A member of my family is a post-doc here at Stanford doing cutting-edge genetic research on cancer in one of the brand new bazillion-dollar buildings that just opened. I write code for everything; I'll probably be writing code to brush my teeth for me someday, so I've offered to teach him to program. He doesn't show much interest. He says that there is only one member of his research team who can code--the PI--and he only knows Perl ("which is what they used in his bioinformatics program"). But, "He doesn't really write code anymore."

I don't know why I'm always surprised to hear this. You'd think I'd learn. I recently asked him if his research didn't require a lot of gene sequencing and analysis of the sequences and if that wasn't pretty computationally demanding. "Oh, yeah, sure it is. That's why we outsource it."