Posts for December, 2009
Against Monopoly
Someone recently told me “I just ran across a few of your interviews and writings. I was particularly impressed with the point that IP creates scarcity where none existed before. Despite its obviousness, it is characteristic of IP that had not occurred to me before.”
So I thought I would elaborate a bit on this. [...]
Mystery Rays from Outer Space
Intracellular proteins have to be degraded, more or less at the same rate as new proteins are produced (or the cell would eventually burst). On the other hand, you can’t go about degrading proteins willy-nilly. There are vast and complex systems for identifying proteins that should be destroyed, tagging them, and [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Juha Kantanen, a research scientist at MTT Agrifood Research Finland, had an announcement out on the DAD-Net discussion forum a couple of days ago which reproduced an MTT press release on what sounds like a fascinating book, Sakha Ynaga — Cattle of the Yakuts.
Siberia’s last remaining indigenous breed of domestic cattle, the Sakha [...]
bjoern.brembs.net
Björn Brembs
Groundhog day: What do anti-science movements have in common? – http://bjoern.brembs.net/news…
10 hours ago
from bjoern.brembs.blog : a…
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Dr Shock MD PhD
This presentation is not against porn, it puts it in perspective and warns for the excesses . One part of this talk is for above 18 years but she warns in the talk for these sections.
Speaking from her personal experience, she argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of [...]
Against Monopoly
Rebellion in the Red: Manifesto (google translation) notes Spanish legislation allowing the suspension of Internet service to users “to safeguard the rights of intellectual property” has caused a huge backlash. Journalists, bloggers, users, professionals and Internet developers have put forth a statement “In defense of fundamental rights on the Internet”, which includes:
1. Copyright can [...]
Mystery Rays from Outer Space
HA structure showing mutating amino acids1
Anyone who’s taken a virology class, and many who haven’t, know about “antigenic drift” and “antigenic shift”. These are usually used to explain influenza virus changes over time (although of course the same concepts apply to many other viruses). Antigenic shift refers to large, [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
How to breed potatoes, Basque style.
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bjoern.brembs.net
Björn Brembs
lol! thanks @andrewspong and @kzelnio
14 hours ago
from Twitter
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Dr Shock MD PhD
Two weeks ago I went to a course about editing medical journals. You can read all about this course on the website of the firm of one of the excellent teachers: Pippa Smart (what’s in a name). The other instructor was Dr Domhnall MacAuley is the Clinical Editor (Primary Care) with the [...]
Scienceroll
I launched PeRSSonalized Medicine to help patients and doctors keep themselves up-to-date more easily without any kind of IT knowledge. It is an easy-to-use, free aggregator of quality medical information that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles about a medical specialty or a medical condition in one personalized [...]
Against Monopoly
On the latest This Week in Tech, guest panelist and sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle has an interesting anecdote about his involvement with a copyright squabble between Fox and Universal in the 1970s concerning Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. As noted on Wikipedia:
Battlestar Galactica was finally produced in the wake of the success of the [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Sometimes nature needs a little help. That was brought home to me in emphatic fashion last week as I listened to the formidable Udda Lundqvist summarize her more than half a century making and studying barley mutants. Some 10,000 barley mutants are conserved at NordGen, and she described some of the main ones [...]
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
There’s a heart-warming story in The Atlantic Channel about a young woman, Emma Clippinger, who started an organization called Gardens for Health International, that helps people with HIV in Rwanda to grow the food that they need to ensure they respond well to anti-retroviral drugs.
That sounds awfully complicated, but apparently it wasn’t.
Many of [...]