I am hopeful that Atlanta will rise to this challenge. Many of the pieces are there - community support would seal this.

Gilbert F. Amelio, former CEO of Apple Computer and a director of AT&T, is a member of Galectin Therapeutics’ board of directors. Rod Martin is vice chairman of Galectin.

Atlanta can become Silicon Valley of biotechnology | www.myajc.com

Tim Hornyak writes about the new oversized Canadian commemorative quarters, which will feature glowing dinosaur skeletons

Cool!

Commemorative Canadian quarters with glow-in-the-dark dino skeletons - Boing Boing

From Tom:

If you believe in due process of law and the right to freedom of expression you should join us in taking a stand. It is important that we take a stand right now.

It doesn't matter whether or not you support what Wikileaks is doing. If I were handed such a rich trove of private information I might have moral qualms about dumping the whole thing on the Internet. That is totally irrelevant.

In the United States of America we are a country of laws. If Wikileaks has violated a law than the appropriate way to respond to that is through the use of the legal system. In fact, like it or not, it is most likely the case that Wikileaks has not violated the law. Therefore, senior politicians in this country have taken it upon themselves to use their personal influence to shut the website down, and a number of corporations, large and small, have obliged them.

In a free country with a strong legal system and a tradition of upholding the right to freedom of speech, this sort of thing is not acceptable. Life, liberty, and property should only be taken away through due process of law and not simply because some powerful people desire it and present thin arguments in favor of it.

As The Internet Society recently stated in their newsletter:

[Wikileaks] must be subject to the same laws and policies of availability as all Internet sites. Free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet.

Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence...

Anger about these events runs deep. Right now, many of the companies who assisted in cutting off Wikileaks have been subjected to distributed denial of service attacks. While I share the anger of those who are launching these at... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Taking a principled stand on Wikileaks

Toms newest brilliant idea. Check it out!

Announcing my latest website project:

Wiki Voter Guide is a website that helps you research upcoming elections in the United States using Wikipedia. Why use Wikipedia for this purpose? On the one hand, Wikipedia can contain information that is incorrect or misleading, because it can be edited by anyone. However, we believe that Wikipedia can be a useful resource if it is used properly and read with a critical eye. Its openness and collaborative process enables people to work together to create objective documentation of a politican's positions and views, independent of any campaign or special interest. Also, the WikiTrust Browser Plugin makes it easier to identify and eliminate vandalism. You can read a detailed discussion of the philosophy and origins of this website by clicking here.

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Feedback?

Wiki Voter Guide

A career civil servant who had worked for six prime ministers from Mackenzie King to Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Cross watched anxiously from Parliament Hill as the drama unfolded. Wondering whether "this still could be Canada," he waited while Mr. Trudeau consulted his advisers.

"Canadians might've been accustomed to uniforms and arms during wartime, but to have them appear in peacetime gave one an uneasy feeling," Mr. Cross said decades later.null

The Globe and Mail ran an obit on my Grandfather friday.

globeandmail.com: Ottawa insider was at the centre of the October Crisis of 1970

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

Acidus had a project mentioned offhandedly on the Daily Show a few months ago but Virgil has seriously raised the bar by actually getting his picture on the Colbert report! We now have a new standard for leetness around here. If you haven't been personally denounced by Steven Colbert, you just aren't that important...

WikiScanner on the Colbert Report

The State Department has a message for White House candidates wanting to expound on sensitive diplomatic issues: Shut up...

First it was Barack Obama's talk of dialogue with dictators and invading Pakistan to kill Islamist militants, then it was Hillary Rodham Clinton refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons to that end. Now, the Democratic front-runners have been joined by radical Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, who threatened to bomb Muslim holy sites to stop terror attacks....

"To somehow suggest that an appropriate response to terrorism would be to attack sites that are holy and sacred to more than a billion people throughout the world is just absolutely crazy," he said, denouncing "any suggestion that the defense of the American homeland or the defense of American interests would ever justify attacking holy sites."

Amen....I shudder at the fact that Tom Tancredo actually got elected to Congress.

U.S. State Department cringes as presidential hopefuls muddy diplomatic waters - International Herald Tribune

Hey...just wanted to say thanks to Rattle and Decius. I personally know that they basically spent *ALL* day on Sunday (in to the wee hours of the morning) coding to fix this problem. I am very impressed at their determination to get this problem resolved before the monday morning "oh god I am at work, guess I will surf the web instead" rush hour. And thanks to Starbucks and Venti sized coffees, which I also saw had a hand in this tour-de-force.

Decius wrote:
This morning a few links popped up on MemeStreams that don't work if you click on them. You get an error message which says "I could not find the proper URL based on the OID. You may have reached this page due to an error."

We realize that this is a serious problem. Unfortunately, it is not a simple to fix and it is going to take time.

When we first started working on this project back in 2001 we were completely green at relational database design, and we made a poor decision, which was to use a feature of Postgresql called "OID" which at the time was defined as globally unique for an entire database. Unfortunately, the Postgres team later decided that this was impossible, and change the definition of OID. In newer versions of the database, which we are running due to numerous performance enhancements, OIDs aren't globally unique, or even unique to a table.

At this point, unfortunately, we had a hell of a lot of code invested in OIDs. We figured it would be a long, long time before OIDs would end up repeating in our database, and so we could wait to change all of that code. Unfortunately, today, OIDs appear to have started repeating in the blog table far in advance of when we thought this was likely, as this table only has 44,000 entries. There are about 500 references to OIDs in our code, and in order to fix this problem, we'll likely have to change them all.

This is going to require time from us, and hopefully patience from you.

RE: The OID Problem

Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.

It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.

“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”

“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax...”

I agree whole heartedly. While I am in most respects an American one aspect of me which will always and forever be Canadian is my taste in chocolate. My two great disappointments upon moving to the United States at the age of nine were learning that your Cheerios are made with whole wheat, and learning that basically all of your candy bars suck. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I've travelled to, from France to Hong Kong, has English chocolate like Smarties and Aero Bars on the shelf. For a long time I'd thought the reason Smarties weren't available here was due to a trademark conflict with the rolled up sweettarts popular at halloween, but this doesn't explain the fact that no other English candy is available, or if, like Kitkat, it is available, the recipie has been screwed up. Something is deeply wrong with American taste buds.

I'm disappointed that this article, while finally putting the honest truth in print in the United States, fails to delve into the details of why. However, I have a hypothesis. I'm not sure when candy bars first became popular but there are only two possibilities:

1. They became popular before the revolutionary war, in which case Canada and the United States should have both inhereted the same taste in chocolate from England.
2. They became popular after the revolutionary war, in which case you'd think Canadians and Americans would have started eating chocolate manufactured in the same way, and that while English tastes might have diverged, Canadian tastes would have tracked American tastes and not English ones.

Neither occured. So, my hypothesis is that in the beginning, American and Canadian tastes in Chocolate tracked English tastes, and then this funny thing called World War II happened. During WWII Hershey got a contract with the US Army to distribute Hershey bars to American GIs. These bars were designed to have a high melting temperature so they could be handled by Army logistics easily, and be sour enough that soldiers wouldn't eat them when they weren't supposed to. Soldiers came back from the war with an endearing relationship to Hershey, and a taste for flavorless bars, and so now everyone in the country is eating the chocolate equivelent of MREs.

I have no idea if Canadian soldiers were issued chocolate during WWII, but as these flavorless candy bars were an American invention its likely that whatever they had, it was different.

The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course - New York Times