On Sunday afternoon, Grove is unleashing a scathing critique of the nation's biomedical establishment. In a speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he challenges big pharma companies, many of which haven't had an important new compound approved in ages, and academic researchers who are content with getting NIH grants and publishing research papers with little regard to whether their work leads to something that can alleviate disease, to change their ways.

There is only one section of this entire article that makes sense. It is the final question of the interview, where Grove discusses the problem of conformity in the biomedical sciences. With that, I agree...with the grant system the way it is, there really is no good place (at least where government money is concerned) for extreme innovation. However, I think that Grove seriously underestimates the complexity of drug design and misses a basic understanding of much of biomedical research. The reason why there are no "new" big therapies for diseases like Parkinsons is that research hasn't found a way to fix it yet. Its not that we are not trying hard enough. As well, although not every scientific paper published seems to have a direct line to therapies, they are all important. The human body, and even just a single human cell, is so complex that even after over 100 years of intense study, there are still hundreds of questions left about how basic cellular machinery works. Its not that the pharmaceutical companies are hording a bunch of great new drugs and are too lazy to getting around to testing them. Its just that all too often, a drug will work great until it gets to clinical trials, where the complexity of the body causes the drug not to work as well as it did in the mouse models. Until we understand *EVERY* pathway and machine within a cell and between cells and between organs, we will never be able to design drugs that will cure all the horrible diseases. He makes an analogy between designing computer chips and design of drugs, which I think is a poor analogy. Whereas he can open a computer, take it entirely apart, and put it back together (thus understanding every connection making that computer run), biomedical scientists are unable to do the same with the human body. They struggle to make sense of the human body by studying every organism that is ethical to work on, and try to draw parallels. Anyway, I wish I could have been at this talk to see the reaction of the crowd. Something tells me he didn't receive a standing ovation. While the funding system may need an overhaul in some people's opinion, innovation isn't entirely muted in the research community. The NIH do have grants for new investigators and new lines of research, and as well, the NSF funds science that is a bit more out of the box as well. I think Grove should have done a bit more research before unleashing on the biomedical research community. I am sure it must be frustrating to be diagnosed with a horrible disease such as Parkinsons, but instead of lashing out, perhaps his time would be better spent raising awareness and funds for the biomedical research community.

Intels Andy Grove roasts the biomedical industry

What should be done if one can-not accept the Byzantine system of power? Retreat into the catacombs? Wait until enough energy for another revolt has been accumulated? Try to hurry along revolt, thereby posing another "orange threat," which Putin and his allies have used, since the 2004 Ukrainian elections, to frighten the people and themselves? Attempt to focus on the demand for honest elections? Carry on painstaking educational work, in order to gradually change citizens' views?

Each person will have to decide in his or her own way. I imagine -- with both sorrow and certainty -- that the Byzantine system of power has triumphed for the foreseeable future in Russia. It's too late to remove it from power by a normal democratic process, for democratic mechanisms have been liquidated, transformed into pure imitation. I am afraid that few of us will live to see the reinstatement of freedom and democracy in Russia. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that "the mole of history burrows away unnoticed."

Why Putin Wins

As we struggle to make sense of the current political crisis in Pakistan, it's useful to think back nearly 30 years to the wave of protests that toppled the shah of Iran and culminated in the Islamic Republic -- a revolutionary earthquake whose tremors are still shaking the Middle East.

The shah was America's friend, just like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. He was our staunch ally against the bogeyman of that time, the Soviet Union, just as Musharraf has been America's partner in fighting al-Qaeda. The shah ignored America's admonitions to clean up his undemocratic regime, just as Musharraf has. And as the shah's troubles deepened, the United States hoped that moderate opposition leaders would keep the country safe from Muslim zealots, just as we are now hoping in Pakistan.

David Ignatius - In Pakistan, Echoes of Iran - washingtonpost.com

Air travelers are asking for trouble if they show up for a flight with 3.5 ounces of shampoo in their carry-on bags. But the Department of Homeland Security has decided that the government should not even trouble chemical plants to account for the storage of anything under 2,500 pounds of deadly chlorine. The department’s new rules on reporting stockpiles of toxic chemicals, issued last week, have certainly made the industry happy. They should make the public worried.
...
The rules the department issued last week are far too lax about when facilities need to report stockpiles of chemicals like chlorine, fluorine and hydrogen fluoride to the government. According to the new rules, which watered-down proposed rules that the department had released in April, a chemical plant does not have to report the storage of 2,499 pounds of chlorine, even if it is located in a populated area — or across from an elementary school.

If 450 pounds of chlorine are stolen, enough to cause mass casualties, the theft need not be reported. Chlorine has been used by insurgents in Iraq, and it is high on the list of chemicals that should be kept out of terrorists’ hands.

Chemical Industry 1, Public Safety 0 - New York Times

Less than two weeks after a team of scientists created a nanoscale radio component, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have gone one better -- announcing the creation of the world's first complete nanoradio.

The breakthrough nanoradio consists of a single carbon-nanotube molecule that serves simultaneously as all the essential components of a radio -- antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier and demodulator. Physicist Alex Zettl led the development team, and graduate student Kenneth Jensen built the radio.

"I'm totally amazed that it works so well," says Zettl. "Making individual components are good breakthroughs, but the holy grail was putting it all together. So we're ecstatic that we were able to achieve that full integration."

The radio opens the possibility of creating radio-controlled interfaces on the subcellular scale, which may have applications in the areas of medical and sensor technology.

Nanoelectronic systems are considered crucial to the continued miniaturization of electronic devices, and it's becoming a hot research and investment arena. Two weeks ago, a team at the University of California at Irvine announced the development of a nanoscale demodulator, an essential component of a radio.

The number of consumer products using nanotechnology -- from the iPhone to home pregnancy testing kits -- has soared from 212 to well over 500, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies' online inventory of manufacturer-identified nanotech goods in March 2006.

The nanoradio is less than one micron long and only 10 nanometers wide -- or one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair -- making it the smallest radio ever created.

The researchers' paper was published at the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters website.

The first transmission received by the nanoradio was an FM broadcast of Eric Clapton's "Layla." (The lab has posted video of that moment.) The Clapton classic was quickly followed by the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and Handel's Largo from the opera Xerxes -- the first piece of music broadcast by radio, on Dec. 24, 1906.

The nanoradio's amplifier operates on the same principles as vacuum-tube radios from the 1940s and early '50s, says Zettl.

"We've come full circle. We're using the old vacuum-tube principle of having electrons jump off the tip of the nanotube onto another electrode, rather than the conventional solid-state transistor principle," says Zettl.

The electronic properties of this electron-emitting nanotube function as the radio's demodulator -- making a complete radio possible within a single molecule.

The audio quality "can be very good," says Zettl, but if you listen closely, some unique effects of the radio's tiny size can be heard: an old-fashioned "scratchiness" that occurs because the device is working in the quantum regime.

"The amazing thing is that since we have such a sensitive nanosc... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

World's First Nanoradio Could Lead to Subcellular Remote-Control Interfaces

My sainted grandmother, whose memory I reconstruct in a thousand unrealistic ways, turned on the televisions in her apartment first thing each morning and off last thing at night. This seemed counterintuitive in a woman famous for focusing all her attention on the child in front of her. But she liked voices in the background.

We would sit at the table in her fragrant kitchen chatting, while weeping women vied for a crown, a dishwasher, and the distinction of most miserable life. In one direction, we could hear the portable set on a countertop next to the refrigerator; in the other direction, there was the mahogany living room console. Sometimes the soundtracks were slightly out of sync. It didn't bother us, because we weren't really listening. We weren't watching, either.

Voices of comfort - International Herald Tribune

By imposing martial law, Gen. Pervez Musharraf has pushed nuclear-armed Pakistan further along a perilous course and underscored the failure of President Bush’s policy toward a key ally in the war on terrorism. The events should not have come as a surprise to administration officials. This is what you get when policy is centered slavishly on a single, autocratic ruler rather than more broadly on his country.

another fine mess
another man ol' George has looked in the eyes and decided here was a man he could trust

The Pakistan Mess - New York Times

The world's richest model has reportedly reacted in her own way to the sliding value of the US dollar - by refusing to be paid in the currency.

silly article but the intriguing point raised is the possibility (and i stress possibility), a subject a friend of mine wrote his masters thesis on about 3 years ago, that this is one of the first signs that the euro will replace the dollar as the global reserve currency

BBC NEWS | Business | Supermodel 'rejects dollar pay'

Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and Microsoft's Chris Wilson are trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript, better known as JavaScript.

ITworld.com - Mozilla, Microsoft drawing sabers over next JavaScript

The patient was a 37-year-old man who had been physically abused as a boy by his schizophrenic mother, often while he lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Nevertheless, he had grown into a reasonably normal, gainfully employed adult, and he thought that the worst was behind him, until one night he awoke to find an intruder rummaging through his dresser drawers. After that, his nightmares began — terrifying, recurrent dreams in which the intruder was a middle-age woman and a knife dangled with Damoclesian contempt from the ceiling fan over his head.
...
In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call “fear extinction memories,” the brain’s way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. “The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of,” Dr. Nielsen said. “But if there isn’t a check on the process, we’d fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood.”

Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.”

By this scenario, nightmares, in allowing you to escape prematurely, represent a failure of the “fear extinction” system. “Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional,” he said.

i read this when it was first online on 23rd Oct after some minor league odd dreams last night it came back to me so i meme it now for your reading pleasure

plus i'm reminded of something i have believed for years that art is like the dreams of a culture - an expression of the cultural unconsciousness - those that study narratology talk about the creation of a magical resolution, clearly sometimes it is a nightmare like in Kafka's The Trial, a sustained surreal journey that ends with the execution of K. I looked for some old text books to explain magical resolution but couldn't find what i was looking for but it's about closure, resolving the story arc and having a happy ending (obviously The Trial isn't a happy ending but like Shakespearean tragedy the nightmare has closure). The Tempest is a rather literal example of magical resolution. A Midsummer Nights Dream, Fanny Hill, Pride and Prujudice. Sometimes there is too much magic and the ending is perceived as too forced, too contrived and the book or film isn't satisfactory. Peter F Hamilton's conclusion to his Nightsdawn trilogy springs to my mind.

edit
googling magical resolution i came across a great example "Neo’s triumph over the Agents is a magical resolution" from here absolutely the ending of The Matrix is a great and rather more contempory example of a magic resolution which is artistically successful Neo is dead/dying but revives by hacking the Matrix itself

Nightmares - Sleep - Dreams - New York Times