Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:19:28 GMT

Mark B. Cohen. “Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.” [Quotes of the Day]

Eric Hoffer. “You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.” [Quotes of the Day]

Henry Kissinger. “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” [Quotes of the Day]

Voltaire. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” [Quotes of the Day]

Michael Pritchard. “No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.” [Quotes of the Day]

I’ll try to figure out how these quotes fit together tomorrow. I got a chuckle out of a couple of them.

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 05:31:09 GMT

Go Phish!.

New Service Sounds Like Phish

“Last month, Phish joined with Elektra Records and nugs.net — a free live-music site — to introduce a unique Web music service that coincides with the band’s first studio album and tour in two years.

For a fee of $10 to $13, the service, called Live Phish, features specially designed cover art and provides soundboard-quality downloadable recordings of Phish concerts less than 48 hours after a performance.

Shows are available in both unrestricted MP3 and SHN files — a compacted and so-called “lossless” format.” [Wired News]

Here’s the key statement, though:

” ‘The service is so affordable and easy to use that it’s easier to just download (the show) than to bother trying to get it from a friend,’ said Jason Colton, an associate at Phish management company Dionysian Productions.”

How long until the rest of the music industry comes to this conclusion and starts making money instead of losing it?

[The Shifted Librarian]

I discussed this last month. You do not need to have too many people to spend $10 to make some change. ANd if you change the sets every night, adding a new cover song, you will start getting the collectors involved. The ones who want that one special song only sung one time. Added value items, covers, lyrics, biographical stuff, special club memberships and you can drag in more. This would feed not only their CD sales but their concerts also. It will be interesting to see what happens but it could be that Phish will be remembered for changing the business models, along with former Byrds singer Roger McGuinn who is publishing some works under a Creative Commons license.

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 04:39:51 GMT

Alvin Toffler. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” [Quotes of the Day]

Samuel Butler. “The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.” [Quotes of the Day]

A nice pair.

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 05:53:51 GMT

Metaphor, Morality, and Politics. The essay Metaphor, Morality, and Politics is a great read. I have to study it carefully to find out how the ideas in the essay fit with my thinking. There should be more texts which ‘think outside the box’ out there on the net. [Universal Rule]

Okay. I’ll have to reread this tomorrow. Some sounds reasonable. Some sounds like claptrap. I agree that Conservatives do a much better job getting their message across to their followers. Liberals fail here, to their detriment. Maybe it is the metaphor of morality as he applies it to politics?

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 05:18:03 GMT

Hierarchy and silence. Hilary Burden:
Dysfunctional institutions mobilise to defend themselves at their weakest points. They want passion in their organisation, but when they woo it, they try to control it because they fear it more than anything. So creative energy is tamed and cooled by the twin weapons of hierarchy and silence.
[The Guardian] [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

This is a horror story that is being widely repeated. I have seen this first hand. In the long run, if these institutions exist in an industry that requires creativity and innovation to function, they will fail. The separation between the creators and the board of directors is a chasm impossible to cross. The only path these companies have is to get so big that they always have money to buy others passion and creative energy. This is a business model that works but you will not find much of that passion or creativity in the dysfunctional institution, no matter how much they discuss it in their mission statement. The people running such a company lack any true creativity or are rightly fearful of it, because innovation brings change. The prototypical MBA does not want change; they want stability.

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 05:02:03 GMT

Public Release: 26-Jan-2003

Nature Immunology
Newly identified gut protein kills bacteria
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered a new antibiotic protein that appears to kill certain types of bacteria in the intestine.

National Institutes of Health, AstraZeneca, Burroughs-Wellcome Fund

Contact: Gila Z. Reckess

314-286-0109
Washington University School of Medicine

[Eurekalert - Biology]

This is really cool. A protein that seems to be invoolved in blood vessel formation is also a powerful antibiotic if it is released by cells in the gut. Proteins having multiple uses will be something that we will see a lot. But what is even stranger here is that apparently its expression is controlled by a ‘friend;y’ bacterium found in the gut. Working out this system could be a real paradigm shift. If you take antibiotics that also kill the good bacteria, are you making it easier for the bad bacteria to get a foothold? Why do bad bacteria not mutate to get around the antibiotic activity of this protein? They do when we take antibiotics. The answers to some of these questions could tell us a lot about how to defeat bacterial infections.

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 04:56:15 GMT

Public Release: 27-Jan-2003
New protein will help fight inflammation
A joint research project by scientists in Cardiff, Wales, UK, has developed a new protein, which could end the suffering of thousands. The research, at Cardiff University and the University of Wales College of Medicine (UWCM), and funded mainly by the Wellcome Trust, is designed to tackle the problem of chronic inflammation š which can lead to serious disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and bacterial peritonitis.

Wellcome Trust

Contact: Dr Wendy Ross
RossW@cardiff.ac.uk
44-292-087-4673
Cardiff University

[Eurekalert - Biology]

I hate these sorts of press releases. They do not say what the protein is or what it does. Checking google reveals that the scientists are involved in inflammatory cytokines, but there are a lot of them. IL-6 is one they seem to be working on now but is this the one in the release. Who knows? Not very informative. I guess they just want to announce that someone is giving them money for whatever it is.

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 04:45:56 GMT

Sleeping sickness bug swallowed a plant [Nature Science Update]

It would be interesting to see what genes these are. The fact that the parasite that causes sleeping sickness once had chloroplasts is interesting. The fact that after losing the need for chloroplasts, some of the plastids genes moved to the parasite’s chromosome is more interesting. The fact that these genes may now be necessary for its survival is the most interesting. What genes, that once were necessary for exploiting sunlight , are now required for living? It looks like they are used for degrading sugars rather than synthesizing them. If so, this would indicate that the enzymes that make up this pathway altered in ways that would be very interesting to understand. Enzymes catalyze chemical reactions. As such, the reaction can really proceed in either direction. Usually, by altering the concentrations of the reactants, a specific direction is maintained. It would be unusual but amazing if these enzymes now work “backward” because of the new biological system.

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 04:35:14 GMT

Between Iraq and a Hard Place. If you missed the Channel 4 screening of “Between iraq and a hard place” by Bremner, Bird and Fortune it’s worth watching [Realplayer]. Here’s some choice quotes from the transcript [Word doc, file size: 80kb, 57 pages]: RORY: And so Iraq was created. By us. The trouble was it had never been a country. Just a collection of tribes. Kurds, Marsh Arabs, Shiites, Sunnis, Turcomans, Jews, Assyrians. Mostly they detested each other, so you would think it would be a tough job for Britain to unite them. JOHN FORTUNE: But we did it. Less than 3 years after we took over, they all got together to throw us out. That revolt was put down by British troops but the Arab tribesmen and the Kurds kept… [Monkey X - Hairy Thoughts]

Well, this is an interesting perspective. Obviously not an American channel. Check out its website to get an idea of what sorts of news it finds most tempting. WIfe Swapping. Looking for more volunteers to tell all. It sure is educational.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 06:00:19 GMT

Molecular Abacus Stores Abundant Information [Scientific American]

While this is a wonderful technical achievement, it still requires an atomic force microscope, not exactly a small instrument, to work. We might not see it in iPods anytime soon but it could be very useful in other areas.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 05:57:06 GMT

Microsoft fails Slammer’s security test. Internal memos show that the software giant hadn’t patched its own network against the Slammer worm, causing many of its services to fail. [CNET News.com]

Oh. The Irony! They have lots of excuses for why their servers were not patched; at the same time they denigrate others who fell victim to the worm. Typical.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 05:41:00 GMT

Study says boys do read, they just don’t read books [elearningpost]

WHile my sn does read a lot, I am constantly impressed with his knowledge garnered from baseball statistics, competitive card games and video games. Games such as Magic or Yugioh require the ability to understand the ramifications of a wide set of properties that vary from card to card. Then these cards must be placed into a deck that accentuates the potential usefulness of each card. Then, since the cards are drawn at random, these games require a rapid adaptibility. All this comes from reading about the cards and possible strategies. It may be that for many boys, reading fiction is not easy while reading books about game strategies would be much easier. Of course, this also gets into why we read? Although many schools no longer do this, I believe that there should be certain books that everyone read, that provide a common basis for our culture. But usually these books are hard for everyone to read, which is one reason they are no longer in the curriculum. But if reading is to provide basic skills permitting one to read a bank statement or a supeona, then why not use alternate approaches?

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 05:28:48 GMT

Innovation as a Deep Capability [elearningpost]

While this article is mostly right on track, it still requires people who have succeeded in a heirarchical compnay to actually be able to identify radical solutions. Most middle managers are selected for being able to effectively deal with small, evolutionary changes. If they were really capable of finding truly innovative projects, they would probably be gone from the company, creating innovation for themselves. Where is the reward for identifying creativity and keeping it in the company? Companies that naturally innovate tend to select for people that enjoy the creativity and find their rewards in that. If a company has to pay extra to find creativity, I think it is likely not to have a huge wellspring of the sort of radical innovation described. I could be wrong though and it is worth doing rather than doing nothing. It will be interesting to see just what happens. I do like the idea of having some fraction of your time devoted to any creative idea you have. At Immunex, we could spend 15% of our time on any individual project we wanted to.

Editors and Lobbyists Wage High-Tech War Over Letters

It has gotten to the point that if a letter to the editor contains any actual figures and statistics, I figure it is an astroturfed letter. It also invalidates much of the media if their filtering systems for publication can so easily be subverted. Their models are all ‘filter, then publish’. But if this can now so easily be shown to fail (previously it was not as simple to show this), then the ‘publish, then filter’ approach of the Internet will gain even more creedence. If these letters had been sent to Internet sites, the obvious astroturfing would rapidly been discovered and the perps easily found. Oh wait. That is EXACTLY what happened. In just a few hours. The major media, as well as political action groups of either stripe, need to take this as a warning. The Internet facillitates transparency.

Online Kid Porn a Tricky ProblemÊ

A very interesting viewpoint. I don’t understand why Pete Townsend is arrested with big fanfare but you hear nothing about any prosecution of the web site he supposedly visited. I expect we wmight see a similar type of spedtacle when the RIAA starts getting people arrested for having a pirated MP3.