Traitwise alpha general release

We've made a lot of progress on Traitwise our engine for permitting people to ask and answer seemingly random health-related questions. From this public Q&A we find correlations among all the participants and permit you to understand yourself in a larger context. We also hope that in the long term this gigantic dirty database of answers will reveal interesting things about human health. And, even through we've only barely begun to populate the database, already the correlation engine is turning up intriguing things. For example, some I've looked at today...

• Reporting that you "have trouble regulating your emotions" is strongly correlated to experiencing significant forgetfulness.
  
• Experiencing dry mouth is correlated to napping
• Being irritable is correlated to being clumsy

While some of these might be statistical flukes (we are, after all, already testing about half a million hypothesis!!) the engine will soon be able to crank up the sampling of those high-interest correlations so that we can asertain if these are statistical flukes or not. Of course, this all depends on participantion, so I beg all of my friends to go to traitwise.com and participate as well as forward the link to whomever they can.

http://www.traitwise.com

Traitwise alpha -- Call for participation

As many of my friends know, I've been working on a project for sometime that aims to develop a user-friendly interface for answering and creating health-related questions. We are excited to release the alpha version of http://www.traitwise.com and hope you'll help us by participating.

Traitwise is about giving us all a voice in our own health care. Not only can you answer questions, but you may develop questions of your own about any health related subject. We would very much appreciate it if you would create an account and then create questions,
especially about specific diseases or conditions based on your own experience -- after all, no one knows better about a condition than those who suffer from it.

The question creation process is very easy, and don't worry about making mistakes -- all questions go through a review process.

If you are interested in creating questions, you may review the question creation guidelines here, which may make the process easier for us:
http://communities.traitwise.com/mediawiki/index.php/Question_Creation_Guidelines

For those super-technical friends of mine, be sure to check out the "Analytics" page and see a prototype of how it is that our system finds interesting patterns. (Try "sleep" as an example).

Please note that as this is an alpha release and thus there are plenty of bugs to find (please report them on the "Feedback" page) and many features missing. The most important of the missing features is "results" -- that is returning back to you the interesting findings about your health. As it is now, the system mostly takes from you (your answers and questions) but gives back very little (the results). By answering questions, you are helping us to gather a sufficient amount of data that we may fully develop the results pages.

Thank you for all your help!
http://www.traitwise.com

Closet, bathroom, and bedroom

Bruce delivered the major pieces of my closet drawers and shelves today! Hooray, storage! We use the same CNC web-based box builder as before -- "Top Drawer Components" -- just love the results from them. Every box is dove-tailed, perfectly square, and already polyed at very reasonable prices. For the drawers I'll eventually put on drawer plates that will hide the slider hardware.



For some bathroom storage we ordered two different sizes of box and screwed them together for this nice effect. (There's several more bathroom fixtures yet to be installed.)


Meanwhile, last week we started on the "tree" element that spans out between then bathroom and the the bedroom. There's a lot more pieces to add to this, but all the heavy stuff is done.

Fountain pumps

It's taken years to get around to, but the fountain by my back door finally pumps water. Still lots of details to clean up -- hiding the plumbing and finishing the brickwork, but progress nevertheless!

Meanwhile, I've commissioned a bas-relief sculpture of the nerd-martyrdom of Hypatia from my friend Holly Melear that will go on the top back along the wall.

Found art - child's game map

I found this awesome playful game map laying carefully folded up in the park this morning. No doubt left by one of the neighborhood children, a game designer at heart. Game industry friends -- give this kid a job before school beats this wonderful playful world out of him/her! :-)

Camera ethernet

One or the combination of drugs I'm on (buproprion and celexa) induce very vivid dreams. The other night I dreamed about allowing laptop computers, which now often have built-in cameras, to communicate with each other by flashing their screens at each other. If the 640x480 cameras ran at 30 fps at, say, 50% efficiency then you might be able to achieve 30*(640*480)/4*8/2 = 9 Mbits/sec which is about the bandwidth of first generation Ethernet. (Although realistically I'd be impressed if you got 1 Mbps.) Implementing this might be a fun student programming assignment.

(Yes, it's true, I have super nerdy dreams! What did you expect?)

Lego the idea vs. Lego the product

Not Lego
(Absurdly custom modern Lego part from lego.com)

In engineering circles (such as the molecular programming conference where I am today), the word "Lego" is commonly used as a synonym for "an elegant and simple basis set whose parts can be arranged to assemble anything." The Lego company should be proud of the fact that their product has inspired at least three generations of engineers to the point where their name is evoked as the gold-standard of an elegant functional basis set.

However, the irony is that while engineers have adopted Lego as representing platonic perfection of elegant engineering, the Lego company itself has apparently abandoned the idea. Lego's current sets are monstrosities of custom non-interchangeable parts as shown in the picture above. The engineering-driven ethos that encouraged creativity to emerge from the arrangement of simple blocks has been replaced by a marketing-driven ethos of product tie-ins and creativity-free model building. At best, today's Lego users are encouraged to build their super-specific models where practically every piece is custom and then tear them down to reuse some of the pieces in non-intended ways. But, this is a far cry from starting from a bucket of rectangular bricks and then dreaming up one's own creations. As a result, Lego might make more profit, but new generations of engineers will not be inspired in the same way as before.

Other toys, such as the supremely well-designed K*Nex, have tried to fill Lego's lost role but the marketing people there have also apparently taken over the company and have infected K*Nex with the same kind of absurd non-generic parts as demonstrated by this Sesame St. tie I found on their site.


Not K*Nex
(Absurdly specific product tie in from knex.com)

The evolution of these toy companies from pure-nerd-vision to marketing-tie-in-sell-out is a perfect demonstration of how nerd-culture and marketing-culture will forever be in a violent struggle. As far as toys go, we're losing.