This piece contains some longer excerpts from Watson’s writing about the discovery of DNA that tell the story far more beautifully than I ever could. The tale is full of false starts, randomness, and human flaws. I do my best to tie points together where necessary. But, for this piece, I let the story of the discovery of DNA itself be the star of the show. This week I began reading Flowers for Algernon.

Subscribe now Last week, I finished a new biography that I’ve been waiting on for months. Eagerly waiting for a book to be released is not something I make a habit of. But this was different: this book was about the great Johnny von Neumann.

Subscribe now The importance of grant-funding panels in science cannot be overstated. Every year in the US, tens of billions of dollars of scientific grant-funding get allocated based on the whims of these panels. The opinions of panels have a massive influence over what can and cannot get researched.

Subscribe now In the previous Engineering Innovation post, I detailed how America’s research ecosystem has become less applied and less exploratory since the mid-1900s. To most, the concept of true exploratory research is fairly intuitive. But wrapping one’s mind around research that is truly applied isn’t so obvious. In today’s piece, I’ll provide a concrete example of a possible course of applied research from the field of economics.

America’s sub-optimal use of applied and basic grants is a major problem. We have a system where our applied research is poor at producing real applications, and our basic research doesn’t provide the freedom to explore new, unproven areas. In this piece, I’ll dive into: What the goals of applied and basic research were intended to be. How the American research ecosystem not living up to its goals in practice.

This post is the first of my new Substack, the Engineering Innovation Newsletter. Every piece in this newsletter shares a common goal: to propose concrete ways forward for those looking to help shape the future of technological research and innovation.

Speaking as a social scientist…real scientists are the coolest I love progress studies and metascience. I’ve loved it since before I knew it had a name. I initially stumbled into the field while doing background research on the Manhattan Project for a project I was working on at my job.

A large chunk of Twitter is furious. In the wake of Tom Brady winning his 7th Super Bowl Ring, the consensus NFL GOAT (Greatest of All Time) has started to be called the "GOAT of GOATS." Brady's Super Bowl win this last week was with a new team and a shortened offseason due to Covid-19. This seemed to solidify to most doubters that the fabled "Patriot Way" may have been the "Tom Brady Way" all along.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a dataset of California STD rates from 2001 until a couple of years ago…and..well…this article pretty much wrote itself. As a responsible social scientist, I obviously had to lay out my hypothesis before conducting my data work because that’s what responsible social scientists do when they’re pretending to be real scientists.

Author’s note: After publishing this, the graphic in this article ended up making the front page of Reddit and that was really cool! If you're anything like me you've probably wondered, "What do white people actually do for fun?" Are their weekends just golf and skiing if they're on the rich end? Building decks and fishing if they're more working class? Is there a lot of bocce ball involved?

Welcome to the Data Barguments section of Freaktakes! This is the whimsical part of the Substack that I do for fun. The other section of the Substack, Engineering Innovation is where I do my serious writing on metascience and progress studies related things. Data Barguments are the articles that nobody asked for, nobody needed, but people think are pretty damn fun.