[dxbydt]

Tremendously enjoyed your post, particularly the part about fucking around with gene assays. My wife is a physician, and sometimes I rile her by saying she is not helping real people because she is just a glorified hashmap. She does a lookup on the disease and returns a drug prescription. She says that's still better than fucking around with gene assays in a labcoat :) I'm completely familiar with your line of reasoning. Its just that the number of nodes needs to traverse from a styloot to a vaccine is significant. Its not zero. Most companies get around this by simply making large philanthropic donations from time to time. But you'll still agree that's not the same. Some of my classmates got their math & physics PhDs and then gave it all up and returned to India to feed the poor and work with the homeless. When I look at that and then look at the fact that I'm messing around with sobol sequences....it just irks me, that's all. I think that was the point of the article - dealing directly with the real world full of real people, and not via some long indirect causal mechanism.