2026, the year of Delta
Every essay I finish this year has a measured difference at its center. It might be two groups, two numbers, or one thing before and after. I call the year Delta. In math, Δ is a change you can measure: the end minus the start. A biostatistician’s unit of attention is a difference.
My own year has one too. In June, in my third trimester, I stepped away from work. The first essay here is dated June 23, the day after my last working day.
Once I stepped away, I started to see gaps everywhere. One runs between how long we live and how long we live well, the question my research keeps coming back to. Another runs between the career I had and the one I might want next. A third runs between the careful voice I learned for journals and the one I first used on my school paper. The Dash Between the Dates tells the longer story. It reads each gap as a delta, a change with two ends, rather than a hole.
Why statistical.systems
A statistical system turns noisy data into a decision you can trust. A life is one too. My methods work builds the first kind: tests that decide which discoveries are real and which are noise. These essays turn the same tools on the second kind, where the data are a day’s habits and a year’s choices, and every part pushes on the others. The site sits on a domain I own rather than a rented platform, so the words stay mine and nothing on it changes without me. Put a Pin on It tells how I built it and keep it running.
What I write about
No essay here is only one thing. Each one draws on six pillars, in different amounts:
- Statistics is the rigor.
- Regulatory is what has to sign off before that rigor reaches anyone.
- ‘Omics is the material it gets applied to.
- Reproducibility is whether it still holds when someone else runs it again.
- Systems Thinking is the frameworks that carry past any one problem.
- Praxis is the how, the tools that bring an idea to life.
The pillars are where I start, not a fence. An essay can go to a thermostat dial, a newborn’s first minute or a mother’s milk, because a question from a field that is not mine yet is still a question someone can count. The Pillar Wheel places every essay by its mix.
How to read
If you have a minute, read the first screen, let the section headers carry you down, and stop at the box marked Worth remembering. That line is the one I would keep if the rest were gone, and it is the card that travels when a piece is shared. Just under it, Where This Came From names the source I went back to and, when I reran a result myself, the code. Those reruns live on Projects: GapYears rebuilds a healthspan study from public WHO data, and BloodVsMethylation sets two measures of biological age against each other in the same people.
If you want one place to begin, Pick Six holds six essays, each with a line on why. If you read only one, read The Window Stayed Shut: it is the question my research keeps coming back to.
If you have longer, the essays come in seasons, by the calendar, and Collections files them that way. Summer 2026 is the science of a body, read the way an engineer reads a machine. Autumn 2026 opens with two pieces about this site, then takes one question apart (why people spend their last years in poor health), rebuilds a published study on it from public data, and follows the rules a drug must pass before it can reach that gap. Winter 2026–2027 starts with two pieces on testing many things at once, then turns to the life: the questions I keep, and the wants under them.
Each essay stands on its own. Read in order, each one hands the next a question.
Who writes these
Most of my career so far has happened inside academia, a setting built around precision more than voice. I am a biostatistician, and what I kept from those years is a habit: taking one idea and reshaping it until it lands, whether the person in front of me is a domain expert, an official writing policy or one of my daughters at breakfast. I write these essays to clear my head and to test whether I know what I thought I knew. Each one takes a question, often from a field that is not mine yet, finds the method it needs, checks whether the answer holds when someone runs it again, and ends with something a reader can go and do. My papers are on Research.