Category: Reference

Filed Under: “Can’t Make This Up”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

Sort of reminds me of this 1980s TV “gem,” Masquerade

Google Disease

io9 might be afraid to call this site Google Disease(tm), but I’m not.

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization).

Not for Counting Anymore

Using animals to grow human body parts has been done, but how about using a live sheep for dialysis? The idea comes from one design student Revital Cohen. The project she’s calling ‘Life Support’ seeks to use a sheep whose genome has been spliced with a human to produce human blood. The transgenic sheep then becomes a dialysis machine for diabetes patients, filtering their blood as it frolics in pastures during the day, then gets needles shoved in its head each night.

Some Catching Up

Happenings on the “life outside writing/blogging/anything artistic” front have been flying. News on those if/when things germinate. For now, here’re some things I’ve been meaning to post for the past month…

1
Now what am I supposed to watch on Sunday mornings?

2
[Michael] Chabon defends mass entertainment against the accusation that it is merely a formulaic product. At times it is; yet commercial culture’s focus on deadlines and profits can also act as a “quickening force” on an artist’s imagination. He demonstrates this with discerning essays on Arthur Conan Doyle, Will Eisner and Howard Chaykin, all of whom, like Chabon himself, attained the ultimate goal of the “pop artisan”: a delicate balance between “the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic”. He disagrees with those who equate literary entertainment with mindless escapism, passive consumption or unproductive activity (“guilty pleasures” is “a phrase I loathe”). Instead, he finds that different forms of writing offer distinct satisfactions to an alert reader.

3
It’ll probably still be a while before you can neurointerface directly with the internet or your friends and lovers, but psychologists are testing implantable brain ‘pacemakers’ that regulate brain activity and so far appear really useful for treating the most stubborn forms of depression.

But we can dream, can’t we?

4
Some people may think that a monk is somewhat reclusive — kind of isolated, in a bubble, meditating all day. But it’s quite the opposite. I’m on the computer, e-mailing. I’m driving, using cell phones and using Facebook. I have my own Web site.

Maybe becoming a monk isn’t so bad after all.

Before Battlestar

Much as I love both incarnations of Doctor Who, there’s one show I will always like better, and that’s Blake’s 7.

Moral ambiguity, a corrupt galactic Federation, terrorists-as-heroes, story and character arcs. Unfortunately, a lot of those episodes were visually comparable to the Doctor Who episodes of the time. Plus, some episodes were stinkers, too. If someone new to the show caught the wrong episode, he’d probably swear it off for life.

Luckily, the folks at io9 have put together How To Get Into Rebel Space Opera Blake's 7