Information & truth. What’s the difference? I’ve always liked this analogy from the world of data science: data is information, but models are truth. Let’s start with the data. This image shows total monthly publications for a particular journal up until mid 2024: On its own, the data doesn’t tell us much that’s interesting. But a little bit of analysis can go a long way here.
R + AI, uv, RAG+Zotero, Quarto books, Codex in Positron, Positron assistant &
Appalachian History Series – Blackjewel: How One Coal Company Turned Appalachian Mines Into Bankruptcy Assets On strip mine benches above eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, Blackjewel looked like any other late era coal operator. Conveyor belts crossed hollow mouths. Rusting loaders sat beside black ponds. Permit numbers were nailed to posts at the edge of steep, gray highwalls. On paper, though, Blackjewel was something different.
Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of James Harrod of Bedford, Pennsylvania Along the courthouse lawn at Harrodsburg, a roadside marker and a reconstructed fort point back toward a man most Kentuckians know only by name. James Harrod does not loom in popular memory the way Daniel Boone does, yet the town that still carries his name began as his outpost on the edge of Virginia’s empire.
Back on October I presented Everything you always wanted to know: plant pathway modelling in WikiPathways (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18149988) at the Knowledge Graphs for Plant and Microbiome Multiomics symposium (see this archived LinkedIn post) on 14th October 2025 (youtube recording). I had not found time yet to post about this meeting, but it was an awesome list of speakers, regrettable absense of some others, but resulting in new contacts and some
What would happen to prices if firms started internalizing the social impact of their behavior? A few years ago I published a model of moral management in competitive markets (Martin 2019) and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take the price and quantity functions from this model to make a price index.
None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.
Das Känguru hat uns auf dem #39C3 erklärt, dass jeder erste Sonntag im Monat digitaler Unabhängigkeitstag (#did) ist.
TipHey, I’m writing a book about this! I’m actually writing a book about this stuff. It turns out there isn’t a lot of literature on how to do post-training at the level too big for single-GPU laptop-sized hobby projects and requiring enterprise reliability on one hand, but not quite at the scale of multi-team distributed post-training you’d get in foundation labs.
Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Travis Glenn Brock of Leslie, Kentucky On a winter morning in 2010, deep under Leslie County, a young miner from Helton was doing the work he had learned as a teenager. He stood beside a remote controlled cutting machine in a crosscut of the Abner Branch Rider mine, trimming the mine floor and ribs so the crew could keep advancing.
Appalachian History Series – The Coal Camp Post Office at the Heart of a Company Town The Benham Post Office has never been the biggest building in town. It does not tower over the valley like the old tipples once did, and it does not have the imposing bulk of the commissary that now houses the Kentucky Coal Museum. What it has instead is persistence.