Dolly's Generous Legacy: Do Rich Women Give More Than Rich Men?
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Dolly Parton gave away about as much money as she kept. Her death sent me to the data: do the world's richest women give more than the richest men?
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Single-Cell Is About to Have Its Placenta Microbiome Moment
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Microbial ecology spent twenty years learning that in low-biomass samples, the thing you measure is partly your reagents. Single-cell has the same exposure, most of the same tooling gaps, and none of the same scar tissue — and the field is moving into exactly the regime where it starts to matter.
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Journal Safari: Seven Million Parameters and a MacBook Air
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Journal Safari #3. Pan-human Azimuth puts 27 million cells from 23 tissues on one annotation tree, then classifies them with a model 70× smaller than the foundation model I read in July — and wins. The contribution is not the model. It is the labels.
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School Gets Out at 12:05 on Thursdays
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California just gave my daughter free transitional kindergarten, and I'm thrilled. Then I saw the bell schedule. A data-driven look at how American school days and American work days stopped speaking to each other.
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Journal Safari: What Do You Buy by Sequencing Half a Million Whole Genomes?
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Journal Safari #2. The UK Biobank just finished whole-genome sequencing all 490,640 participants. I read the resource paper to answer one question: what does WGS actually buy you over the array and exomes we already had — and who pays the storage bill afterward?
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Journal Safari: Can You Compress a Cell Into a Word?
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Kicking off Journal Safari, my biweekly close-read of one recent paper. First up: CellVQ, a 500-million-parameter single-cell foundation model that squashes every cell into a discrete code — and the peer reviews that quietly agreed with my doubts.
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Data, Dirt, and Agentic AI: Why I Coded a Gardening App
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Battling grocery monopolies, testing AI coding agents, and planting a mutant sweet potato with my three-year-old.
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If 3.5% of Us Protest, We Win
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We need 11.9 million people to show up to the No Kings protests this weekend. Here is the data on why nonviolent resistance actually works.
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Zohran's Math: Can Taxing the 1% Really Pay for Free Buses, Childcare, and Rent Freezes?
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NYC's mayor-elect wants to tax millionaires 2% more and raise corporate taxes. I crunched the numbers – and dreamed bigger.
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