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The Invisible Privilege of Not Being a Black Man
Mostly I post about science, but there was a very good Morning Edition item I’d like to share. It aired a couple days ago in the wake of the tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death. I think it did an...
View ArticleA Python GEDCOM Parser
Excited by my discovery of Mayflower ancestry (or perhaps by the apparent confirmation that my genealogy records weren’t totally made up), I decided to contact other individuals on 23andme who were...
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23andme’s First Patent
Update, June 1: 23andme has added an addendum to their announcement. In particular, the addendum clarifies and seems to promise that the patent will not be enforced with respect to performing...
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Phineas and Name Uniqueness
It’s been a while since I posted to this personal blog — so long, in fact, that I have had a child! We named him “Phineas Charles Ball”. (Photos are on Flickr.) “Phineas” is a fairly unusual name —...
View ArticlePersonal Genome Project talk at 2012 Open Science Summit
Finally I have a video to point people to if they’re at all curious about what I work on. This is a talk about the Personal Genome Project that I gave at the 2012 Open Science Summit. It’s an overview...
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Celebrating Seven Years with Seven Percent
(This is a joint blog post with Chris.) Today is Giving Tuesday. It’s a great idea. Here in the US, something feels odd about following our national day of giving thanks (Thanksgiving) with the...
View ArticleWell, That’s Ironic
I’m lucky and grateful to have been recommended by George Church for Genome Technology’s Seventh Annual Young Investigators. The profile they wrote — “Madeleine Price Ball: Free the Data” — is really...
View ArticleWhat can we do in Aaron’s wake?
The brother of my friend Noah Swartz committed suicide last Friday. I didn’t know Noah’s brother Aaron, so these are the terms I relate to it in. The Swartz family is close to many of my friends: Mako...
View ArticleI study body-books
Theo Sanderson has made a text editor that checks if a body of text complies with using only the 1,000 most common English words. This was inspired by XKCD’s “Up-Goer Five” — a description of the...
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CC0 all the media
I’ve released as CC0 all the pictures I’ve created and shared on Wikimedia Commons. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while; Aaron’s death and — more specifically — Nina Paley’s release of...
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