, 2 min read
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a clinical trial for “an anti-aging pill”. The pill is simply metformin. Metformin is a cheap drug that is safe and effective to treat type 2 diabetes, an old-age disease. While it has been a part of modern medicine for a few decades,…
, 4 min read
When I took Physics courses in college, I learned about how astronauts should age a tiny bit slower than us. Of course, they would be exposed to a lot more radiation so they might develop more cancers. But all in all, I would have been excited about the prospect of living in space. Then the…
, 1 min read
As we work at something, we usually get better and better. Then you hit a plateau. For most of human history, people have been hitting this plateau, and they just kept working until death or retirement, whichever came first. Today, if you ever reach the upper bound, chances are good that you should…
, 1 min read
Being ever more productive… is a duty
, 5 min read
Ten years ago, a team lead by Irina Conboy at the University of California at Berkeley showed something remarkable in a Nature paper: if you take old cells and put them in a young environment, you effectively rejuvenate them. This is remarkable work that was cited hundreds of times. Their work…
, 4 min read
Life has a way to give me what I want. Back in 2009, I wrote that instead of following conferences or journals, I would rather follow individual researchers. At the time, there was simply no good way to do this, other than visiting constantly the web page of a particular researcher. A few years…
, 5 min read
Many famous people have recently grown concerned that artificial intelligence is going to become a threat to humanity in the near future. The wealthy entrepreneur Elon Musk and the famous physicist Stephen Hawking are among them. It is obvious that any technology, including artificial intelligence,…
, 4 min read
We all know the regular multiplication that we learn in school. To multiply a number by 3, you can multiply a number by two and add it with itself. Programmers write: a * 3 = a + (a<<1) where a<<1 means "shift the bit values by one to the left, filling in with a zero". That's…
, 2 min read
Modern software spends much time hashing objects. There are many fancy hash functions that are super fast. However, without getting fancy, we can easily double the speed of commonly used hash functions. Java conveniently provides fast hash functions in its Arrays class. The Java engineers like to…
, 2 min read
Though we have plenty of memory in our computers, there are still cases where you want to minimize memory usage if only to avoid expensive cache faults. To compare the memory usage of various standard map data structures, I wrote a small program where I create a map from the value k to the value k…
, 3 min read
After arrays and linked lists, one of the first data structures computer-science students learn is the search tree. It usually starts with the binary search tree, and then students move on to B-trees for greater scalability. Search trees are a common mechanism used to implement key-value maps (like…
, 1 min read
Back in 1903, the Wright brothers flew for the first time, 20 feet above ground, for 12 seconds. Hardly anyone showed up. The event went vastly unnoticed. It was not reported in the press. The Wright brothers did not become famous until many years later. Yet, ten years later, in 1914, we had war…
, 2 min read
Economists worry that we have entered in a secular stagnation called the Great Stagnation. To summarize: whereas industrial productivity grew steadily for most of the XXth century, it started to flatten out in the 1970s. We have now entered an era where, on paper, we are not getting very much…
, 6 min read
To the ancient Greeks, the male reproductive organ was mysterious. They had this organ that can expand suddenly, then provide the seed of life itself. Today, much of biology remains uncatalogued and mysterious, but the male reproductive organ is now fairly boring. We know that it can be cut (by…
, 3 min read
Two of my favorite data structures are the bitset and the heap. The latter is typically used to implement a priority queue. Both of these data structures come by default in Java. In JavaScript, there is a multitude of implementations, but few, if any, are focused on offering the best performance.…
, 3 min read
Biologists and medical researchers are used to drinking data with a straw. Doctors measure heart rate, weight and blood pressure, one at a time, at a high cost. When patients suffer from serious diseases, like cancer, measures are even more expensive. To make matters worse, measures are usually not…
, 2 min read
Anyone who has a critical mind and who attended college long enough, knows not to trust textbooks. They are full of mistakes. Because textbooks tend to copy each other, you cannot even trust a fact that appears in multiple textbooks. Mistakes reproduce. Some mistakes are conceptual. For example,…
, 3 min read
Driven by companies like Google, the hacker spirit is winning. Though we fail to see it, our culture is being hacked. One annoying element of this culture has become ubiquitous: constant updates. The old-school software industry minimized updates. Then companies like Google or Facebook came about…
, 4 min read
Many years ago, I interviewed for a job at a nearby college. One of the professors started talking about how they were working to take the “hacker spirit” out of the students. At the time, I had not yet realized that most professors never build anything themselves. I had not realized that they…
, 6 min read
Vernor Vinge is a retired mathematics professor who became famous through his science-fiction novels. He is also famous as being one of the first to contemplate the idea of a “technological singularity“. There is debate as to what the technological singularity, but the general idea goes as…