We live in challenging times. I find the need to balance the heavy with the light: to be serious but have fun; to be grounded but retain some levity. Part of the balance involves living on this earth and in this country right now, while another part is exploring the world of thought and ideas using the tools of automation, design, analysis and visualization.

Gravity is the force that holds us to the earth, while antigravity, in theory, frees us from that grip. Antigravity is a tool to explore ideas using words, code and data. The balance of forces keeps us alive. For me, the balance is between thinking and creating, taking care of myself, and connecting with others and the world around me.

The Process

The tools of automation, design, analysis and visualization are now available in novel ways that were not possible during my formal career trajectory, or even six months ago. I’m exploring ways to create artful, data-rich stories that are grounded in what I know–statistics and data science–using an AI-first environment to collaborate with people around me.

Specifically, I am using Antigravity as a creative environment with a variety of AI agents. This enables me to construct “prompts” of various levels of complexity to generate code, images, and other artifacts that help me explore and communicate ideas. This becomse a high-level conversation with the AI model (so far, mainly Gemini 3 Flash) in which I am learning to guide with words rather than grapple with code. For more about AI agents see Artificial Intelligence (AI) References.

Another aspect of collaboration involves other people. I have started talking with long-time colleague Alan Attie about his work on the genetics of diabetes, obesity and nutrition. We are exploring ways to use these new tools to help us communicate his ideas more effectively. Early days, but we are both learning about AI and about how to communicate with each other using this new environment. In other words, we are crafting an ecosystem in which we build ideas that result in useful documents or interactive widgets (Shiny and Quarto).

We each bring different strengths to the table, and we are learning to leverage each other’s skills. For instance, Alan showed me how to record speech into a document that is transcribed and then edited. This would be useful for the big picture story, or it might help in developing a detailed prompt.

The Projects

Here are some projects that I would like to evolve in coming months. These all have presence on GitHub.

• Systems Genetics
  • biochemistry of nutrition and obesity
    • Alan Attie collaboration described above
  • qtl2shiny
    • Redesign hotspot par scan_window
    • Reactive snpList
  • Summary of sysgen GitHub Organizations
• Environment Systems
  • landmapr
    • Tutorial for census and territory
    • translated modules from landmapy
  • landmapy
    • Nate example as function and shiny example
    • translate modules from landmapr
  • Summary of envsys GitHub Organizations
• ESIIL projects
  • ESIIL GitHub pages from Python course
  • ESIIL Stars Program with Nate Quarderer
• geyser shiny module tutorial
  • organize tutorial from zoom session into 5-min bites
• Bland Ewing systems ethology
  • Shiny modules walking through sim
  • Bland Ewing biography

Updated on February 20, 2026.