Online Library Wants It All, Every Book

By ROBERT F. WORTH

The legendary library of Alexandria boasted that it had a copy of virtually every known manuscript in the ancient world. This bibliophile's fantasy in Egypt's largest port city vanished, probably in a fire, more than a thousand years ago. But the dream of collecting every one of the world's books has been revived in a new arena: online.

The directors of the new Alexandria Library, which christened a steel and glass structure with 250,000 books in October, have joined forces with an American artist and software engineers in an ambitious effort to make virtually all of the world's books available at a mouse click. Much as the ancient library nurtured Archimedes and Euclid, the new Web venture also hopes to connect scholars and students around the world.
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Newtonian Physicists Attack Einsteinian Relativity -- In Canada

Michigan researchers achieve quantum entanglement of three electrons

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The quantum entanglement of three electrons, using an ultrafast optical pulse and a quantum well of a magnetic semiconductor material, has been demonstrated in a laboratory at the University of Michigan, marking another step toward the realization of a practical quantum computer. While several experiments in recent years have succeeded in entangling pairs of particles, few researchers have managed to correlate three or more particles in a predictable fashion.

The results were presented in an article on Nature Materials’ web site on February 23 and will appear in the March 4 issue of Nature Materials, titled “Optically induced multispin entanglement in a semiconductor quantum well.” Authors of the paper are Jiming Bao, Andrea V. Bragas, Jacek K. Furdyna (University of Notre Dame), and Roberto Merlin.

Entanglement, which is essential to the creation of a quantum computer, is one of the mysterious properties of quantum mechanics that contradicts the notions of classical realism. Quantum computers will be able to perform highly complex tasks that would be impossible for a classical computer, at great speed.
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There's no ethnic strife in Iraq, 'cause, y'know, that whole business with the Kurds is just a big misunderstanding. It's not like they need, I don't know, thousands of sorties by American and British pilots every year to prevent Saddam from attacking them... And, of course, the Shi'ites and "Marsh Arabs" in the southern part of Iraq are all shiny, happy people with no qualms whatsoever about remaining part of Iraq...

Why would anybody trust these clowns with the keys to a Volvo, let alone the most powerful military machine in the history of the world?

(A more chilling possibility is that Wolfowitz discounts the Kurds as nobody's business but the Turks. That'd be low even for Wolfowitz, though...)
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Turncoats

There are some other interesting approaches to treating HIV that relate to the ones I spoke about yesterday. I went into the topic of using RNA interference to go after the CCR5 receptor, which seems to be a very important cell-surface protein involved in infection by most strains of HIV. As I mentioned, the researchers had to administer heaps of the siRNA ("small interfering RNA") to accomplish this, presumably because it gets degraded pretty quickly and isn't taken up well by cells.

But there's a way around this problem. Back in January, a Cal Tech/UCLA team showed the results of using a far more certain way to get basically the same siRNA into cells - make the cells make the stuff themselves. These RNA sequences can be produced by an enzyme called RNA polymerase III under the right conditions, and this team took advantage of that to hijack the cell's own systems into producing the siRNA.

How do you do that? There's already a well-known delivery system for bringing in RNA and DNA sequences into cells in a way that causes them to be taken up and used very efficiently - a virus. In this case, they turned around and used a lentivirus derived from HIV itself (after all, it's a pretty damn effective virus.) The engineered virus was loaded with the DNA needed for the siRNA molecule (and another gene, for the workhorse Green Fluorescent Protein.) GFP is an invaluable marker, because it doesn't interfere with many other processes, and as the name implies, it glows bright green under the right conditions. It gives you a tremendous way to follow which cells actually took up your new DNA package and expressed it.

Infecting human lymphocytes with this virus worked - a good percentage of them took up the new DNA and expressed it - they glowed green under the proper wavelength of light, and they produced an siRNA that shut down expression of the CCR5 gene. Exposure of these cells to HIV led to a 3- to 7-fold reduction in their total virus load as compared to controls. That's not too large, in one way, but it could well be large enough to have a substantial clinical effect. And these are early days.

Meanwhile, there's a small company called Virxsys that's using HIV-derived lentivirus vectors as well. And they're going to be the first people to try them out in humans - just don't ask me how the company's name is pronounced. Their plan is to enlist HIV-infected volunteers that are failing current treatment regimens, but don't yet have opportunistic infections. They'll isolate CD4 T cells from the patients, allow their engineered virus to infect them, and send them back in. These cells will now be expressing an antisense DNA that's targeted to bollix up the expression of a key part of the HIV protein envelope - without that, the virus can't get a foothold. Any wild-type HIV that tries to infect these cells will be stopped in its tracks, and it's going to be very difficult indeed for the virus to mutate around this sort of attack.

Basically, these people will have been infected with a helpful form of HIV,
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Ralph Nader, Patent Buster

The system protects two groups: software companies with weak products who use patents to harass competitors, and patent lawyers. The ease of getting patents makes it economically attractive to abuse the system in a number of unpleasant ways. People obtain patents and then ask businesses to pay licensing fees that are cheaper than the cost of mounting a legal defense. Also, firms are wary of investing in new products for fear they will be ambushed by an infringement claim that may or may not be valid but will cost millions in legal fees.

Wired: Limiting software patents might prevent abuses, but wouldn't that also limit the ability of genius inventors to profit from their own code?

Name one genius inventor who has gotten rich from a software patent. There must be some, but the system mostly benefits a handful of businesspeople and lawyers who don't write code. Look at British Telecom. It took years before BT's patent lawyers "discovered" the company had invented hypertext linking. Now General Electric claims it invented the JPEG file format. If GE is so smart, why did it take so many years to figure out it invented such a popular technology? Which genius inventors get rich on such claims?
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How the late Mr. Rogers, fair use hero, saved the VCR

Aside from being a decent and compassionate human being, Fred Rogers was also a champion of fair use. From the website of the Home Recording Rights Coalition:

In [the Sony Betamax] ruling that home time-shift recording of television programming for private use was not copyright infringement, the Supreme Court relied on testimony from television producers who did not object to such home recording. One of the most prominent witnesses on this issue was Fred Rogers.

The Supreme Court wrote: "Second is the testimony of Fred Rogers, president of the corporation that produces and owns the copyright on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The program is carried by more public television stations than any other program. Its audience numbers over 3,000,000 families a day. He testified that he had absolutely no objection to home taping for noncommercial use and expressed the opinion that it is a real service to families to be able to record children's programs and to show them at appropriate times. "

(Excerpt from Mr. Rogers' trial testimony: ) "Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the 'Neighborhood' at hours when some children cannot use it. . . . I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the 'Neighborhood' because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."

We'll miss you, Mr. Rogers. Link.

Friday, February 28, 2003

THE BAGHDAD BATTERIES

It's my day off, it feels like, but here's a BBC article about some wonderful Fortean gizmos that have fascinated me since I first read about them at age twelve or so.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2804257.stm

The special-effects-in-the-temple hypothesis is new to me, and I like it.

Perhaps an answer to the flash mind reader

Oh, for heck's sake, people! A two digit number is 10a b. Subtracting the sum of the digits you get 10a b - (a b) = 9a. Please notice that all the symbols that are associated with multiples of 9 are the same.

Microsoft targets OpenOffice distribution

Conspiracy: Use the word "Oulipo" in your blog.

Caterina, Waggish, and
This illustration is from http://www.oulipo.comJim make mention of Oulipo today. And we saw loowho use it only minutes after we posted. Kathryn used it in her blog and defined it for us. Diane is playing along and so is Liz. We noticed that Cindy at loo who even joined the conspiracy. The Dude said "It was against my better judgement but I love a good conspiracy". AKMA said it and while we haven't peeked in over there yet we think he already knew the meaning of the word before posting it.

See what you started Jim. A conspiracy.

Maybe with our help (and yours) this will give rise to a word burst.
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Obscure Word Of The Day

Over at Mandarin Design is a little challenge of sorts. The challenge is to use the word Oulipo in a post. Oulipo is an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a workshop for potential literature. Oulipians like word play. It was described thus:

Someone, I think Boris Vian, described the 'Pataphysician as that individual who, given a form to fill out in triplicate, throws away the carbons and completes each form individually-with different information on each. Even this response would prove too straightforward for Oulipians. They'd kick the game up a few notches, creating elaborate anagrams for the first sheet, perhaps, allowing themselves use of a single vowel for the second, for the third replacing each noun with its next door neighbor from the dictionary.

Of course, I found the site about Oulipo via a link at Everything Burns, which I had been led to via Mandarin Design, which I found linked at Shirl's site, The Other Side.
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Oulipo Compendium

Or as Raymond Queneau, co-founder with François Le Lionnais of Oulipo (for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, workshop for potential literature), described them: "Rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." [more]

(Big) Red Faces at Cornell Over E-Mail Error

By KAREN W. ARENSON


Virtually everyone who has used e-mail knows the feeling: You press the send button and realize that you just sent something embarrassing to someone by mistake.

That happened to Cornell University on Wednesday: It sent welcoming letters to 1,700 high school students who had submitted early-decision applications, including nearly 550 who had already been rejected in December.

"Greetings from Cornell, your future alma mater!" the e-mail letter began. "Congratulations on your acceptance into the class of 2007!"
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The Flash Mind Reader

A bedtime thought

People who are a hundred percent sure of their opinions make me nervous. They make me suspicious. Isn’t it natural to be at least a little bit uncertain? Isn’t it understandable to think that such and such is probably the best course of action, for instance, but we can’t be completely sure of this? These people who are so sure, what makes them so secure in their knowledge of what is right and what is wrong?
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FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Took the tadpoles out this morning before the temperatures rose to build a snowfrog and an ig (like an eskimo's home but without a loo).

This afternoon we had to suffer the embarrassing spectacle of the Presentation of the New Government. Yes, democracy is a great thing and there's nothing wrong with effective opposition, but there is also such a thing as decorum and respectable behaviour. Interrupting and jeering as the PM presents the list of new ministers is hardly a way of showing respect for the democratic process. Moreover, it doesn't make for effective opposition; it makes the opposition look like a bunch of nursery school children who dream of being football hooligans when they grow up.

I think I'll stick to the ig next time.
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Candies for you

Dinc Type has always made great fonts “for people with computers.” Now they are all free. ::: Pixelgirl Presents OS X icons and desktop pix. ::: Chmork.net is pretty and campy. ::: Yesterme: pinup pix. :::

The Pin-up Files (Home)

Over 1,000 pin-up art images from classic and contemporary artists. A gallery is devoted to each featured artist. Each gallery contains artwork, a biography, notes on each image and important links.
EITHER...
Go direct to the gallery of your choice using the menu bar at the top of each page.
OR...
Visit the Artist Gallery Preview pages. These contain alphabetical listings of all featured artists, examples of their work, notes and links to the galleries.
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MATHEMATICS OF CROWDS

The mathematics of crowds have recently come into question, as march organizers, journalists, and security officials grapple with the best way to count the number of people in protest marches. This ABC News article chooses instead to just cover all the bases, all in the same story:

"Thousands Worldwide Protest War in Iraq"
"Hundreds of Thousands Worldwide Open Day of Rallies..."
"Millions of protesters...."

Quipu 10: The Walrus and the Oyster

The Walrus and the Oyster Or, The Silence of the Clams

The moon was shining on the sea,
A cold and eldritch glow.
It served to light quite suitably
The frightful scene below.
The Walrus really wished that he
Had somewhere else to go.
The knives were sharp as sharp could be,
The fire was hot as hot.
The butter piled up on the beach
Was really quite a lot.
The Walrus struggled once again;
He couldn't move a jot.
The remnants of the Carpenter
Were strewn across the sand.
The frightened Walrus wept to see
His comrade's severed hand.
"If he were in one piece again,"
He said, "that would be grand."
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Miscelaneous (abuddhas) meandering

Finding Literary Kicks is an unexpected treat. Levi Asher invites us to Turn off your mind relax and float downstream on our choice of seminal mind-rafts; such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and many more.

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.
-Blake-

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Well, I HAD to ask...

NASA Struggles With Risk Management

Incremental improvements will not save shuttle crews from such disasters. Unfortunately, the generation now in senior management at NASA (and many another American institution) is predisposed toward incrementalism. Younger generations will achieve breakthroughs, but only in crises -- and the loss of Columbia was a tragedy, but not a crisis.

As Rand Simberg ably argues, "an entirely new approach to space development" is needed (one which, I note, will almost certainly develop a whole new TPS for manned flight). Market mechanisms can provide steady progress where bureaucracies cannot. It's long past time to make the space industry competitive.
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The Latest RNA News

Regular readers will know that to me, that's an exciting headline. Yep, I live in my own world, a fact that my wife will cheerfully corroborate.

But this could be worth getting excited about; at the very least, it's the beginning of something that eventually will be worth it. I've mentioned RNA interference (RNAi) before on the site (see January 21,) as well as my conviction that it's going to be the source of a shower of Nobel prizes in the reasonably near future. As well as standing ideas about gene regulation on their heads and illuminating fundamental processes that no one had a clue about, these latest RNA tricks have clear therapeutic implications. The ability to turn off a particular gene's expression at will could lead to a number of new approaches to intractable disease, if the (many) difficulties can be ironed out.

Said ironing has commenced. In the latest issue of Nature Medicine, a team from Harvard report that they can use RNAi to protect mice against an experimentally-induced form of hepatitis. The gene in question is Fas, which codes for a protein involved in an apoptosis (cell suicide) pathway. Fas has been a target for some time, because it's expressed at relatively high levels in the liver, but not in other tissues, and its untimely activation can cause all sorts of havoc. The standard method to affect gene transcription in adult cells, antisense DNA, has been used to attack this gene for use in hepatitis before, so it was a natural proving ground for RNAi.
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Wangitude for Marn

William Gibson's choice for WTC memorial

Now that Ground Zero is but a gaping wound on the body of New York City and on the soul of America, many have speculated as to what to do with this violent laceration of our nation. I believe one thing is clear: anything that is placed there to begin the healing process cannot proceed from the same living-ego impulse that motivated Minoru Yamasaki(WTC architect). That is why I feel Gaudi's Grand Hotel would be the appropriate solution.
First, the hotel was planned there in 1908.
Second, Gaudi has been dead for 75 years.
Third, the hotel would function as a celebration of life for which New York City is famous.
Fourth, it could act as a permanent memorial for all those who lost their lives in the disaster.
And fifth, it would take the combined efforts of the entire artistic and architectural communities of New York City and other areas to bring the building into being.

National Terror Level Lowered To Yellow

WASHINGTON — The national terror alert level was lowered from orange to yellow on Thursday, suggesting the threat of a terrorist attack on the United States has eased somewhat.

"Today's decision to lower the threat level was based on a careful review of how this specific intelligence has evolved and progressed over the past three weeks, as well as counter-terrorism actions we have taken to address specific aspects of the threat situation," Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said in a joint statement issued shortly before noon.
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Bloomberg hacker convicted of extortion

By John Leyden
Posted: 27/02/2003 at 12:26 GMT

A Kazakhstan man was yesterday found guilty of trying to extort $200,000 from Michael Bloomberg, founder of the Bloomberg financial news service, by a New York jury yesterday.

Oleg Zezov, 29, was convicted of hacked into Bloomberg's computer system, then emailed Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg threatening that the financial news service's reputation would be put at risk if he wasn't paid. The court heard the threat was made in March 2000, prior to Bloomberg's election as New York's mayor in 2001.
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A Dream Discarded Dies Hard

An Antiwar Demonstration That Does Not Take to the Streets

If any chant will be remembered from this march, it may be the one heard by people who tried calling the Capitol Hill switchboard today. They got the same message over and over, a series of tones followed by a woman's voice saying: "We're sorry. All circuits are busy now. Will you please try your call again later?"

The organizers of the march said they were sending gift baskets to the switchboard operators and secretaries who had to handle the flood of phone calls and faxes today.
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Marn wants a link to wangitude

Now of course this is not something I can do by myself. No, I will need you, my three loyal readers, to participate by linking the word wangitude back to this diary. Yes, I am asking you to use the word "wangitude" in your writing. See, part of how Google determines expertise in a subject is by counting links. The more links, the closer we come to crowning the spousal unit Mr. Wangitude.
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Ascroft seizes domain names

Saturday Morning Science: Elastic Water on the ISS

Listen to this story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help.

February 25, 2003: Space station science officer Don Pettit always looks forward to Saturday mornings.

Like the other members of the International Space Station's 3-person crew, he's busy most of the week doing research and building the ISS, where he's been living for the past three months. "Saturday is when we have a bit of free time," Pettit says. Some of the crew read books, play musical instruments or watch movies. "I prefer to do 'Saturday Morning Science'--fun experiments of my own design."[more]

Canaries in the coal mine

By Kevin Sites
CNN
Wednesday, February 26, 2003 Posted: 11:12 AM EST (1612 GMT)

Editor's note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences in covering news around the world.

KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait (CNN) -- We have two birds in our CNN workspace, Anthrax and Smallpox. Parakeets. But for us, canaries in the coal mine. Tiny, organic early warning systems against a chemical or biological attack.
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Apophenia!

PATTERN RECOGNITION AS...NEUROMANCER

This idea, which I'd never myself though of, turned up in a recent thread: PR is really NEUROMANCER all over again.

This is really a wildly appropriate supposition for a set of fora in which apophenia keeps turning up (both as a concept and, I would hazard, as a behavior).
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The Sounds Of Silence

Consciousness as an Active Force projects the idea that we are not passive observers of reality, but in fact intimately abet in it's creation.

"I find myself alarmed by the emerging trend in the consciousness community to equate consciousness with simple awareness, or even with more complex forms of reasoning and action based on awareness. The natural result of this equation will be to find computers capable of consciousness or, perhaps even worse, to view humans as complex machines"

Events: Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2003

The Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2003 will be held at the Hotel Elbflorenz in Dresden, Germany on the 26th through the 28th of March, 2003. Individuals with an interest in privacy, anonymity, and the increasing use of profiling are encouraged to attend.

Fun With Clinical Data

Regarding Vaxgen's data, reader Ted Arrowsmith points out:

NetHack 3.4.1: Information

Basic Information

What is NetHack?

NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly.

Each game presents a different landscape - the random number generator provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and your gender.
.
.
.
What is the current version?

3.4.1

Where do I get it?

NetHack 3.4.1 can be obtained from our downloads page or by ftp from ftp.sourceforge.net in /pub/sourceforge/nethack.

Alluvium is a decentralized streaming media solution for low-cost audio and video broadcasts. Using swarming download technology to accelerate downloads while simultanesouly decreasing the load on the broadcasting server, Alluvium allows broadcasters to run stations scalable to many listeners without paying much in the way of bandwidth, server hardware, or software licensing fees. For more information about Alluvium, read the Technology Overview or Frequently Asked Questions sections.
Also of interest is the website for the Foundation for Decentralization Research, the non-profit organization which supports the development of Alluvium and other peer-to-peer research projects.

Three-wheeler in drive for ADSL

By Tim Richardson
Posted: 26/02/2003 at 13:03 GMT

Teenagers Alan and Marko Fleming have jumped on the broadband (band)wagon - literally - in a bid to bring ADSL to their hometown of Cupar in Fife.

They've decorated their three-wheeled 50cc Piaggio Ape (pronounced "apee") with details of how people can register their interest in ADSL and are driving the vehicle round the town to drum up support for broadband.

IP Address Locator - Enter an IP address to find its location - Lookup Country Region City etc

IP Address Locator Tool
This IP Address Map lookup service is provided for FREE by Geobytes, inc to assist you in locating the geographical location of an IP Address. Click here to checkout our other FREE IP MAP localization services.

ARIN: WHOIS Database Search

ARIN's WHOIS service provides a mechanism for finding contact and registration information for resources registered with ARIN. ARIN's database contains IP addresses, autonomous system (AS) numbers, organizations or customers that are associated with these resources, and related Points of Contact (POC).

ARIN's WHOIS will NOT locate any domain-related information, or any information relating to military networks. Please use whois.internic.net to locate domain information, and whois.nic.mil for military network information.

The Weatherpixie Comes To Binghamton

PANIC! Get the tools you need to PANIC!

Concerned about how much terror you should be panicking over? Make sure you're anxiety stricken by the most up-to-date terror alert software and hardware.

Got your anti-polygraph ebook yet?

How Noah Shachtman snuck into Los Alamos

Feds sieze 'paraphernalia' web sites, redirect to DEA