Joe Chou

TIL that splattering your scrubs with beet juice at lunch leaves you looking like you were at a VERY bad C-section. And it doesn’t blot out. So now I look like an axe murderer, taking care of the babies.

A view of Earth as seen by NASA's EPIC camera aboard the NOAA DSCOVR spacecraft, capturing our planet suspended in the darkness of space from nearly a million miles away

Installed Linux Mint a few days ago. It’s good. Very good actually. Didn’t expect this, but I could see myself migrating eventually, or even pretty soon. (Currently Mac OS >>> Windows)

Thoughts on the impact of exponentially (literally) growing capabilities of AI. Very much worth the 10 - 15 minutes to read, particularly if you're closer to the start than the end of your career, no matter what that career might be.

Coffee and improved cognition, reduced dementia >130,000 people followed 37 years Benefit seen only with caffeinated coffee or tea and most pronounced ~2 cups/day @jama.com ☕️☕️https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2844764

Encouraging a kid who decided to get vaccinated, in my own apparently strange way. #PedSky

So much depth to the half-time show that I missed. Really nice post sharing the cultural meaning. www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQu... www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQu...

This is today. I guess for me it’ll have to be “Eat ice cream for third breakfast day”

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

Was working with a medical student recently who said I had a “moral code”. I don’t really know what that means but I felt strangely disturbed. They probably shouldn’t let me work with medical students. I’m contaminating them.

Groundhog Day Meaning https://xkcd.com/3202/ Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania. Explain xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3202

I prefer: “Don’t believe anything without thought.” - Me

This is both horrifying and expected. I have been dismayed at how many clinicians I know are quite willing and even excited to offload their clinical judgement to large language models.

Anyone else find this concerning? #MedSky #PedSky #NeoSky

Parents terrified to leave home to bring kid to the hospital is yet another thing making me very angry (bili over 25 mg/dL)

You do have to give Anthropic credit here. It is rare for a lab to publish data questioning its own tools. Meta constantly buries internal findings that challenge their business model. This kind of transparency is uncommon and should be encouraged instead of dog-piled. Link to the full study:

Really important research out of Anthropic: In a RCT study, they found AI coding assistance resulted in a 𝟏𝟕% 𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐩 in mastery for users. While tasks were slightly faster, offloading thinking to AI stunted skill growth. Using AI to explain code, rather than just write it did help with retention.

I had a mom in the nursery ask if I was The Baby Whisperer yesterday, after calming a cranky small one. Honestly, my dream retirement would include being a volunteer cuddler. Someday.

There are no words.

“This is an image of universal moral urgency, akin to a small number of photographs that once upon a time had the power to change our behavior, away from cruelty or indifference and in the direction of basic decency.“ Gift Link

Dang it, how did I miss this? Back in 2018 I worked (very slowly) through an earlier edition of this book using R but always meant to go through it again (with the 2nd edition) to try to cement understanding. This is perfect! Hopefully I can catch and keep up!

Just installed #LibreOffice for use on MacOS — any tips or suggestions? It’s a bit janky with intermittent app hangs on saves (which I’ve seen previously reported but without solutions) and odd UI issues, but I want alternatives to M$ Office and Google apps.

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

Is anyone surprised? #nevertrustUSA #trumpisarussianpuppet #USAisarogueterroriststate

Uh, Denmark? Massachusetts is also pretty nice — maybe a two for one deal?

Data is beautiful. #dataviz

Thank you, Massachusetts Department of Public Health. #PedSky

Here's an annoying behavior that resulted in a hard to find bug: Our build of SnowflakeSQL returns queries in R with: - datetimes as POSIXct (yay!) - time in local (yay!) - timezone in UTC (boo...) It'd be great if I my hospital was near the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, but it isn't.

This is a wonderful and extraordinary YouTube series. While it's not "actually" Richard Feynman speaking, it's inspired by him, and the joy and wonder comes through. The explanations are at a low enough level for me to understand, so much as quantum mechanics can be "understood". It's inspiring.

Thanks GlobalTV Canada! 🇨🇦

> We archived around 86M music files, representing around 99.6% of listens. It’s a little under 300TB. This is the largest music metadata database that is publicly available. Many interesting 📊 charts on this page that can only be made by having this scale of data. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Came across a bad joke: What do you get when you cross Cookie Monster with Cthulhu? I’m generally against AI-generated images, but I needed to visualize it:

Nice work by the authors of this MMWR with some good vaccine news! The report found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines provided significant protection against COVID-19 related emergency department and urgent care visits among U.S. children aged 9 months to 17 years. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...

Challenger 650 for X-Plane sim is picky… tried high altitude flight for the first time at 36,000 feet. I might have accidentally deactivated cabin pressurization + climate control. So, the passengers might have all passed out and the cabin might be at -3°C. No repeat customers from this flight.

I ignored the strip.clip argument in #ggplot2 for way too long 😲 Combined with a small negative margin tweak, you can place facet labels inside each panel. A tiny trick that makes small multiples feel so much cleaner. 🔵 no manual coordinates 🔵 inherits theme styling 🔵 scales nicely when resizing

New levels of geek achieved — for flight sim, I bought the X-Plane Bombardier Challenger 650 by Hot Start. Wow. Its systems are so accurately modeled that I’m now going through the real life Challenger’s 1000+ page Airplane Flight Manual to better understand what the sim is doing.

My wife has been repeatedly repairing large holes in her knit socks, and I believe she is well on her way to creating the Socks of Theseus.

Wife has been using the 3D printer at the makerspace a lot. Finally broke down and got one for home. Meet my Hippo of Disapproval. Its role will be to sit on my desk and unsuccessfully prod me into being productive.

Need an article for Journal Club? Apparently people are more willing to be decent if Batman is present… PubMed: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41184421/ #AltJournalClub

Refilling the water reservoir for the NICU coffee maker this morning — mystified by the .XAM label. Yes, I really need this coffee badly.

Warned my NICU team to be careful about using the CDC as a source of reliable information. Hope the AAP steps up, perhaps expanding the Red Book to cover topics I used to go to the CDC for.

At least half a decade later, the bunny is still going strong… Copy paste the bunny and then put something else in his hand 😃 (\_/) (°-°) />🥕 My kids’ contributions: (\_/) (\_/) (°-°) (°-°) />🔪 🔫<\ (Bringing a knife to a gun fight…) (\_/) (\_/) (🕶️) (._.) / \ />🕶️

This is a real flight school, teaching people to fly planes!!! Like????