- Why you shouldn’t store your data in Excel.
- Article of the week: RCT of auto versus alloSCT as first-line consolidation in T-cell lymphoma.
- Interview of the week: Miyamoto in the New Yorker.
- Thread of the week: Lear linear algebra. Wolfram University has a good beginners’ course.
- Photos of the week: so many good ones. Oh who am I kidding? It’s actually this one.
- Chart of the week: Evolution of the alphabet. There was another good chart this week too, and probably more consequential.
- Discussion of the week: Branko Milanović and Russ Roberts mostly on the Nobel prize
- Letter of the week: Lunch is bad for me
- Tech tip of the week: Uninstall Google Chrome and the malware that comes with it (bonus life tip of the week: Write better notes)
- Thread of the week: The future of work(?)
- A depressing truth which reminded me that season 2 of the Leftovers is the best season of any show ever made.
- Discussion of the week: Is “Finite and Infinite Games” a masterpiece or dangerously delusional (after reading the replies I favor the latter, and this is a good reason why)
- Software of the week: CellPAINT-2.0, and I had to pick up my jaw off the floor after seeing what it can do (this tweet also made my jaw drop but for all the wrong reasons).
- Article of the week: Shedding of viable SARS-CoV-2 after immunosuppressive therapy for cancer.
- Thread of the week: David Steensma’s best one yet — A brief history of aspirin (bonus thread: Accidental renaissance photos)
- The nightmare continues. Novartis should ask for its money back.
- Thread of the week: some RECOVERY trial updates. And if you prefer vaccines, there is a thread for that.
- Tool of the week: SciTLDR. Turns your abstracts into tweetable one-liners. Not sure it’s a positive development but it’s interesting.
- Taleb tweet/video of the week: discussing the Danish mask study with Yaneer Bar-Yam. Here is the paper if by some miracle you’ve missed it.
- More Prince, less Covid-19, please.
- USMLE Step 2 CS is now virtual. I am trying hard to find reasons for this other than the purely cynical and so far I’m failing.
- ABIM has its issues too.
- Idea management tools. I was using Roam Research this time last year and stopped as soon as it became clear privacy would always be an issue with an online-only tool.
- Article of the week: Exceptional responders.
- Taleb tweet of the week: Eggs!
- Remember how people blamed sugar for tumor growth? Well, they can now start blaming fat as well.
- Life is complex.
- Article of the week: super-spreader parties.
- Taleb tweet of the week: if you are in six+ sigma territory time and again, your probability distribution is wrong.
- Quote of the week: “Live your life honestly and make sure you are never caught”. Truly a quote for our times.
- Abolish time zones! (I’ve had this idea for a while, glad I wasn’t the only one)
- Taleb on 538’s election model
- Knowing the result ≠ counting all votes, legal or not
- I finally understand Bayesian statistics.
- RIP Sean Connery and Alex Trabek.
- The known unknowns of Covid-19
- The blue checkmark correlates with not distinguishing correlation from causation. (or does it actually cause the ignorance?)
- Someone at DHS hasn’t thought through the second order effects of their stupendously inept J-1 policy change.
- The best essay I read this week was written in 1944.
- Zombie starfish and mutant crayfish. Halloween must be near.
- The true value of Twitter: one misspelled, 2-like post can lead you down some magnificent rabbit holes. Bonus: An introduction to mathematical oncology, which is part of this JCO compilation.
- Median time from application submission to drug approval was 3.3 months (range 0.4 to 5.9 months) with real-time oncology review. Hard to get much faster than that, so why do some economists still want to speed up review?
- Another top physician-scientist leaves academia for industry, and announces it in style.
- Nassim Taleb doesn’t know that DOs and MDs are nowadays functionally equivalent but Twitter quickly sets him straight.
- Thread of the week: Sarajevo assassination 1914 — what really happened.