Podcast: Personalizing hardware with data? Personalizing people with CRISPR?

Jim Stogdill, Jon Bruner, and Mike Loukides chat about personalizing all the things.

This week in our Radar podcast, Jon and I both had colds. You’ll be pleased to know that I edited out all the sneezes, coughs, and general upper respiratory mayhem, but unfortunately there is no Audacity filter for a voice that sounds like a frog caught in a mouse trap (mine). If that hasn’t dissuaded you from listening, we covered some things that were really interesting, at least to us.

Here are some links to things you’ll hear in this episode:

Are you a microphone geek? You’re welcome. Jon is a maximizer, I’m a satisfier. Mike remains indeterminate.

Blackberry’s salvation may reside in its QNX embedded systems division.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was an amazing technical organization in its heyday. Railroads were that time’s web, and Pennsylvania was its Google. It created a lot of the practices we still use today for testing and other technical disciplines. Also, I suppose if Atlas were to shrug today (shudder) John Galt would be a data center designer.

Modular Science is trying to make biological sciences more reproducible. And less dependent on (nearly) free graduate students.

Synbiota Science is doing a Hack Day. The goal: figure out how to synthesize a compound that costs more than ink jet printer ink.

Sure you can read DNA for $1,000 now; but can you write it? CRISPR.

The next BioCoder is coming out on April 15th. Sign up for it here.

D.E. Shaw Research is doing computational chemistry (not D.H. I said it with a froggy voice, though, so maybe you didn’t notice.)

Mike added The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, to my reading list. It’s described as a “chilling story,” but Mike gushed about it as if it were a love story. I’m worried about him.

I likely missed a few, but that’s probably more than enough. Thanks for listening.


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