Amazon blooper: no images, clean look, no order button

Just now visiting Amazon, I saw the following:

For a moment, I thought, "Hmm. Interesting new spartan look!" But then I noticed something rather important missing. Can you see what I mean? (Click the image for a full-size window capture.)

There's no order button. Amazon's order button is an image with no alt/title text. If the image can't load, there's not even an narrow clickable region to 'order' or 'add to cart'.

(It looks like some sort of server-side glitch where all the intended IMG SRC values have been replaced by some "untranslatable-image-id.jpg" dummy value.)

Free design tip for Amazon: don't make ordering dependent on images appearing! Even though all images are gone, the above page is almost wholly understandable and usable... except in the one most crucial way, that allows me to order.

Technorati Tags: amazon, glitches, one click ordering

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Goople Uber Alles

If you read the two following stories in rapid succession...

I, Cringely: The Google Box: Taking over the digital world four ounces at a time

Think Secret: Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room

...you can't help but think, at least for a moment, Google + Apple = Goople.

The rumored new entertainment-centric Mac mini ('Kaleidoscope') is just a couple notches up from the 'Google Cube' which Cringely describes. An acquisition -- or at least deep partnership -- would fall somewhere in plausibility between the perennial Sony-Apple rumors and the 1996 "Sun + Apple = Snapple" speculation boomlet.

Alas, goople.com is already registered. :(

Technorati Tags: sony, apple, google, sun, goople, mac mini, dvr

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WTF? "Celebrate Festivus with BART"?!?!

I have no idea what this means. BART can't really be having a special giveaway based on holiday invented on Seinfeld. Can they?

BART.gov: Cal Rec students--Celebrate Festivus with BART!

Technorati Tags: absurd, bart, cal, festivus

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Rookie blunder on Google Sitemap stats

I was quite pleased to learn last week that by proving 'control' over a website, I could view detailed statistics about how the Google crawler sees it.

The signup process involved putting a blank file with an arbitrary name at the site root; the existence of the file in response to a Google probe confirmed that you, the Google account holder who had just requested the filename, controlled the site

I signed up and happily viewed some data on a site I control. Later, though, while offline, I recalled that many sites will give an OK response to *any* URL path requested of them. These "soft 404s" can cause some confusion for web crawlers, which wind up collecting pages of negligible value. Would a site that gave a "soft 404" OK for any path let anyone claim the right to view stats at Google?

As this is an old and well-known problem in crawling, I figured Google had accounted for it -- for example, they could probe a site with random paths and determine that it gives false OK indications, and then require a more rigorous test in those cases. But, I didn't check that they actually did this.

Well, others did check -- and found that Google had made a rookie mistake, ignoring the prevalence of soft 404s, allowing anyone to view the crawler stats for sites like EBay, AOL, and even Google Orkut. (The flaw has now reportedly been fixed.)

This was the second security flub just last week by Google: Google Base initially launched with a cross-site scripting vulnerability -- of the same sort as had bitten Google's AdWords site just last month.

Give 'em a few more launches, they'll eventually get this right. And it is important that Google does -- because the theme of most of their recent launches has been linking more web content and behavioral data than ever to precise human identities.

I think there's a master plan at work -- more on this in a future post. But both the 'false claim of ownership' and cross-site-scripting exploits are forms of identity theft, and if Google is cross-referencing all your web trails to a single identity, then that identity is going to be a very attractive target for hijacking.

Technorati Tags: google, identity, google base, sitemaps, identity theft, cross site scripting, privacy, 404,

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Seeing this in a feed reader? Please update your feed URL!

So that I get a vague idea of readership, I've wrapped my blog feed with Feedburner.

Unfortunately, Blogger/Blogspot gives me no option to withdraw/redirect the older original feed. So if you read 'Gojomo' via a feed reader, and are not already using the Feedburner feed, I'd appreciate if you could update your subscription to the new feed:

     http://feeds.feedburner.com/gojomo

Yes, you'll leak a little anonymous info to me -- mainly your existence and reading software. And you may leak a little nearly-anonymous info -- your IP address -- to Feedburner instead of to Blogger/Google. But you'll help me understand who, if anyone, is reading my ravings, and how.

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: rss, atom, feeds, feed readers, feedburner, gojomo

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Google Analytics & the "pay-per-click-you-like" future

Google Analytics:

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

This is a giant step towards the "pay-per-click-you-like" future I predicted previously in "Killing click-fraud (and the competition) with one stone". The gist is:

Offer a money-back-guarantee, no-questions-asked, on every click delivered. "Pay for only the clicks you like," Google could say.

No more haggling over suspicious clicks. Just use Google Analytics to see exactly which ones convert -- or otherwise look sufficiently like a real customer to you -- and pay only for those clicks, getting a refund on all others.

What does this mean? As an advertiser, you would pay more per click -- but for fewer, verified-valuable clicks. Google gets a new stream of feedback about what clicks you want, and which clicktrails leading up to -- and then through -- your site are most likely to convert. If you try to game Google by not paying for good hits -- well, that's just like no one clicking on your ads in the first place. You tend to fall out of the rankings because you're not making Google any money. You could game this for at most one payment period before you were only hurting yourself, and to climb back into the system you'd have to overpay in the future by about as much as you shaved off on the way down.

So I reiterate my previous prediction: a pay-per-click-you-want offering, with a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee on all unwanted clicks, is coming. And it will give a major competitive advantage to the player who effectively implements it first. As I noted:

So the day Google adopts this kind of policy, click fraud ceases being a major problem for them and starts to be a giant club they can use to beat off their smaller competitors. Who else will have as large and detailed a map of which clicks are wanted? And once you've been with Google for a while, and fed it months of data about the clicks you like and don't, switching to any other advertiser would involve a big cost and efficiency hit while the patterns are relearned.

Mmm, economies of scale and customer lock-in. Call it Pay Per Wanted Click (PPWC)/Cost Per Wanted Click (CPWC) advertising. And if Google doesn't eventually do this, someone else looking to leapfrog them will.

With Google Analytics, it's now even more likely that Google will be the first to offer a clicks-you-want guarantee. And the pricing power they'll acquire -- the ability to finely price-discriminate, in the economists' sense, charging each customer exactly by their ability to pay -- will be incredible, beyond that of more traditional monopoly pricing with only limited price discrimination.

Which leads naturally into another prediction. I agree with Rudy Rouhana's Long Bet: Google will face antitrust problems, probably before 2010. (This is not to imply Google will have done anything wrong. It's just the nature of the beast, as the also-rans and political opportunists of either party realize they can wield a regulatory club against Google.)

Technorati Tags: google, adwords, payperclick, analytics, urchin, antitrust

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Microsoft pushing illegal DMCA 'circumvention device' via Windows Update?

CNET: Microsoft will wipe Sony's 'rootkit'

Hmm. Might this 'update' from Microsoft, with the stated/marketed primary purpose of disabling part of Sony's DRM, qualify as an illegal "circumvention device" under the DMCA?

Technorati Tags: microsoft, sony, drm, malware, rootkit, windowsupdate, dmca

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Mickey Kaus: yes on 77, California's anti-gerrymandering initiative

Mickey Kaus has written a detailed case for proposition 77, the California initiative which aims to put some checks on gerrymandering. Some excerpts...

I'm going to vote for Proposition 77, which would try to end gerrymandering in California by giving the job of drawing district lines to a panel of retired judges.

Indeed, no California pol in either the U.S. House of Representatives, the state assembly, or the state senate was defeated in 2004. Yet state voters were pissed off! This impenetrability of elected institutions is as big an issue for our democracy as campaign finance reform, about which a hundred times more ink has been spilled. (After all, the candidate who raises more money quite often loses. The candidate who gets to rearrange concrete district lines to his advantage almost never loses.)

The New York Times Magazine's world-weary contrarian exposition of the difficulties of drawing competitive districts concluded that under Prop. 77

at most a dozen or so of the state's 53 congressional district could have competitive races.

A dozen? A dozen seems like a larger number than zero! A dozen competitive seats would be a big improvement. I'll take it.

For Democrats concerned that reform will only benefit Republicans, Kaus points out that...

There's a similar ballot proposition in GOP-controlled Ohio. There, unlike in California, it's the Democrats pushing reform.

More centrist Democrats will be elected! Prop. 77 won't result in a GOP takeover of the California statehouse. There aren't enough Republicans in the state to go around. It might easily result in an increase of Democratic seats, because there will be more districts with slim Democratic majorities rather than a smaller number of safe-seat districts with huge Democratic majorities. If Dems sweep the new swing districts, they'll win big. But the winners are likely to be centrists who appeal to the swing voters, not paleoliberals or interest group hacks who know they can't be dislodged.

(Of course the unstated corollary is that if all those Dem centrists in swing districts do a bad job, creating statewide voter disaffection -- then there would be a backlash, and a sweep of the slightly-Democratic districts by centrist Republicans. But isn't that how it should be -- rather than getting the same hack incumbents reelected no matter whether times are good or bad, whether policies are working or not?)

Democrats might retake Congress. Gerrymandering favors Democrats in California, but nationwide it's one of the things keeping Republicans in power. As Morton Kondracke notes, thanks to gerrymandering a surge for the Democrats analogous to the Gingrich surge in 1994 is probably no longer enough to change who controls the House. That's why the Republican National Committee has opposed Proposition 77, even though it's a pet project of Republican Governor Schwarzenegger.

If the initiatives in California and Ohio pass, jumpstarting a national reform movement, the ultimate effects for the two parties are unknowable: unable to run as many partisan hacks in safe districts, the parties themselves would change. But the effect on government and the incumbent politicians is certain: they'd have to compete harder, appeal to more diverse constituencies, respond more directly to the electoral process, and shake off the partisan insiders who now hold the process captive. That's an unalloyed good, whatever your political affiliation.

Technorati Tags: california, elections, proposition 77, gerrymandering, mickey kaus

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Creative interpretations of copyright law, part 337

PrintFu: Super Fast. Super Cheap. PDF Book Printing. Neat idea for a service; cheap printing of any PDF on the web which is then bound (like a college course reader) and sent to you. But is it legal? From their FAQ:

What about Copyright?
PrintFu never looks at the content of the printed content. PrintFu is only a remote printer. The user is responsible for their own rights to the printed content.

Hmm. I think such a service should be legal, but I don't think "we never look at the content" is the standard. MP3.com got into trouble trying to use the delegated and indirect fair-use rights of its customers -- who had even "proven" (after a fashion) their possession of a legal physical copy. My magic 8-ball says for PrintFu: "Danger ahead. Watch your back."

Technorati Tags: copyright, pdf, printing

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Crawling for dollars

Silicon.com: SEC in legal fight with Estonians over financial hack

Some folks apparently figured out a way to access BusinessWire press releases slightly before their official release, and used the information to trade stocks for profit. I'm guessing they speculatively crawled URLs where they expected releases to occur:

The SEC's complaint states that in June 2004 Lohmus became a client of Business Wire, which gave it access to its secure client website, after which a spider program was used.

However, the SEC could be moving into a grey area as a spider program does not circumnavigate access controls to a system but crawls around a site from weblink to weblink, reporting information back to its owner. The SEC may have to examine whether the spider predicted a weblink that was not publically available and then prove that was 'hacking' in order to prosecute the firm.

I'm not sure what law was broken. If anything, BusinessWire was lax in putting information at predictable URLs without access controls in advance of the official releases. You could think of the Estonians as simply engaging in very aggressive research; perhaps their true (or original) intent was just to be among the very first to see releases at the moment of their official release, and the viewing of releases even earlier just a 'happy accident' caused by the flaws in BusinessWire's system

Technorati Tags: stock market, businesswire, sec, web crawling

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Pay no attention to the man behind the API

Amazon Mechanical Turk, "artificial artificial intelligence".

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.

Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.

Freaky cool.

Technorati Tags: amazon, web services, artificial intelligence, mechanical turk, cool

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FEMA's not ready for robot revolution -- so you'd better be

Here at Gojomo Blog, we've been following the threat of robot insurrection for years, starting with commentary about one of the more unusual 'Long Bets' (#86), positing that "[b]y the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks."

Well now via Slashdot, we see that the rest of America is waking up to this danger. A new book by Daniel H. Wilson, How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, will finally give Americans the skills they need to survive this threat -- a potential disaster that could be greater than terrorism, hurricanes, and earthquakes combined.

Wilson is an actual Carnegie Mellon roboticist, so you know you're getting the inside scoop the robots don't want you to know.

Writers Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant are taking a break from their usual lighthearted work to adapt the book for the big screen -- and no doubt this educational film will someday be a key part of American schools' robot-defense curriculum.

And again: it's not too late to buy Old Glory Robot Insurance (video) (transcript).

Technorati Tags: robots, thomas lennon, ben garant, carnegie mellon, disaster preparedness, books, humor

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WW2 airman found frozen in California glacier; Brendan Fraser, call your agent!

LA Times: U.S. Airman Found Encased in Glacier After 60 Years

I didn't even realize California had glaciers, but here you go: California has 20 glaciers. (What's next? Cows, in Berkeley?)

I'm a little suspicious. Might this just be a publicity stunt for some upcoming Brendan Fraser movie? It's been almost 7 years since Blast from the Past (1999), which itself followed Encino Man by 7 years. Like locusts, you can't keep man-out-of-time movie premises buried for very long!

Technorati Tags: glaciers, encino+man, blast+from+the+past, brendan+fraser, ww2, iceman

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Most awaited new political thriller since 'Be Gone Demons'

Washington Times: 'Saints' fend off 'snakes' in Boxer's political novel

California Senator Barbara Boxer has a novel on the way -- A Time to Run -- where Democrat 'saints' work to derail the nomination of a conservative woman to the Supreme Court.

The fiction world hasn't seen this sort of suspenseful insider allegory ripped from today's headlines since Be Gone Demons!, Saddam Hussein's 2003 literary swan song. Hussein chose as his villains evil, scheming Jews -- a crowd-pleasing choice among his fan demographics. In a wise nod to American sensibilities, Boxer instead chooses evil, scheming Republicans.

"Suffice it to say, [Boxer's] effort reads more like a cross between a bad romance novel and a soap opera script. The Congressional Record might be more entertaining. And it's free," noted the Sacramento Bee, which obtained an uncorrected proof of the novel last month but was prohibited from quoting directly from it.

Pshaw! These journalistic carpers are just jealous. <monheit>The Nobel committee will recognize dynamite when it reads it! Come next October, it will be A Time to Run, alright -- all the way to Stockholm for the Literature Prize!</monheit>

Technorati Tags: barbara boxer, saddam hussein, walter monheit, novels, nobel prize, politics, dilettantism, sarcasm

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Smart enough to die, not smart enough to throw the test

Via NEWS of the WEIRD:

In August, a jury found Virginia death-row inmate Daryl Atkins mentally competent, based on a recent IQ score of 76 (thus beating the '70' standard, below which under state law he could not be executed). Prosecutors said two previous scores below 70 were deceptively low because of Atkins' drug and alcohol use, but legal experts hypothesized that Atkins' IQ had actually improved in recent years via the intellectual stimulation of discussing his case with lawyers.

Reminds me vaguely of a short story I read in middle school, where a child is worried he'll fail an important upcoming test. At the end we learn, via condolences delivered to his mother, that her child has been lost, because he scored too high. I can't locate the title or author now; I had thought it might be by Bradbury (we read The Pedestrian around the same time) or maybe Asimov.

Technorati Tags: deathpenalty, iq, irony

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"Could you say that again after putting on this helmet?"

AP via Yahoo News: Scientist: MRIs Can Serve As Lie Detectors

It's a Truth Machine! Reason magazine in 2001 considered then-current research in brain-scanning interrogations.

Technorati Tags: lies, brain, mri, liedetectors, privacy, truthmachine

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Old time revival -- TONIGHT!

Attention heathens!

The most illuminated R-y Kurzweil (pbuh) is giving a sermon tonight in San Francisco on the coming technological singularity, which will grant us all bliss everlasting in a computational paradise.

It's due in about 30 years, plus or minus a few decades.

In this virtual heaven not only will we get everything we ever wanted, plus a pony, but the ponies will talk, and get everything they ever wanted too, and shoot frickin' lasers out of their eyes.

I'm going, and may catch a late movie with friends afterwards -- if the singularity does not arrive early during the talk. If it does arrive, we'll instead simultaneously download all movies ever made or capable of being made into our neoneocortexes.

The singularity is near, repent!

Technorati Tags: kurzweil, singularity, longnow, sanfrancisco, religion, extropianism

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horoscopes.google.com?

John Battelle's Searchblog: Financial Advice, Horoscopes on the Way?

Google has altered its famous Philosophy page and footnoted the change, SEW points out after noting an older Cnet piece. The line on the page once said: "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." It was a poke at portals, and, well, was written before Google became, well, a portal of sorts. It has chat now, so one wonders, can Google Finance be far behind?

Technorati Tags: google, horoscopes

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Google Talk: finally, a big player embraces open IM

Google Talk has launched. Nice to see that they interoperate with other clients conforming to the IETF XMPP IM/Presence specifications.

From 1996-1999, our team at Austin startup Activerse pursued a IM product strategy based on the idea that this crucial internet application space, like email before it, must eventually be ruled by decentralized, interoperable, standards-based products. We demoed interoperabilty with prototype software from Microsoft, Lotus, Fujitsu, Ubique, and AT&T using a HTTP-inspired, REST-ish toy protocol called PIP-DEMO. We helped author the IETF's Instant Messaging / Presence Protocol Requirements (RFC 2779), a key source document for the many attempts at standardization that followed, including the XMPP IM/Presence specification.

But "eventually" wasn't soon enough for tiny Activerse -- with the giant players like AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft more-or-less happy with owning their own giant closed IM networks.

Google might just survive the wait!

Technorati Tags: google talk, xmpp, activerse, instant messaging, im, standards

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Dynamic regex debugging in a web page: Regex Powertoy

Regex Powertoy is a fun little tool I've put together for playing with regular expressions in a web browser. I just showed it to a small group here at Bar Camp. It requires the latest Java ("5.0"/"1.5") applet support, and as yet has only been tested in Firefox.

Features include:

• immediate highlighting of matches as pattern and input text are editted
• drill-down into capturing group details
• optional animation of matching progress -- heavy backtracking becomes obvious
• "matchmark" bookmarks to prepopulate pattern/input text

Many more bells and whistles are possible. There have been similar tools as downloadable apps before, but nothing quite as interactive inside a web page, as far as I know.

I'm releasing the source code at Sourceforge under the GPL. (It's not pretty code -- quick hacks and whatever experiments survived to do the job.)

Comments, ideas, and contributed features welcome.

Technorati Tags: regex, regexp, javascript, applet, dhtml, ajax, regularexpressions, tools

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The tall head strikes back: 'long tail' much smaller than previously reported

Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog: A methodology for estimating Amazon's Long Tail sales Anderson's originally-reported estimate, that the 'long tail' of books not among the 100,000 titles typically carried by a bricks-and-mortar Barnes & Noble accounts for 57% of Amazon's sales has been revised downwards. The new number is at most 36%, and perhaps as little as 20%. The 'tall head' strikes back.

Technorati Tags: longtail, tallhead

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Fortify Firefox's pop-up blocking

PeteBevin.com: Firefox popups

Seeing more popups recently despite Firefox's built-in popup blocking? Chances are they're using a Flash embed to sneak through. From the above site, here's a little-known setting to disable this trick:

1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.

Technorati Tags: popups, firefox, tips, peeves, web

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Highway (bill) robbery

Matier & Ross at SFGate.com: Small, private marina hauls in $20 million catch in transit funding

For a small investment in political contributions and lobbying, a private firm with a tiny marina in the north bay got a $20 million federal handout to build a new commuter ferry terminal -- a terminal unplanned by regional transit authorities.

Even the local congresswoman who slipped this shameless pork into the bill, Lynn Woolsey, didn't seem to realize it was in the final version, nor that public transit agencies had shelved a similar plan due to environmental concerns.

The $286 billion highway/transportation bill contains over 6,300 projects, most just as dumb and corrupt as this one. The bill, HR3, passed 412y-8n-14a in the house and 91y-4n-5a in the senate.

Technorati Tags: politics, pork, corruption, lynnwoolsey, waste, federal, bayarea

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Closing the barn door after the horses have left...

New Scientist: Earth life could invade Mars on contaminated craft

NASA needs to clean up its robotic spacecraft better or risk colonising Mars with terrestrial microbes, an expert panel has warned.

But it says the reforms will probably take at least a decade to put in place, raising the chance that earthly life could still stow away on spacecraft scheduled to visit the Red Planet before then - if it has not done so already.

Already, indeed. By my reading of the Wikipedia article on Exploration of Mars, at least 10 Earth-launched devices have landed or crashed on Mars: Mars 3 (1971), Mars 6 (1973), Vikings 1 and 2 (1975), Pathfinder (1996), Polar Lander (1999), Deep Space 2 Mini Probes (1999), Beagle 2 (2003), and the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers (2003).

Technorati Tags: mars, bacteria, space, panspermia

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Bloggers crowing about AdSense

Jason Calacanis: $1M a year in Google Adsense (or why 2,739 is my favorite number)

'ProBlogger' Darren Rowse: ? Earning Milestones

Rowse is earning over $10,000/month from AdSense on his "17 or so" blogs. Calacanis's network of 103 bloggers is nearly at a pace to make $1 million in a year from AdSense. (That'd be $2,739/day.)

My ambitious target for 2005: $10. For the year.

Technorati Tags: blogging, adsense

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'Planarity' -- like untangling a knot onscreen

Detroit Free Press: Case Western student invents online game that's exploding online

The game requires Flash and is called Planarity. (It could probably be reimplemented in Javascript/DHTML.) It gets pretty tough past level 5...

Technorati Tags: games, planarity, flash, fun

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"Cat ladies" caused by toxoplasmosis?

Daniel Engber in Slate: What's the Deal With "Cat Ladies"? - Are there "cat gentlemen," too?

Engber considers the prevalence of "cat hoarders" (who are usually women) without considering the most obvious -- at least to my intuition -- cause: toxoplasmosis infection.

Toxoplasmosis is a disease caused by a protozoa parasite whose lifecycle can cross cats and other animals, but only sexually reproduces inside cats. There's strong evidence that toxo-infected rats and mice have their behavior affected by the parasite in ways that make them more likely to be captured by cats: their reactions are slower, they're less fearful of new situations, and they even seem to be drawn to the smell of cat urine (whereas non-infected cat prey will wisely avoid all cat smells).

There's also evidence toxo-infection can have analogous effects on infected humans -- subtly altering their personality and making them more prone to, among other things, dangerous accidents. This writeup (which I believe is an uncreditted reprint of a New Scientist article) is a good summary. Let's compare Engber's observations about "cat ladies" with the observed effects of toxoplasmosis on mammals:

Engber on 'cat ladies'	New Scientist on toxoplasmosis victims
"In most cases, animal waste dirtied the home; the hoarder's bed was sometimes found to be covered with feces or urine."	"[Toxoplasmosis] releases eggs that are spread in cat faeces, and if these end up in moist soil they can remain infective for 18 months." "But the real clincher came when the researchers offered the rats a choice of bedding - their own, or bedding laced with water, cat urine or rabbit urine. Cat urine is usually a big turn-off for rats, but the toxo-rats actually preferred it."
"Not all animal hoarders are cat ladies, but most are." "[A 1981 New York City study] found that two-thirds of the obsessive collectors were women and that 70 percent were single."	"Infected men tended to be more independent and inclined to break rules, although infected women tended to go the other way. Could it be that males are being made more reckless, like the rats, while for some reason the mind-control chemical has the opposite effect in females?"
"Researchers say that most obsessive animal collectors deny that they have a problem. Many claim to have a special ability to communicate with their animals and insist that all their pets are well-loved and in good health. (In fact, the animals are often dying around them; animal control officers found more than 200 dead cats in two homes owned by the Knueven family.) Some psychiatrists say these beliefs, along with a paranoid fear of government intervention, may constitute a delusional disorder."	"[I]n rare cases [toxoplasmosis] can lead to serious eye damage." "Another controversial idea is that latent infection might trigger some forms of schizophrenia. Fuller Torrey at the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Maryland and his team has found that schizophrenics are more likely to be cat owners, and to have latent toxoplasmosis. What's more, drugs used to relieve schizophrenia symptoms happen to harm the parasite, at least in the test-tube. Torrey believes this may be why the drugs work."

The cats aren't just a symptom of 'cat hoarding'... they're also an original cause.

Technorati Tags: toxoplasmosis, cats, schizophrenia, parasites, diseases, mentalillness

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Naturally-occurring saluvirus fights cancer

Reuters via Yahoo: Common virus kills cancer, study finds:

"Our results suggest that adeno-associated virus type 2, which infects the majority of the population but has no known ill effects, kills multiple types of cancer cells yet has no effect on healthy cells," said Craig Meyers, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.

I've long been convinced that there are many as-yet undiscovered 'contagions', especially viruses, that serve to improve rather than harm health. I suggested the term saluvirus for any such viruses a few years ago -- and have tracked further evidence suggestive of saluviruses since, including:

• The discovery and further confirmation that a naturally occurring virus called "GBV-C" benignly defends against HIV infection.
• Hints that mitochondrial DNA correlated with longevity isn't just inherited, but somehow acquired during life like a viral infection
• News items that certain germs in mothers' mouths prevent HIV transmission to their children, and other germs in the stomach help prevent allergies.
• Evidence that hepatitis A confers asthma protection

This latest news -- of a pervasive virus that is not only harmless but may actually cure cancer -- further suggests we may be swimming in as-yet-undiscovered naturally-occuring health-giving contagions. Viruses like this latest discovery could explain otherwise mysterious total cancer remissions -- via catching an anticancer virus by chance.

This discovery also suggests a more comprehensive research program: take every category of pesky pathogen -- bacteria, viruses, protozoa, fungi, and parasites -- and look for more organisms of the same type but beneficial effect. Of course, many types of symbiosis and commensalism between life forms are already known, but down to the level of microbial contagions, there seems an overwhelming focus on the bad with little search for the good. (Would a 'salugen' be the opposite of a pathogen? 51 hits right now, several promoting cannabis as a 'salugen' substance, none emphasizing microorganisms.)

Inquiries into the diet and lifestyle choices of the long-lived -- whether anecdotal or statistically rigorous -- have already been done to death. Let's get the healthiest old folks among us under a microscope instead, take some tissue samples, grow some cultures, and see what they've got crawling around inside them that the rest us should get, too.

[Thanks to Sean for passing me this latest story.] Technorati Tags: cancer, viruses, saluviruses, health, longevity, lifeextension

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Open-source + p2p + rich media coding for fun and profit: Bitcollider request-for-bids

The Bitzi Bitcollider, an open-source utility for calculating file hashes, extracting file metadata, and submitting information to the cooperatively-built and Creative Commons-licensed Bitpedia digital media encyclopedia, needs support for files larger than 2GB/4GB (2GiB/4GiB).

Bitzi is trying an experiment to get this capability implemented: placing a request-for-bids at RentACoder, an international marketplace for contracted piecework software development. For more details, see this message on the bitpedia-l project discussion list:

Contribute Bitcollider largefile support, for fun and profit!

Technorati Tags: bitpedia, bitzi, bitcollider, opensource, rentacoder, outsourcing, opensource, p2p, filesharing, richmedia, metadata, publicdomain

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NYTimes corrects missing attribution

Thanks go to the New York Times for finally addressing their uncreditted use of an illustration I created for this blog. (The more direct and accusatory approach worked.) From the June 3 2005 Corrections:

A caption in Business Day on April 18 with an article about whether companies can restrict the blogging of their employees omitted a credit for the creator of the artwork. The re-creation was done by Gordon Mohr. An e-mail message reporting the error a month ago was misdirected at The Times. (Go to Article)

Technorati Tags: nytimes, corrections, blogging, msm

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But what about Pinky?

New Scientist: Mission to build a simulated brain begins

Technorati Tags: neuroscience, neurotech, simulation, brain, transhumanism, uploading, pinkyandthebrain

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Milton Friedman profile in San Francisco Chronicle

SFGate.com: Friedman's 'heresy' hits mainstream / Private Social Security accounts were his idea

I'd like to quote the whole thing, but I'll settle for the opening paragraphs...

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security.

Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat.

"Not much competition here," he quipped.

"The people I see in the Safeway don't go around yelling, 'I'm a left wing Democrat,' even if they are," he said. "This is a very nice city to live in."

...and the close...

He calls himself an innate optimist, despite the unpopularity of many of his ideas.

When he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, the city was debating rent control, he recalled. So he wrote a letter to The Chronicle saying, "Anybody who has examined the evidence about the effects of rent control, and still votes for it, is either a knave or a fool."

What happened? "They immediately passed it," he laughed.

San Francisco can be a maddening place for someone with any sense of market economics. It takes a good sense of humor to tolerate it for a year, much less the nearly 3 decades Friedman has called San Francisco home.

Technorati Tags: miltonfriedman, sanfrancisco, economics, rentcontrol, socialsecurity

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Mozilla Foundation earning $30 million/year from Google?

Mark Pincus blog: Firefox = Foxy Cash Cow

i've been hearing rumors that firefox (from mozilla.org) is making over $30m annually off of its deal for the google search box. just saw they passed 64m downloads too. that would mean they're making $0.50 annually for every download, but actually if you lose 50% of the downloads to apathy, bugs and ignorance (hmm...the ABI dilution effect), that would imply more like $1.00 per user which is pretty amazing. it's kind of fitting that one of the few startups in silicon valley to immediately go cash positive is a non-profit; and continues to support my hypothesis that all startups are non-profits except google:)

$30 million/year seems incredible from the perspective of a a small software-development nonprofit building a web reference into its work.

But when you think of the popularity of Firefox, it's plausible.

I imagine all the details will eventually come out in the Mozilla Foundation's 501(c)3 filings.

Legally, they'll have to spend that money on further not-for-profit program activities... that revenue flow could become a giant engine of new free/open-source software development.

Technorati Tags: opensource, google, firefox, mozilla, nonprofit, markpincus

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North Korea resembling an Ayn Rand dystopia

NYTimes: North Korea, Facing Food Shortages, Mobilizes Millions From the Cities to Help Rice Farmers

The weekend mass mobilizations appear to be intended to help farms where machinery no longer works due to lack of parts or fuel.

This passage from Ayn Rand's 1936 novella Anthem, from the viewpoint of the narrator "Equality 7-2521", could almost be a report from the scene in North Korea, if not today then in another decade or two:

But we must never speak of the times before the Great Rebirth, else we are sentenced to three years in the Palace of Corrective Detention. It is only the Old Ones who whisper about it in the evenings, in the Home of the Useless. They whisper many strange things, of the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there is no will save the will of all men together.

Previously: North Korea as Mordor

Technorati Tags: northkorea, aynrand, totalitarianism, anthem

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NYT+GOATSE

Anil Dash gets his photo in the NYTimes... while wearing a GOATSE t-shirt. (See Wikipedia entry on Goatse.cx for an explanation of the long-running Internet gross-out pranks to which GOATSE alludes.)

Technorati Tags: slashdot, nyt, goatse, anildash, pranks

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To Serve Man, with fries

I saw this billboard -- sans animatronic sculptures -- about a block from where I live on my way to work today:

More details at BoingBoing: Billboard Liberation Front vs. McDonald's

"To Serve Man" alludes to a classic Twilight Zone episode.

Update: There's a Billboard Liberation Front: To Serve Man photoset at Flickr chronicling the installation of the billboard through to the removal of the sculptures.

Technorati Tags: mcdonalds, billboardliberationfront, twilightzone, pranks, art, nutrition, agitprop, aliens

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P2P file-sharing ♥ open-source (and vice-versa)

SourceForge.net: All-Time Top Downloads

Four of the top five, six of the top eleven, and seven of the top twenty downloads of open-source software packages from Sourceforge are peer-to-peer file-sharing applications. (I've highlighted their rank and download tally below in red.)

Rank	Project Name	Downloads
1	eMule	114,308,075
2	Azureus - BitTorrent Client	61,415,864
3	BitTorrent	41,086,245
4	DC++	27,613,939
5	CDex	23,972,280
6	VirtualDub	19,547,457
7	ZSNES	8,969,182
8	eMule Plus	8,068,745
9	phpBB	7,947,400
10	Gaim	7,564,122
11	Shareaza	7,373,645
12	phpMyAdmin	7,133,215
13	Dev-C++	6,446,593
14	guliverkli	6,308,925
15	TightVNC	6,034,358
16	FileZilla	5,911,896
17	ffdshow	5,776,923
18	JBoss.org	5,703,843
19	ABC [Yet Another Bittorrent Client]	5,560,464
20	7-Zip	5,056,631

If LimeWire, another open-source P2P file-sharing application, chose to distribute their application through SourceForge, it would be in one of the top spots, as well. (Download.com reports over 56 million LimeWire downloads.)

Technorati Tags: p2p, filesharing, sourceforge, opensource, downloads, gnutella, bittorrent, emule, edonkey, ed2k

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Letter to NYTimes, take 2

To: nytnews@nytimes.com
To: public@nytimes.com
Subject: Plagiarism of my work in your paper


Editors:

Last month, I sent an email to your corrections address, CC'd to your public editor, about the uncredited use of an illustration I created in your paper. (Message appended below.)

If the omission of customary attribution was an honest mistake, I would expect a correction and brief explanation. If it were a careless oversight, I would expect a correction and apology. If anyone on your staff passed off my work as their own, I would expect a correction and appropriate disciplinary measures.

But no matter the cause, or corrective measures you deem appropriate, a response other than the automated form letters my mail generated is warranted.

Thank you for your consideration,

Gordon Mohr
gojomo.blogspot.com

[original letter]

Technorati Tags: nytimes, blogging, plagiarism, corrections, msm, journalism

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Plagiarized (and ignored) by the NYTimes, day 37

Last month, the NYTimes republished, on the web and in print, an illustration I created for this weblog without permission or attribution. The next day, I emailed their corrections page and 'public editor'.

There's been no response or correction. Apparently the NYTimes itself recognizes it has a responsiveness problem...

Editor and Publisher: 'N.Y. Times' Releases Key Internal Report

As for accessibility: 'The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being,' the committee's 16-page report said. It also noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year.

Perhaps I need to be more direct in my correspondence.

Technorati Tags: nytimes, blogging, plagiarism, msm

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But what of the younglings?

Newsday.com (AP): Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco

Technorati Tags: demographics, sanfrancisco, children

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Hepatitis B prefers boys; Asian misogynocide half as horrific as before

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in Slate: The Search for 100 Million Missing Women - An economics detective story.

Convinced now of the relationship between hepatitis B and birth gender, [Harvard economics graduate student Emily] Oster set out on a vast data mission to determine the magnitude of that relationship. She measured the incidence of hepatitis B in the populations of China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and other countries where mothers gave birth to an unnaturally high number of boys. Sure enough, the regions with the most hepatitis B were the regions with the most "missing" women. Except the women weren't really missing at all, for they had never been born.

If you believe Oster's numbers�and as they are presented in a soon-to-be-published paper, they are extremely compelling�then her detective work has established the fate of roughly 50 million of Amartya Sen's missing women. Her discovery hardly means that Sen was wrong to cry misogyny, at least in some parts of the world: While Oster found, for instance, that Hepatitis B can account for roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China, it can account for less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap in Sen's native India. The culprits behind the disappearance of the 50 million women whom Oster did not find are likely the horrible ones that Sen and others have suggested.

Fascinating article, including the closing anecdote about a particular infant American girl. However, the framing -- "my, don't economics and statistics provide nice tools when used properly?" -- deemphasizes the questions most interesting to me.

Why would Hepatitis B skew birth sex toward males so much? Not the mechanism, but the motivation -- inasmuch as a virus can be said to have motivation, in that it will tend over the generations to do things that ensure its own prevalence or recede from interest. Are boys better vectors of the virus?

And turning back to the other missing Asian women -- the previously hypothesized explanations are all rather bleak. Also from the article:

[Economist Amartya] Sen charged these cultures with gravely mistreating their young girls�perhaps by starving their daughters at the expense of their sons or not taking the girls to doctors when they should have. Although Sen didn't say so, there were other sinister possibilities. Were the missing women a result of selective abortions? Female infanticide? A forced export of prostitutes?

If, even after the Hepatitis B effect, 50 million born Asian women have disappeared as victims of treatment ranging from neglect to murder, why would such practices be so ingrained and self-sustaining? What organisms' propagation benefits from such murderous misogyny?

Humans ourselves? (There is no shortage of Asian peoples, despite whatever gender injustices are being practiced.)

But also: cultural values and customs are not unlike viruses. They must transmit themselves from person to person, generation to generation, to even be noticed. They may advance themselves even at the expense of their hosts. Is misogyny itself a far-distant cousin of Hepatitis B, both malign self-replicating organisms on a human substrate, each sharing the same preference for men as better hosts?

Technorati Tags: economics, hepatitis, memes, viruses, misogyny, asia, statistics, gender, genocide

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Google succumbs to the dark side

Google offers a personalizable portal homepage.

The drag & drop layout is cool.

Technorati Tags: google, portal, personalization, ajax, javascript, dhtml,

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Flooding the clone zone

Financial Times: S Korea�s �giant step� in human cell cloning

Scientists have cloned embryos for the first time from patients with serious diseases and injuries. The research at Seoul National University in South Korea demonstrates the principle of �therapeutic cloning� producing stem cells genetically identical to the patient, which could repair any damaged or diseased tissue.

Two entries ago, I pointed out that Francis Fukuyama's ideas about limits on third-world pharmaceutical trials, reported in the Washington Post, were largely contradicted by a story running the same day in USA Today.

Now, his prediction that "the number of people who are going to want to take the risk [of human cloning] is going to be awfully small" has been shown as similarly naive by South Korea's enthusiastic progress in therapeutic human cloning.

Events haven't just overtaken Fukuyama, they've completely lapped him.

Technorati Tags: cloning, bioethics, fukuyama, asiarising

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BitTorrent without centralized 'trackers', Azureus with magnets

Bram's BitTorrent 4.1.0 beta, released a couple of days ago, adds a trackerless torrent option based on a Kademlia-based distributed hash table (DHT). It follows in the footsteps of alternative BitTorrent client Azureus, which earlier this month introduced its own distributed tracker capability also based on Kademlia. Alas, these features appear to have been developed independently and are incompatible with each other.

The original Kademlia paper was published just over two years ago, and it's nearly 2 years to the day after I posted an article to infoAnarchy about the Kademlia-demonstration P2P sharing tool VarVar. Kademlia was the first DHT I could intuitively imagine working well in chaotic real-world P2P nets.

The Azureus implementation also supports the use of hash-based magnet URIs to compactly advertise specific 'torrent' control files which may be available from the peer network. I first proposed magnet URIs as a multi-application standard for website-to-local-app coordination in June 2002.

The inevitable usually takes a little while.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, azureus, bramcohen, magnetlink, magneturi, kademlia, infoanarchy, p2p, dht

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Fukuyama's sensibilities overtaken by events

Washington Post, May 16, 2005: Inventing Our Evolution: We're almost able to build better human beings. But are we ready?

Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project, thinks many biological innovations that are possible will be held back by social pressures:

Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama says. "We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn't take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust -- "

USA Today, May 16, 2005: Costs, regulations move more drug tests outside USA

Cost is one factor. Trials in Eastern Europe, Asia and Central and South America might cost 10% to 50% less than trials in the USA and Western Europe, says Ronald Krall, GlaxoSmithKline's head of development.

Researcher and clinic/hospital costs are lower and patient recruitment is faster, which also lowers costs. Bigger populations more in need of medical treatment make faster recruitment possible, Wyeth's Ruffolo says.

Fukuyama is also quoted in the WP article:

"But not everything that is scientifically possible will actually be technologically implemented and used on a large scale. In the case of human cloning, there's an abstract possibility that people will want to do that, but the number of people who are going to want to take the risk is going to be awfully small."

He seems to be implying that human cloning is inherently risky to those considering the procedure. I think he's got it backwards: the first cases for cloning will rather be seen (or marketed) as a risk-reducing tactic. Make a clone to harvest compatible fetal stem cells, perhaps with some genetic patching. Make a clone to harvest compatible organs some time in the future. "Don't be the last of your ultra-wealthy clique to take this prudent life-extending step, now available more cheaply than ever before!"

The risks in such a situation would only be those imposed by society, not inherent to cloning as a process. Based on animal experiments, cloning doesn't appear to need a giant laboratory or infrastructure. So this "possibility" won't stay "small" and "abstract" for very long.

(This idea is ripe in popular culture, as well, with both a recent book and upcoming movie considering the lives of clones raised from birth for others' welfare.)

Technorati Tags: cloning, bioethics, fukuyama, drugs

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Top grades in monkey torture

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey: Sorry, Fluffy, but I really need an A

An English exam authority has a system where test-takers get adjustments to their scores for recent traumatic events. The bonus for a dead pet is 2%.

But that's neither here nor there. What I like is directly addressing animals in english with subtle threats, as in "Sorry, Fluffy, but I really need an A." Can't get enough of it. I've mined the vein myself, with "Play it stupid, man-mouse, and we might just let you live" and "Hey, you two sheepboys�stop that jibber-jabbin'!" Of course those were manimals to be precise.

But that's neither here nor there, either. The genre reminds me of my favorite skit of The State, "Monkey Torture". I only saw it once, and have been hoping to find it again ever since. I recently found a transcript of its episode here.

For reference in case that site ever goes away, I reproduce the skit's script here. I think it holds up well in text, but maybe that's just because I can still hear Thomas Lennon's unique inflection as I read it. Submitted for your approval, "Monkey Torture", written and acted by Thomas Lennon and Michael Black, from episode 201 of The State:

Barry Lutz Show

Barry Lutz (Miichael Black): Barry Lutz here with the Barry Lutz Show. My guest tonight is Dr. Martin Crank. America's foremost primate zoologist.

Dr. Crank (Thomas Lennon): Good evening.

Barry: Doctor Crank, In your many years of primate research you've developed-

Dr. Crank: Ah, research is such a restrictive term, I feel I've I opened up a whole area of research that I like to call 'monkey torture.'

Barry: Monkey torture. What exactly does this process entail?

Dr. Crank: Well, first I lure monkeys into my apartment with bananas, then they fall through a trap door into my secret lair, where they undergo extensive...monkey torture.

Barry: The rack, bamboo shoots, hot water strap basting....

Dr. Crank: No, no, it's psychological.

Barry: Psychological....for example?

Dr. Crank: Ah, well, I have this one monkey who's name is Bongo. And, uh, sometimes I'll pretend like he's dead. He'll be right there,and I'll say, uh, "Boy, I sure miss Bongo ever since he died." Then I'll pretend I can't see him. Another really good one is, uh, sometimes I'll pretend like I'm gonna set them free, I'll drive the car right up to the edge of the jungle and stop. Then I'll turn the car right back around, right back to my secret lair.

Barry: Dr. Crank, what have you learned from your many years of monkey torture?

Dr. Crank: They hate it. The whole being tortured thing. Drives them nuts.

Barry: I understand you've had a lot of trouble getting funding lately.

Dr. Crank: Well, recently, yes. This country is full of what I like to call 'bleeding heart liberals,' who I guess are turned off by the idea of torturing monkeys for no good reason. I guess all can say is "Sorry...I'm the bad guy?"

Barry: Do you have any advice- do you have any advice, Dr. Crank, for any young people who are watching the show and are interested in pursuing a career in monkey torture?

Dr. Crank: Yes, I'd say, get a monkey, and...torture the hell out of it.

Barry: I see you brought a little friend of yours with you and you're going to demonstrate some of your tortures.

Dr. Crank: This is little Ricky.

Barry: Hello, little Ricky.

Dr. Crank: Say hello.

Barry: Do you know who I am? I'm Barry Lutz!

Dr. Crank: I've got something really horrible in store for him. The first thing I'm going to do is convince Ricky--

(phone interrupts)

Barry: (answers it) Barry Lutz. It's the ASPCA, for you.

Dr. Crank: Yes...You're going to file criminal charges... if I don't quit torturing monkeys... And I'll have to take all the monkeys to the zoo where they'll be loved and cared for? Yes, good bye.

Barry: Dr. Crank, I'm so sorry. It seems as though you won't be torturing monkeys anymore.

Dr. Crank: It would seem so. If that had been the ASPCA and not my friend Terry calling from backstage.

Barry: Well Dr. Crank, you had me completely fooled.

Dr. Crank: Well, more importantly, we had little Ricky here fooled...You're not going anywhere, smart boy!

Barry: My thanks to Dr. Crank. Join us tomorrow where my guest will be Chef Paul Perdoe, who will show us how to make little edible luggage. Yeah, that does sound good!

I'm the bad guy?

Technorati Tags: thestate, monkeys, anthropomorphizing, thomaslennon, michaelblack, humor, skits

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Giant, cheap, flat HD displays?

Chicago Sun-Times: Big screens a growth industry for Motorola

Motorola today will announce it is ready to begin marketing a new technology to "grow" large-screen TVs using atom-sized carbon nano tubes as seeds with the potential to produce superior images at a fraction of the price of today's big screens.

Jim O'Connor, vice president of Motorola technology incubation and commercialization, says a 40-inch screen will cost under $400 and that "[t]he technology is ready to deliver now."

Technorati Tags: tv, hdtv, nanotech, motorola

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Chimeras rule! (by majority)

I'm fascinated by chimeras -- organisms made up of cells of varying genetic composition. It happens naturally in humans with odd implications. In one case, initial tests on a woman's son, who was naturally conceived and delivered, indicated he was not genetically her offspring. In fact, the mother was a chimera, and the ovary/egg cells which had contributed to her son were of a different genetic makeup from her blood cells, used for other profiling.

I had always thought this a rare condition. But: NYTimes: Cheating, or an Early Mingling of the Blood?

Dr. Ann Reed, chairwoman of rheumatology research at the Mayo Clinic, who uses sensitive DNA tests to look for chimerism, finds that about 50 to 70 percent of healthy people are chimeras. The more scientists look for chimerism, the more they find it. It seemed not to exist in the past, she said, because no one was explicitly looking for small amounts of foreign cells in people's bodies.

"Some believe that if you look hard enough you can find chimerism in anybody," said Dr. Reed, who also has not been involved in the Hamilton case. It is so common that she thinks there must be a biological reason for it. It also may cause problems, she and others say.

Wow.

Technorati Tags: chimeras, genetics, blood

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I can't get no NYTsatisfaction

Fifteen days later, no response from the New York Times to my email about their uncreditted swipe of my collage work to illustrate a story.

I know that they make corrections when they omit or misattribute published graphics; see for example the April 24th Corrections. It includes three separate picture credit corrections.

Further, by viewing the referenced stories, it's clear that the NYTimes also updates the online versions to include the corrected credits. Yet the story which grabbed my graphic still has no online correction.

Perhaps the NYTimes views the Internet and blogosphere as a giant anonymous hive mind from which creative content can be copied and pasted at will without attribution? That's what it's starting to feel like here.

Technorati Tags: nytimes, blogging, plagiarism, corrections, msm

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"Hey, you two sheepboys� stop that jibber-jabbin'!"

Seth Stevenson at Slate.com: The Last Days of Dada - The talking sheep who love Skittles, and other wacky ads that just don't work. By Seth Stevenson

But what on earth do these sheepboys hope to convey? That the Skittles brand is edgy? That it's unpredictable and wild? If so, the whole effort seems futile when so many other ads reach for the same zany vibe. No distinct identity waits at the end of this well-trodden path. The bottom line: If everyone's freaky, no one is.

Maybe Skittles wasn't trying to leverage zany make-believe -- but rather absurd reality? Maybe Skittles knows that a form of sheepboys already exist for medical research? Paul Elias, AP Biotechnology writer:

On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs.

The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can't wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus' brain about two months ago.

"It's mice on a large scale," Chamberlain says with a shrug.

As strange as his work may sound, it falls firmly within the new ethics guidelines the influential National Academies issued this past week for stem cell research.

In fact, the Academies' report endorses research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.

This article also notes, without comment, the same upside-down ethical guidelines I wrote about previously in entry "Play it stupid, man-mouse, and we might just let you live." Consider:

Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee [which endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells], said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice's behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.

Am I crazy to suggest that the mice displaying the more human-like behavior should be entitled to more humane treatment?

(See also: the risk that chimeras could provide a mezzanine for animal viruses to adapt to human cells, discussed at "I'm not easily squicked, but...")

Technorati Tags: chimeras, ethics, biotech, irony

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Mr. Fusion two steps closer

Nature: Physicists look to crystal device for future of fusion

See previously: Mr. Fusion one step closer.

Technorati Tags: fusion, backtothefuture

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Pricey Zip Codes

The zip code I've lived in with the most expensive homes? 94114 (San Francisco, CA) at #90 on Forbes' Most Expensive ZIP Codes 2005.

Technorati Tags: sanfrancisco, zipcodes, realestate

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The lie in every Sunday paper

Mickey Kaus: The MSM's Weekly Fraud

Mitch Albom landed in hot water for reporting something that he expected to happen as if it had already happened -- to make a story deadline. (Next week, who knows? Maybe we'll find out Albom hasn't visited heaven to find the five people you meet there.)

With the Albom affair in mind, Mickey Kaus wonders about a more purposeful deception in almost every Sunday paper and magazine:

Aren't the dates on these MSM Sunday sections beginning to look like a form of fraud, or at least deceptive non-disclosure? The printed Times Calendar section I'm holding in my hand claims it's the Sunday, April 24, 2005 edition. But it's really the Wednesday, April 20, 2005 edition. Uncredentialed blogs accurately report the date they were written, down to the minute, no? Advantage: Self-aggrandizing journalistic wannabes! ... P.S.: Why don't the LAT and NYT (and Time, and Newsweek, and The New Republic, etc.**) accurately disclose to their readers the date they were actually finalized (e.g. the date they were printed)? They could easily do it. The reason they don't is because readers prefer to read the latest information, and the publications want their customers to think they are getting information that's more up-to-date than it actually is. In other words, it's not just an unavoidable problem, or trivial lack of disclosure. It's conscious deception for commercial gain!

Technorati Tags: blogging, kausfiles, msm, journalism

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First they came for a small swab of cells in my cheek...

SFGate: DNA study of human migration / National Geographic and IBM investigate spread of prehistoric peoples around world

In an unusual move, scientists are allowing anyone to join the study by buying a 'Participation Kit.' Participants will use a plastic stick to scrape mucous membrane cells from the inside of a cheek and mail the tissue to National Geographic. The kit costs $99.95 plus shipping and handling.

Perhaps the "informed consent" portion of the kit could also include a copy of Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, as a reminder that having your ethnic identity uploaded into IBM's computers hasn't always been a good omen.

(Which is not to say that I buy most of Edwin Black's critique of IBM or its Nazi-era German affiliates. Just providing fodder for thought.)

Technorati Tags: ibm, nazis, genome, genocide, eugenics

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