May 17, 2020

Planting Sunflowers With Statistics

All I wanted was a bed of sunflowers.

This should be easy:

Buy sunflower seeds
Plant seeds
Wait

But it wasn’t that simple.

Ignore The Package Instruction

The problem is that I don’t like it when things are planted in straight lines. Sure, in a vegetable garden it’s fine, but for flowers and trees? No thanks. It looks unnatural.

Natural growing trees, and trees plated in straight lines.

Comparing the two forests above, I much prefer the randomly scattered trunks on the left, to the man-made rows on the right.

April 21, 2020

10 Things a 38-Year-Old Book Taught Me About Unix

1984 is ancient.

In a field as young as computer science, reading a book of this age is like reading about building a house in the middle ages; the tools, circumstances, and needs, were so different that the relevance today is limited.

So is there still anything to be learned from a book this old? Yes there is! (Especially if you also count fun-facts, that have almost no use today, as learnings.)

April 2, 2020

The World is Doing Great!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Right now, as the world experience the worst pandemic in many years, the title of this post might seem like an inappropriate exaggeration. Nevertheless, reading Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness will leave you with a feeling that things aren’t so bad after all.

A Life’s Work

The book sums up Hans’ lifework of teaching us how we systematically misinterpret the world. It explains the paradox that we all think the world is getting worse, while it is actually getting better.

April 17, 2019

Unix Philosophy Enforces Simplicity

In R&D of the Pharmaceutical industry there is a strong culture of reviewing - everything. This isn’t without reason. Many of the documents produced ends up being used to decide how patients should be treated. The material used for such decisions has to be sound.

At Novo Nordisk I have, together with Edita Karosiene, been working on making a program that can be used for documenting review on Unix based systems. We call it Trace.