From research to therapy in four years! That’s what I call progress comrades! I mentioned some research a few years back about growing teeth from stem cells well now there’s a private company in the UK that’s trying to develop therapy based on these techniques.
Today teeth, tomorrow livers, hearts, lungs, eyes, tendons, etc.
Oh and a vaguely related complaint, I’ve always been irritated that Microsoft’s IIS is case insensitive. I’ve screwed up more URLs that way–
I was never really happy with the politics of some of the prominent people in transhumanism (In short, I am not a Libertarian.), but now there appears to be a new ideological stripe emerging in the movement thanks, in part, to James Hughes.
I guess the only problem I have with Democratic Transhumanism is that it still has strong utopian feeling in it. This worries me because, this sets us up for a big disappointment when the new technology turns out not to cure everything we thought it would. Remember all the utopian thinking about the Internet in the late Eighties and early Ninties? Or nuclear energy? Or the computer?
I guess my position is that of a tranhuman realist. I believe that all this utterly plastic technology will arrive, probably sooner than we expect, that will allow us to radically alter our biology, but I don’t believe this will result in utopia or dystopia. Uexpected good things will happen and unexpected bad things will happen, the only thing that is certain is that things will change. Some of us will be exchanging the agony of the human condition for the agony of the post-human condition. The universe may be meaningless, but at least it’s interesting.
Yesterday I spent 9 hours in a crowded, hot, school gymnasium for my district’s Democratic Party Caucus. It was very rewarding, inspiring and pleasantly exhausting and, it renewed my faith in the system.
The turn out was enormous–nearly three times what they were expecting! Apparently people on the left are so ticked off by the incompetence of the current administration, that they turned out in droves at the precinct caucuses and now at the district caucuses. Party members also donated record amounts of money and volunteered by legions. And perhaps the turn out will be very heavy all across the country. I think the strategists of Shrub’s reelection campaign had better worry about this! Apparently if you irritate enough people, they will get political and they will remove you, if only to stop apologizing for your stupidity around the world!
Anyway, here is another thing that I think is remarkable–an example of how the left is finally recapturing the center again. There was section of the party platform with inflammatory wording about withdrawing from the WTO and NAFTA. This was challenged, amended and changed to support reform of and opening up of these organizations for the public all participating countries–not withdrawal from them. Finally some rational heads prevail on the left! This from one of the most radical, left-wing districts in the city. This from the city that gave us the WTO demonstrations of 1999 (Which I took part in as the token moderate who supported the reform and opening of these organizations, not the abolition or withdrawal from them. Global trade is a fact folks–better to reform and steer it toward beneficial ends for global labor and the environment than to shun it in disgust and fear.)!
A lot of people were harping on Bush’s economic record and failure to contain deficits. Could it be? Is it possible? That the Democrats are the party of fiscal realism and responsibility again?
On the other hand, the Dennis Kucinich supporters were able to get nine delegates to send on to the Congressional District and State Caucuses and they added several key pieces to the platform, so we haven’t lost those further to the left either. This year, we close ranks!
Techie, geek, technologist, web monkey.
What, isn’t “computer technician” good enough? I am a web server technician. I am a network technician. I am not a computer scientist, engineer or computer programmer. I have no formal training in those things. Technician suffices in describing what I do without taking on presumptive airs like technologist or engineer does. It also doesn’t sound cutesy like webmaster, geek or techie.
Newbie.
What, isn’t “greenhorn” sufficient? Why invent a new, cutesy word when there are dozens of perfectly good words that apply?
Smilie, emoticon.
There used to be a time in the dim past when authors of letters and tracts used politeness and nuance to avoid misinterpretation of dry humor and satire. These days people have to rely on bogus punctuation to avoid misinterpretation. If what you are writing could be misinterpreted, don’t send it. Re-write it so that it makes sense and carries the exact emotional nuance you intend. We laugh at the people of 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as being overly verbose and polite, but I think this was due to the culture of letter writers that existed at the time. Perhaps it is time we rediscovered these skills.
The Earth is in trouble and even after molecular manufacturing becomes commonplace, not all of the damage we’ve done to it will be erased. Therefore, inspired by VHEMT, I’ve decided form my own organization: The Voluntary Earth Evacuation Movement (VEEM). The aims of VEEM are as follows, in the intrest of saving, or at least partially restoring, the ecosystem that proceeded homo sapiens, I resolve to:
It still has a few bugs and I may decide to remove it if spam starts linking to my site, but I’ve installed Movable Type’s trackback module to supplement my Greymatter installation. In theory this means I’ve joined the hip kids but we’ll see. Mostly I did it to see what I can do with it.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll add a syndication feed via atom and RSS in the days to come. Ooh wow! XML man.
As I’ve said many times before, these are science fictional times we live in. I just got news that the Arizona Legislature is attempting to pass rules that may outlaw many of the procedures and services offered by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Alcor, in case you didn’t know, is an organization that offers cryonic suspension. This bill (HB 2637) is being spearheaded by Arizona’s funeral industry, allegedly because that same industry feels threatened by the cryonics movement.
I must have read at least a half dozen shorts in Analog about just this sort of plot premise! First Ted Williams, now this. Interesting times.
So I bought myself an electric trimmer today and cut my hair. No more 15 bucks for Supercuts! Considering it’s my first self-inflicted haircut, it doesn’t look too bad. In truth it’s hard to mess this up, because ever since the Eighties, I’ve had my hair cut real short (between 9 and 12 millimeters.) and now that I’m bald there ain’t too much hair left to cut badly. Maybe in a couple weeks I might follow the trends and go down to 6 millimeters.
So unlike January, this month has been pretty quite for posting. I’ve been pretty busy and I’ve also been thinking of installing a few new things into my log script. I decided to hold off on upgrading to GM1.3 because I’ve customized my own installation of GM so much that I don’t want to give all that work up by upgrading. I have been looking over the code in 1.3 though to see what I can do to transfer over things I need, like better security and modularity, versus things I don’t, like smilies and other such frippery. Hmm. I’ve forked so bad that I don’t think I’ll ever get back into development track with Greymatter.
After spending a few hundred dollars on a used laptop (Of the same model as my old one with a cracked screen and which now stands to be cannibalized for parts.), a roomy drive and an 802.11 (b+g) transceiver, I know have a new office to work in. Just spent the last few days transferring my data and installers and optimizing my settings. The first thing I noticed is how quiet everything is. My old desktop had a cheap power supply fan which whined and squealed endlessly, slowly eroding my sanity.
I still plan to replace the fan and upgrade the desktop for gaming, but that will have to wait for the next series of paychecks. Despite my nerdly heritage, I am not as gadget happy as some. I still don’t own a mobile phone or PDA.
Anyway a few links to share with my tiny audience:
The Fish invited me to join his posse on Ork. Frankly I did this to humor him.
I looked at what the service offers and, it doesn’t have any gimmicks to stand apart from other personals or socializing services. I was disappointed because, Ork is affiliated with Google and, I expect better from Google. I like Google News, Google Glossary, Google Groups and so on because these are all components of what their main mission is: search. I liked all the refinements they’ve added to make search easier and more powerful. Google is supposed be search, period, full stop. Getting involved in this makes Google like–yawn–another portal clone. Adding something like Ork makes them into–shudder–Yahoo or AOL. One could argue that helping folks to find other folks is still about search but, I don’t agree.
