Angeles
4. San Francisco
5. St. Louis
6. Rocky Mount, MO
7. Munich
8. Berlin
9. Paris
10. London
11. Dublin
12. Chicago
13. Cold Spring Harbor, NY

Next year should be a little less hectic.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

– Bertrand Russell