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Friday, September 23, 2005 Tylenol. Don Rickles flavor, please. Personalised medicines, or pharmacogenetics, refers to treating the same disease differently in particular groups of people. It also encompasses the identification of genes that make drugs effective or harmful and assessing how people can differ in susceptibility to infectious diseases, so that new medicines or vaccines can be developed. At the moment, personalised medicines are being investigated for the treatment of some cancers and the use of a genetic test with a drug so it is only given to patients with the right genes for it to be effective. @ 07:21 PM CST [Link] Cat and girl guest star. Well, it got a laugh out of me. The new one is pretty funny too. Actually, I've seen a couple "upper-middle class" bands before. Its usually a group of four guys with nice cars and the best gear in the world and predictably sound like ass. This is also known as the hiding behind pillars phenomenon: A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind. Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macinotsh computers. Which is why there are so many hack writers with state-of-the-art laptops. Which is why there are so many crappy photographers with state-of-the-art digital cameras. Which is why there are so many unremarkable painters with expensive studios in trendy neighborhoods. Hiding behind pillars, all of them. @ 07:18 PM CST [Link] Thursday, September 22, 2005 Reporter infiltrates the Raelian sect. Sounds a lot more sane and fun than Scientology and, frankly, most established religions. Rael is surrounded by his "angels," a "harem of 30 to 40 very pretty young women who have sworn in writing never to spurn his advances and to protect him, with their lives if necessary, from all kinds of aggression," according to "May," who asked to remain anonymous. Aside from Rael himself there is psychologist Daniel Chabot and "bishop" Brigitte Boisselier, a French scientist whose Clonaid society announced in 2003 to a barrage of publicity -- but no proof whatsoever -- that it had created cloned humans. The reporter says that "Rael promises the return of the extra-terrestrials to Earth is imminent but says they will not come until he has built their future embassy in Jerusalem. @ 10:22 PM CST [Link] Chinese robot wields big ass sword. This looks like a cheap knock-off of Honda's Asimo. Could these techs look any more bored? @ 10:19 PM CST [Link] Wednesday, September 21, 2005 Great bunch of overheard conversations in NY. Girl #1: Coke. Has to be. You don't lose weight that fast any other way. Girl #2: I do that sometimes. You know, just to jump start the weight loss. --Crunch, Lafayette Street Girl on cell: Holy shit Daddy, I need to get some coke again, I can't fit into a size 2 anymore! --Gap dressing room, 34th & 6th @ 11:21 PM CST [Link] Lost Coast video available. Video of the free half-life 2 expansion game which has been perpetually just around the corner. The HDR lighting technique adds quite a bit of depth to the game's visuals, but you'll need a fairly powerful videocard to use it. @ 11:10 PM CST [Link] Corpse Bride gets an 83 at metacritic. @ 11:04 PM CST [Link] Human powered hydrofoil. This doesn't look like it should float, but it does. Just keep jumping up and down and it'll move. There's even video. Also: A boat-car-submarine thingy. @ 10:55 PM CST [Link] Pshops of musicians trying to be too versatile. @ 09:29 AM CST [Link] Monday, September 19, 2005 RAW's Email to the Universe released. The sample snippet has quite a bit to do with what RAW calls "androphobia." Boy's got a bone to pick with some people it seems. You see? All the old racist clichés---except "a great sense of rhythm." I thus regard androphobia as merely a transmutation from racism to sexism, an "advance" that is not an advance at all. Let me make this very clear. I do not oppose Feminism; on the contrary, I reject all forms of group stereotyping and dehumanization. Androphobia (or male-bashing) has no intrinsic or necessary link with Feminism, and many Feminists utterly reject androphobia. To use an analogy, Marx said that "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." Similarly, I regard androphobia as the Feminism of imbeciles. I oppose androphobia as psychological gendercide. I believe it underlies the widespread male depression (which psychotherapists recognize as "epidemic"), and also explains much of the soaring suicide rate among boys and young males. Possibly related: Salon.com piece on "Listless lads." The men I meet are not the rakish, workaholic, cheating cads of yore. No, I'm bearing witness to a bona fide crisis in American masculinity, one that seems especially, but not exclusively, to afflict the young, urban and privileged. And with it, I have observed the birth of a new breed of man: a man of few interests and no passions; a man whose libido is reduced and whose sense of responsibility nonexistent. These men are commitment-phobic not just about love, but about life. They drink and take drugs, but even their hedonism lacks focus or joy. They exhibit no energy for anyone, any activity, profession or ideology. @ 11:37 PM CST [Link] Not to be outdone by Malaysia, NASA unveils 13 year plan to go back on the moon. Using designs largerly based on the old Apollo missions. "Think of it as Apollo on steroids," says NASA administrator Michael Griffin. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) capsule will weigh about 50% more than the Apollo capsule. "But understand, we did not set out to make it look like Apollo," he adds, explaining that the design was simply the best option out of all those considered. The new Moon programme will have timetable of 13 years instead of Apollo's 8, and the crew of four astronauts is double the number that landed on the Moon first time around. The maximum time the first astronauts will spend on the Moon's surface will also increase to seven days from Apollo’s three. The "something-old-something-new project" will build heavily on space shuttle hardware. It will use revamped versions of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters, external tank and main engines, but will scrap the system's most familiar component, the winged orbiter. At 104 billion total, that's only 14.8 billion per day spent on the moon. Disneyland costs almost as much. I swear I left the Tang right here! @ 10:44 PM CST [Link] Bloc Party's Silent Alarm remixed by bands like Death from above 1979, Four Tet, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Ladytron, Mogwai, and other indie acts. I hear there's a torrent running over at the pirate bay. @ 10:33 PM CST [Link] Clever little hack may fix "stuck pixels." I have no stuck pixels to test this with but it seems to work for others. It just keeps cycling through red, green, and blue in an attempt to "loosen" the stuck pixel. It looks like the idea originated from one of Best Buy's vendors. I wonder if there's a patent on this yet. @ 10:26 PM CST [Link] Artist puts up blank speech balloons on ads and lets anyone with a pen creatively edit ads with sometimes sublime results. Sometimes they're just fucking brilliant. Some NSFW. My top 10 favorites: 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 @ 06:59 PM CST [Link] Sunday, September 18, 2005 Photoshopped propaganda posters. @ 12:25 PM CST [Link] Malaysia to vote on its first astronaut. Kinda. Perhaps some things shouldn't be popularity contests. Then again, he'll (or she) will just be hitching a ride with the Russians, not too different from the handful of space tourists the Russians have put into space. Once its 11,000 would-be astronauts have been whittled down to a handful, their details and updates on their progress will be posted on the internet. Then, the public will be able to make their choice by telephone text message and Malaysia's space bosses will factor the votes into their final decision. If the contest proves popular and the government charges for the votes, it may even be able to cover the cost of its space programme. Also: According to this article they want to be on the moon in 2020. A country of 20 million people with a GDP per capita of less than $10,000? Good luck, guys. @ 12:17 PM CST [Link] Excellent Bill Clinton interview. Part one here. Part two here. Did Clinton really talk about the mass distribution of world-wide wealth back when? I knew, of course, he was a free-trader but this quote makes it sound like he just didn't want to fight the inevitable. Lots of goodies in this interview and the stark contrast between Clinton and the current guy in office could not be more obvious. Oh well, as long as moderates and conservatives keep voting on hot button no-think issues, they'll get hot-button no-think presidents. I used to give speeches - in my second term I gave a lot of speeches, which almost no one in America paid any attention to, at least in the political press - in which I said, you know, we cannot forever be the only military, economic and political super power. This is an accident of the post-cold-war era. China is rising. India is rising. Europe, at that time, was still continuing to come together economically and politically, and all these places have more people than we do. And intelligence is evenly distributed throughout the world. And we shouldn't see that as a threat. But what we should be doing is working as hard as we can to create a world that we would like to live in when we are a great and successful country but not the only military, political and economic superpower. That's what we should be doing. And that's what I tried to do. @ 12:08 PM CST [Link] When sushi and the Japanese obsession with cuteness attack! @ 11:55 AM CST [Link] [Archives] Search entries: