Ellen Spertus

“The economist Harry Markowitz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing modern portfolio theory: his groundbreaking “mean-variance portfolio optimization” showed how an investor could make an optimal allocation among various funds and assets to maximize returns at a given level of risk. So when it came time to invest his own retirement savings, it seems like Markowitz should have been the one person perfectly equipped for the job. What did he decide to do? I should have computed the historical covariances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it—or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions fifty-fifty between bonds and equities. Why”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“Stanford ecologist Deborah Gordon and computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar discovered that ants appear to have developed flow control algorithms millions of years before humans did.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“In March 1987, Gilbert White, a hematologist, conducted the first clinical trial of the hamster-cell-derived recombinant factor VIII at the Center for Thrombosis in North Carolina. The first patient to be treated was G.M., a forty-three-year-old man with hemophilia. As the initial drops of intravenous liquid dripped into his veins, White hovered anxiously around G.M.’s bed, trying to anticipate reactions to the drug. A few minutes into the transfusion, G.M. stopped speaking. His eyes were closed; his chin rested on his chest. “Talk to me,” White urged. There was no response. White was about to issue a medical alert when G.M. turned around, made the sound of a hamster, and burst into laughter.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“The British physicist William Lawrence Bragg once said that science is less about obtaining new facts than “discovering new ways of thinking about them.” Talking”
― Thor Hanson, The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History