]It’s staggering to think that five years ago there was virtually
]no smack in Tynda. The first local tested HIV+ in 1999. Now there
]are 17-year-old junkies and AIDS is on the horizon. And the
]weirdest thing is that nobody seems to care.

]Take Misha. If he had died on us, we would have stuffed him in a
]trunk and ditched him in the Taiga a la Goodfellas. Only we
]wouldn’t have to worry if anyone found him a couple months from
]now. Nobody even counts the dead and missing junkies out here.
]I’m not trying to be callous and hardened-it’s just what we would
]have had to do.

Interesting article on heroin addiction in Tynda, Russia. A dying city, like many here.

eXile #161 - Feature Story - JunkYard - by Jake Rudnitsky

I found this interesting. Olga Utkina, a female bodyguard. Talks about how females are now competitive, as clients in Moscow have gone from wanting "bruisers" to "shooters". Muscles don't so much matter when you got ace gals with gats.

This reminded me of Molly in Neurmancer in a pleasant way.

A Female Bodyguard Fights Back

] So welcome, and special thanks to those of you who
] arrived early and started colonizing the place before it
] was even completed. That really cheered me up, a couple
] of weeks ago. I don’t have to feel I’m moving into an
] empty (and dishearteningly brand-new) structure. There
] is already some human space here, the start of that
] sense of duration and habitation, and soon there’ll be,
] I hope, more.

] In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a
] reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or
] word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope
] to be here on a more or less daily basis.

Its live now!

William Gibson's Blog

] Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been
] trying to come up with an operating theory of the
] world—and a military strategy to accompany it. Now
] there’s a leading contender. It involves identifying the
] problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking
] them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor
] of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the
] Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually
] at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community. Now
] he gives it to you.

Vewy vewy itewesting.

The Pentagon's New Map

] Lung cancer may be caused by a faulty repair mechanism
] triggered by smoking, according to a new study.
]
] US researchers have found that a primitive cell pathway,
] which is crucial for the development of lungs in the
] embryo, could be the major culprit in small cell lung
] cancer (SCLC).
]
] The pathway is found in all creatures, from worms to
] humans. It is called Sonic Hedgehog, after a mutant form
] in fruit fly embryos that leads to the sprouting of hairs
] all over their bodies.
]
] "The hypothesis was that smokers chronically injure their
] airways and pathways such as hedgehog get turned on to
] repair damage - but chronic injury results in persistent
] pathway activation, which leads to cancer," says Neil
] Watkins, team leader at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive
] Cancer Center, part of Johns Hopkins University in
] Maryland.
]
] The group's experiments showed that the Sonic Hedgehog
] pathway was indeed activated in half of 10 SCLC human
] tissue samples. Furthermore, they successfully stopped
] tumour growth in mice by blocking this pathway and
] believe this may lead to potential therapies in humans.

From Nanochick:
This article is particularily interesting to me for several reasons. One is that I am learning about this particular pathway in my Animal Development class (and learned a bit about it in other classes as well), so its just cool to see something in the news about it. Also, what makes this interesting is that lung cancer is the cancer that nobody has seemed to make much headway on in the way of cures...
At the end of this article, they talk about the cells differentiating into adult lung cells...and that means that this could be an important find for other areas of biology as well...such as organogenesis.

Me:

So, what are my chances of lung cancer being cured before I get it?

New Scientist - Faulty repairs blamed for lung cancer

Brian Greene, professor, and author of _The Elegant Universe_: "wonderfully lucid and thoroughly entertaining"
Gilbert Strang, MIT: "a terrific book"
New Scientist: "inspiring"

Oh jesus, I'm an amazon addict. Its already in my shopping cart :(

Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

The ideas are presented in a clear way, with minimal mathematics, so even students without a deep knowledge of mathematics and statistical physics will be able to rely on this as a reference. Special attention is given to real networks, both natural and artificial. Collected empirical data and numerous real applications of existing theories are discussed in detail, as well as the topical problems of communication networks.

Another book on Networks.. $80? Damn.

Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW

] The only point of this site is to find out as much as
] possible about a North Korean military nuclear
] installation disguised as a subway.

Wow, looks like they could come from the Moscow Metro. Heavy Soviet influence. I guess it figures that communists make the best looking metros.

The Pyongyang Metro

] Digital broadcaster Pseudo.com plans to release a weekly
] TV show hosted by rap star Ice-T on the Internet
] file-sharing network Kazaa, in attempts to start a new
] model of advertising-supported television.

Pseudo spins hip-hop TV show on Kazaa | CNET News.com

] So who will perform the function of Microsoft in the
] Linux world?

More spiel from the interviewer here than from the interviewed, but still okay. Part 3 should be interesting.

Sony's Idei - Part 2 :: AO