Category Archives: Philosophy

Is bioinformatics possible?

I recently gave a talk at the Bio-Pitch event at the French-Japanese institute. I was fortunate to be able to speak about some of the ideas I’ve been developing here among so many interesting projects (MetaPhorest, HTGAA, Yoko Shimizu, Tupac Bio, Bento Lab etc). The topic of my talk was “Is bioinformatics possible”? A deliberate […]

Reactive software and the outer world

At Scala Matsuri a few weeks ago (incidentally, an excellent conference), I was fortunate to be able to attend Jonas Bonér’s impassioned talk about resilience and reactive software. His theme: “without resilience, nothing else matters”. At the core of it is a certain way of thinking about the ways that complex systems fail. Importantly, complex […]

The inexhaustible wealth of appearance, information and specificity

When perceiving an object, for example a chair, the statement “this is X” (this is a chair) is almost entirely uninteresting. The concept by which we identify the object is a mere word, and in a sense entirely devoid of meaning. That concept does help us align this object with other entities in space and […]

Mysteries of the scientific method

Scientific method can be understood as the following steps: formulating a hypothesis, designing an experiment, carrying out experiments, and drawing conclusions. Conclusions can feed into hypothesis formulation again, in order for a different (related or unrelated) hypothesis to be tested, and we have a cycle. This feedback can also take place via a general theory that […]

Collecting books

Until about five years ago, I would hesitate to buy books if I had other, unfinished books that I was currently reading. It seemed irresponsible to “start on something new” without finishing things that were in progress. This is the kind of attitude that leads you to visit every single room and see every single […]