Mencken quote

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

from Wikiquote page on
H L Mencken. 1920

Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock

Bill Ford

Good talk, but he does have a bad vocal tick

Will smart, networked cars save us?

Fords original vision was to give everyone personal mobility. Pre car, most people lived their entire life in a 25 mile radius circle.

Entrepenurial science

The grand vision:
Understand viral evolution, both inter and intra host, so we can stop the bastards.

How do I fill in the details?
What do I bring?
Napolean had the art of artillery, thomas had machine learning. And me?
What do I see, which is currently not in the world  yet should be?
Theory of contagion- done
Vaccines- done
Antibiotics- done
Vector control- done
Mathematical epidemiology- done
Emergence of resistance- done
Quasi species- done
Genetics (geno to pheno)- done

Resistance pathways

We know virus develop resistance to drugs. The interesting cases are when resistance depends on combinations of mutations; mutational pathways.

The concept pathway implies an order. Is there one?
fitness landscapse or seascape?
survival of the fittest or the flattest?
colonizer/competitor dynamics?

What is a reference sequence? Does this define the virus???

Possible titles "Tracing evolutionary pathways through seascapes and bottlenecks"

hmmm-- ship in a bottle, early mariners, exploring, setting up trade outposts???

How to do high-impact work

What question do people want answered?

Need to be early or first, find/define an emerging subject.

HIV was a field before Thomas, but not statistical learning and HIV.

Protein docking was a field before Thomas, but not with flexible protein structures.

What is mine?

Thomas suggests integrative model stretching from cell to population

rates of HIV evolution

Prabhav suggested comparing rates of viral evolution within patients to those within a transmission cluster.

We could measure/compare rates of adoptation to treatment to rates of adoptation to a new host.

The confound is that we identify the transmission clusters via genetic distance. It would be easier if we had a known transmission chain.

Alternately, EuResist does have ~6000 cases with two samples taken under one treatment. We could compare rates here with rates after a treatment change.

Yang Lan: The generation that's remaking China

Yang Lan

The Oprah of China.

This talk opened my eyes to the currents flowing in modern China. China faces the same social unrest as we see everywhere in the world today. Dissaffected youth, aware that the system is set up to exploit them, and angry about it.