Nanog and Pluripotency

As part of my occasional “science in the morning” postings:

The Washington Post had this
article this morning, describing an exciting discovery in the field of cell biology.
Originally published in this
article in the journal Cell, it
seems that scientists have discovered a gene that plays a crucial role in letting
mouse stem cells develop into any other cell. The property to develop into skin, liver,
brain, nerve, or whatever other type of cells is called pluripotency,
and understanding how it works may be crucial to developing new treatments for everything
from paralysis to old age.

The gene has been dubbed nanog,
a reference to the mythical Celtic fairy land of Tir Nan Og, a land of eternal youth.
If scientists are successful in the logical next step of the experiments – being
able to create human stem cells from any cell in the body – that name could
be prophetic: this technology may have the potential to lengthen the human lifespan
to near-immortality.

Media Futures

Tim Bray has an interesting piece that he summarizes as

            Journalism sucks. But there's hope.

I’ve had similar experiences to Tim’s with technical journalists: in all the times I’ve been interviewed, I’ve rarely felt that the interviewer was capable of expressing what I was saying technically. Usually, I get misquoted, a few times to the point of actually reversing what I meant.

What Tim is talking about is the fact that media companies – like any company – are beholden to those that write the checks, and that ain’t the readers, it’s the advertisers. The upcoming FCC decision to drop the rules on media ownership is clearly going to make this worse, not better. For example, if you think that radio is more diverse now than it was twenty years ago, raise your hand. Anyone?

Here’s a brief FAQ that talks about the proposed FCC rules change.

Half-Life 2: Whoa

A few people pointed to this
link. It’s a (roughly) 500MB video of what appears to be a demonstration
of what’s coming in Half-Life 2. It took me about four hours to download the
sucker, but…wow. And…wow. I want this game yesterday.  

Culture Clash

Like many programmers, I subscribe to a handful of fairly active mailing
lists. After a while, you start to recognize names, since something like 90% of the
traffic on a list comes from the same 5% of the membership. Read a little longer,
and you can even sort of get to know people you’ve never met in person.

One guy I recognize from various lists is Thomas Tomiczek. He clearly
has substantial technical knowledge, but I’d always written him off as, well,
a jerk. He tends to write things like this:

Well, frankly - a very
ignorant attitude. 

I myself generally try never to use words like “ignorant”
when replying to people in a public forum, and seeing these types of comments from
Thomas over and over again really colored my opinion of him, to the point where I
found myself reluctant to contribute when he had
questions. A recent conversation I had put the whole thing into a different light.

My wife started her career at a company that has a very high percentage
of international employees. Many of these people are now in her (and by extension,
my) social circle. It’s a rare gathering where I’m not the
only white American male present. Unsurprisingly, the conversation occasionally turns
to the differences between American culture and others.

One comment in particular caught my attention. A French friend of mine
was talking about how it was very difficult to get accustomed to American workplace
attitudes towards criticism. In his experience, Americans are unabashed cheerleaders
of each other. This contrasted sharply with his experience in France. For example,
in France his manager would have no hesitation over calling him on even relatively
small errors. Even grudging compliments were high praise. In contrast, he was taken
aback when – in the US – he performed some routine task adequately and
got a hearty “Good job!” from his supervisor.

From Thomas’s emails, I can tell that English isn’t his
first language. So it makes me view his emails in a new light: rather than being unnecessarily
harsh, I can see where he might view them as being simply unabashedly honest.

I don’t have to tell anyone reading this that email is an inexact
medium for expressing information with intent. Even the emoticon-laden messages that
I find myself occasionally embarrassed to be the author of can only convey so much
out-of-band information.

I’m not sure I care to actually make a point out of these observations,
but having a blog means never having to say you’re sorry. <emoticon mode="gratiuitous">:)</emoticon>

Mail Enable

After getting pretty well fed up with the extreme email latency I’ve
been dealing with on and off this week (imagine trying to sync source code with someone
by email when it takes twenty hours to arrive), I decided to set up my own email server.
I didn’t have too much in mind other than that it should be free. Fortunately,
I’m already using no-ip.com to get a free
DNS name, and they have the ability to add MX records, so it was really just a matter
of installing an SMTP/POP3 server.

My first stop was to try the stuff that’s built into the OS,
of course. Windows 2003 now comes with both SMTP and POP3
servers. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t get them working. I’m (fairly)
sure they do work, but I couldn’t
figure out how to do it. Oh well – I knew there are free programs out there,
so I went off in search of something decent.

My next stop was Mercury. It looked
like a nice product, and it installed easily. But it appears to run as a standalone
app, not as a service. If there’s a toggle somewhere that gets it to run as
a service, I couldn’t find it. Then again, I didn’t look that long.

My final selection was Mail Enable.
Bingo! Runs as a service, has a really easy to understand user interface, supports
an unlimited number of domains and emails, and basically has just enough features
to fit what I want to use it for. Plus, the latest update was like three weeks ago,
which is always good to see, as it indicates someone is still working on the thing.
It even has mailing list capabilities. Very nice.

One of the ways I plan to use it is to make up addresses to hand out
to websites. Because you can define a catch-all account that all mail goes to, what
I can do is make up an account like “amazon-spam@mydomain.com” and hand
that out to only to Amazon. I’ll still get the mail, but if I start getting
unsolicited email from other people on that address, I’ll know where it came
from.

Anyway, so far I like it. We’ll see what happens after I’ve
had it running for a few weeks. If anyone has any experience with the product that
they’d like to share, comments are, of course, welcome.

The Biggest Issue We're Not Hearing About

There has been remarkably little
media discussion about the upcoming FCC decision, which looks set to pave the way
for further homogenization of the media market. Pretty much everyone except giant
media companies appears to think this is a bad idea. Especially interesting is this
opinion piece on the NY Times website (signup required, but it’s free and
worth it, IMO). My friend Jeff pointed it out to me. His favorite quote (and mine):

The concentration of power — political,
corporate, media, cultural — should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion
of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the
essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy.

In other words: there’s reason for both Democrats and Republicans
to hate this idea.  

Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred

This link has
an amusing and interesting discussion of how the authors of  “The Matrix
Reloaded” made use of a real-life cracker tool in the movie. Gotta love touches
like this.