Chrisopher Reeves died yesterday

Superman has fallen

] Roughly ten years ago I was involved in a conversation
] with some patent attorneys over the question of whether
] someone could patent a smell. The conclusion they reached
] was yes, as long as there was some system in place for
] defining smells.
]
]
] Enter the October 4, 2004 announcement that two Americans
] were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering
] how people can recognize and remember an estimated 10,000
] smells, ranging from smelly garbage to expensive perfume.
]
] ...
]
] Patenting smells in the past was limited to describing
] the chemical composition of the substance. Receptor
] patterning opens the door for a variety of new patenting
] possibilities, as well as a world filled with
] infringement pitfalls.

[ Not sure how i feel about this... -k]

The DaVinci Institute - Taste & Smell Patents

] Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a
] report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, who
] found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass
] destruction after 1991, justifies rather than undermines
] President Bush's decision to go to war.

[ Seriously? It's like I'm in some parallel dimension. -k]

ABCNEWS.com : Cheney: Weapons Report Justifies Iraq War

] Some detected animus toward Edwards in Ifill's
] interrogations but for me the overwhelming impression,
] which I've gathered over the years from watching her on
] PBS's Wash Week in Review, is that this is a person with
] a case of the cutes. There's a preening coyness to her,
] as if she's smiling at herself rather than at the camera
] and expecting a cookie.

[ I kinda felt that way too. Some seriously silly moments she cooked up. I'm glad Edwards brought it up when he said "I can use his name again now?" That's was pure silliness. -k]

Gwen Awful

] Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top
] of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the
] millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the
] bitstream.

[ The editor of Wired takes a stab at redefining the business model that entertainment companies should be looking at.

There are some compelling statistics in the article, and a lot of arguments similar to those made by myself and others around here in the past few years. Leveraging the power of collaborative filtering and network effects inherently, flexible pricing based on popularity metrics, modified cost structures and the removal of locality as a parameter for the customer base.

If his numbers are accurate, anywhere between 20 and 50% of existing potential markets may be untapped because there's simply no way to get people to the product efficiently in the physical space. That's an awful lot of money and more importantly, an awful lot of diverse cultural media that could be available to the greater audience. -k]

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

[ Cool looking tech from Cray. The idea of built in FPGA's that can be used as coprocessors for particularly repetitive algorithms seems really smart. -k]

Cray Inc - The Supercomputer Company - XD1 Overview

] A motorist in France went a little faster than he wanted
] when he claimed his cruise control got stuck, leaving him
] barreling down a busy highway at 120 mph and forcing
] police to help clear a route.
]
] The Le Parisien newspaper quoted Hicham Dequiedt saying
] he was overtaking a truck when his Renault Vel Satis
] started to accelerate with a life of its own. He couldn't
] cut the ignition, he said, because his car has a magnetic
] card instead of a key.
]
] "It was impossible to slow down! Stomping on the brakes
] proved pointless, nothing worked. I avoided one car after
] another by flashing my lights at them," the 29-year-old
] was quoted as saying.

[ Could be a hoax, since he claims it finally just decided to slow down when he got to the toll booths, but, if not a hoax, that's some shit. -k]

WFTV.com - News Of The Strange - Driver Calls Police For Help When Cruise Control Gets Stuck At 120 MPH

] So, sitting in front of me right now is a notebook very
] similar to the ThinkPad T42 that I reviewed a few weeks
] ago. However, just below the cursor keys is a slim, and
] very unobtrusive fingerprint scanner.

[ If i was gonna get an x86 laptop, it'd be a ThinkPad. If i was paranoid, or consumed by geek fetishism, it'd be this one. -k]

Biometric IBM ThinkPad T42 | The Register

] The buzz phrase most often heard in the institute's
] offices is academic freedom. "My hackles go up on the
] academic freedom issue," Chapman says. "You should be
] allowed in the sciences to ask questions and posit
] alternative theories."

[ There's a lot of language in this article about the ID folks talking about scientific equanimity, "understanding the full range of scientific views", and so on, but nothing I have seen points to ID being scientific in any way, shape or form.

Its central tenet is that there are structures in Biology that are too complex to be the result of Darwinian selection. They then make the fallacy of stating "therefore, there must be an intelligent designer." It's a fallacy because the conclusion is not logically supported by the assumptions.

And that's not the biggest issue, because science is based on repeatable, verifiable experiments. If you have none, then you aren't doing science. The statement that one theory is wrong, so my theory is right, based on no evidence, is definitionaly unscientific.

Even the "evidence" they cite is only, at *best*, demonstrative of areas where darwinism fails to completely explain a phenomenon. Again though, even assuming is that's the case, the failure of one system to explain something is insufficient to support the claim of another.

And for the record, that's not to say they're wrong, or shouldn't believe whatever they want, but it's just that, a belief. And therefore has no place in a discussion about teaching science.

Don't get me started on Gilder. He tries to cite newton, but neglects to mention that no one threw Newton out because of quantum mechanics. And that's his most cogent argument.

The bottom line, as Lawrence Krauss implies, is that biologists need to stand up. Forget your fears about lending credence to the opposition by engaging them. Dispell any implication that evolutionary theory and ID are even close to each other in terms of support. They may have couched the debate in the lingo of science, but the result will be teaching about God and His plan, as defined by the political Right wing. Fairness doesn't enter into it. -k]

Wired 12.10: The Crusade Against Evolution

] But even with so many issues still on the table, one
] seems to have been long ago put to bed: Birth control is
] unquestionably a woman's responsibility.
]
]
] Or is it? A remarkable new product is on its way that may
] make it possible to shift the burden of reproductive
] responsibility%u2014gasp!%u2014 to men.

[ Interesting and compelling article? Would you go on the pill, gents? -k]

Jagged Little Pill - Will male birth control ever become a reality? By Alex Mar