I’ve been an extremely long term lurker, having kept an eye on these boards for about 8 years, but for various reasons have been unable to post, so now that I am able to come forth I thought I would take the chance to introduce myself.
I’m a 38 year old male, living in Maryland on the outskirts of DC. I’m Married to a wonderful woman. I have a PhD in statistics and am putting it to use analyzing high dimensional genetic data for the National Institutes of Health. Politically I’m quite liberal, and in terms of religion I tend towards atheism, so fit the standard prototypical doper.
I imagine I will hang out primarily in the Great Debates, BBQ pit and GQ. I mostly prefer to listen rather than talk, hence the 8 year silence, and I may not have too much time to provide timely responses, but I’ll try to keep up with any comments I do make.
I think he’s working on raising an army of Godzillas, supported by a Mothra air force, to take over the world. We should have a betting pool on whether he succeeds before the Mayans kill us in a couple years. I’ll hold the money…
Sorry Quasi. I didn’t see an obvious Waiting for Godot reference in your post. Also don’t know the play very well. Read it. Hated it. Watched it performed live. Hated it more. Was later asked to run the light board for it. Made stabby face and growled. Did it anyway. Hated the show to infinity. Still trying to block the memories. But ya don’t get a chance to drop that sort of trivial reference just every day, so I was saving it for the right moment…and sadly, arrived too late.
Regarding high dimensional genetic data, I deal with such things as gene expression data in which we measure which gene in a given patient sample are being expressed as RNA and so are active in a given sample. There are generally thousands of such measurements for each sample, and you generally have maybe few dozen samples whose behavior you are attempting to model. So with many more variables than samples the statistics become somewhat interesting.
I understand some of those words. I’ll just put you down for “Science/Gene Stuff Guy” in my [del]list of potential minions[/del] er, file cabinet. Yeah. File Cabinet.
