I notice that the New England Journal of Medicine has a study out suggesting that multivitamin supplements slow the progression of immune deficiency in AIDS patients.

(Looks at ceiling, pokes tongue in cheek, and wonders if Dr. Mike is still reading.... heehee.)

Researchers at Medical College of Georgia have identified a gene therapy which might well both extend lifespan and promote thinness. The bad news: it may also help ameliorate the causes of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the social conservatives now. Next thing you know people might not have to be miserable just to live longer, healthier lives. That can't be a good thing....

How many times have we heard that over the years? The TV guys make it sound so easy.

But the reality is much more diffficult, especially when you are watching from more than halfway across the solar system.

Spacecraft Cassini Enters Saturn's Orbit(AP)
Cassini Spacecraft Enters Saturn's Orbit Between Two of Its Rings
...
A carefully choreographed maneuver allowed Cassini to be captured by Saturn's gravity as it arced within 12,500 miles of the giant planet's cloud tops.

Using its big radio dish as a shield against small particles, the spacecraft ascended through a gap between two of the rings, then spun around and fired its engine for more than 1 1/2 hours to slow its acceleration.

The craft then rotated again to place its shielding antenna in front as it descended back through the gap.

Since the craft was over 900 million miles away, all JPL could do was watch, and hope that Cassini-Huygens worked as advertised. It did so, by flying between two of Saturn's rings.

Good on ya, guys!

You can find more information about Cassini-Huygens here, as well as the latest images.

(This is cross-posted from The Gantry Launchpad)

There's an interesting story in the San Jose Mercury News you might want to read. It requires registration, but, it's basically about someone who ran a weblog for three and a half years about a person who did not exist, known as "Layne Johnson."

Since I wasn't a reader of the site I have no strong feelings on the matter. I know there are people using weblogs as a basis for writing stories, and it frankly strikes me as a very neat character development tool. Although I'd think that if you're going to do something like that, you'd want to go well out of your way to avoid getting too intimate with your readers, and to make it clear to people in some fashion that you're writing stories. Or a "caveat emptor" warning, anyway.

I kind of liked what Emma said. "Online is real." And it is. I've had very good friends I've met online, many of them people I've either never met face to face, or only met face to face once or twice, or talked to on the phone a few times. Written communication is still real communication. It's not really all that new, either, for in centuries past there were people who would carry on written correspondence with each other for many, many, many years without ever seeing each other. So, as with many things, the internet isn't really creating things anew so much as it's making faster and more common what used to be slower and more rare.

Our friend Trudy Schuett has set up a new weblog devoted to showcasing positive stories about the weblogging phenomenon: charity fundraising, helping people in need, and so on. You might want to check it out.

It was apparently inspired by an idea from Anil Dash. And it's not a bad idea at all.

Researchers at U of M have developed a strain of mice that stay extremely lean despite a very-high-calorie diet and an activity pattern that causes most mice to become obese. The secret appears to be that they have an overabundance of a certain protein that makes it hard for the body to store fat.

These mice appear to be the complement to the famous Zucker rats, which grow obese on a caloric intake and activity pattern that would leave normal rats quite thin and healthy, apparently due to a deficiency in leptin.

How all this relates just yet with chickens and mice which grow obese due to viral infection is not clear.

My view is that in the next decade or so we're finally going to crack the nut on what it takes to really reverse obesity.

By the way, if you haven't seen the live video of Spaceship One's first space flight yet, you should. You'll get to see her as she cuts loose from White Knight, lights her candle, and heads for the stratosphere. You'll also see her roll 90 degrees twice, which was one of the technical problems they had that has them retooling the craft. Then you'll see shots from space, and our astronaut hero letting some M&Ms loose to float around the cabin.

No sound, but very cool anyway.

Amusingly, it looks like Coca-Cola is a threat to national security.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

One of the odder treatments for Multiple Sclerosis is bee venom. That's right the poison from bee stings. Some MS patients swear that it reduces their symptoms an their pain. Methods for using it include actually keeping hives of bees and regularly capcturing a bee and forcing it to sting you, to companies which sell the venom in injectible form.

This treatment's been around for years and never taken seriously. It always bugs me when people refuse to take alternative medicine treatments seriously though; if a therapy is unresearched it may be junk but it might work, and if enough people say something works that, to me, is usually justification for at least doing some basic research on it. So I'm pleased to note that researchers are now looking at bee venom as a treatment for MS. Preliminary findings are, well, preliminary, but they do look promising.

If you haven't been absorbed into the Gmail-worshipping collective, soon you will be. Resistance is futile. And amazingly, Michele has an easy and cheap way for you to get your own Gmail account, and for a good cause to boot. How can you say no?

Josh Claybourn tells the story succinctly.

It doesn't sound like much. Yet, I've been using email for more than 20 years, and this is the best mail app I've ever worked with. Period.

I can't wait until they release client software for this thing.

I must say that this is the coolest crop circle I've ever seen.

The folks who got up in the middle of the night to do that sure are ambitious. I can imagine better things to do with my time, but then, I'm more sedentary than some.

The Mayo Clinic notes that fatty liver disease, caused by chronic obesity, has begun to exceed Hepatitis C as a cause of liver damage, and notes further research on how obesity can cause irreversible liver damage.

Yet another sign of why obesity--which is only about 50 pounds overweight by the way--is not particularly funny, but it actually life-threatening.

I must say, after a few days of working with Gmail, I'm thinking about dumping my deanesmay.com address, my copy of Thunderbird, and just start using Gmail for everything.

Man it really is good. It wasn't that obvious at first but the more I use it the more I like it.

Burt Rutan notes that malfunctions in the first private space flight mean that there's a lot of work yet to do before private space flight becomes routine.

It doesn't take away from their achievement either. It was a few years after Kitty Hawk before airplanes became a commercial success too.

You may remember when I mentioned how peanuts always contain aflatoxin in at least small amounts, making all peanut products moderately carcinogenic. There's been no way to get rid of it--until now.

A company has come up with a clever anti-aflatoxin pesticide that involves growing a non-Aflatoxin-producing mold that competes with the mold that creates the poison. They claim to be able to reduce the toxin by at least 70%, and as high as 98% with repeat applications.

That's pretty neat, although of course it doesn't get rid of 100% of the poison. But it's going to do a lot of good for peanut farmers, that's for sure.

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3c) made two startling announcements today. Dave Winer is involved. American Digest has the scoop.

Journalism professor Ben Yagoda wrote a column not long ago snarking on the use of British expressions in American English. He is mystified as to why these things ("gone missing," "going to hospital," "on holiday," "sell-by date," etc.) had crept into American journalism with increasing frequency in recent years.

Yagoda is mystified as to the source of the trend. He thinks maybe it's the rise of BBC America that's caused it, thinking it's just because people are trying to sound stuffy. (British accents always sound a little formal to Americans after all.) So in the end he sniffs that the whole thing's pretentious, has gotten out of control, and journalists should stop doing it.

Poor, poor Old Media expert. He seems to miss that young journalists these days are all internet-savvy. Part of it is also that more and more journalists are making their way from British and British Commonwealth countries to the U.S., while U.S. people travelling the other way is also extremely common nowadays. But most of all, it's the internet.

I read British (and Australian and Israeli and South African and Canadian and....) news sources all the time. Practically every day. For free, and without a second's hesitation. Indeed, when I read some news on "ABC" these days, I have to stop a minute and think whether I'm reading these guys or these guys.

It's called the Internet. As a writer I can't help but be influenced by the words of others I read. If you're in Texas long enough you pick up a bit of a twang. If you're in New York long enough you get a bit of a honk.

And if you read the internet a lot, you start to pick up a mishmash of the written expressions of whoever you read regularly--and the most intriguing and fun phrases are the ones that stick to you. I expect that if someone were to read through my writing in a single day, they'd find things they could identify as britishisms, American southernisms, American midwesternisms, and lots else besides. Maybe even some Aussie stuff, who knows?

Poor old J-School guy, thinking that the world's still about people reading the local paper and writing like they teach at Columbia or Northwestern. The world's a much bigger place now I'm afraid. (Oooh, was that last a Britishsm too?)

(Link via Jerry Kindall.)

As a diehard despiser of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--a bunch of pernicious, nasty jerks--I've always been frustrated. I hate people who are unnecessarily cruel to animals. I support the SPCA and generally support anti-cruelty laws. But I eat meat, I'll never stop eating meat because I think vegetarianism is unnatural and unhealthy--and yet I do think there are some animal-raising practices that are unnecessary and could be improved.

What do do?

Well, now I've found a group that looks promising: The Humane Farming Association (HFA). They look like a pretty good group. Anyone know much about them? Ilyka seems to think they're cool....

Here's an interesting new weblog: Showcase, whose whole existence is given over to promoting brand new weblogs.

If you're looking for interesting new reading, or run a new weblog, you might want to check it out.

Andrew's got a classic logic puzzle that some of you may enjoy. And yes, there is a generally recognized solution to the puzzle.

As might be expected, there were some technical problems on yesterday's giant leap for mankind. Alan Brain has details.

Just remember, this is why they call these "test flights."

Gallup, one of the most trusted and scientifically responsible polling services, has an interesting snapshot of American moral judgements on such issues as divorce, sex outside of marriage, polygamy, homosexuality, abortion, and other social issues.

Having watched responsible polls (as opposed to the silly ones newspapers, magazines, and radio stations usually do, which are generally junk), I have to say I found few surprises here. Even though I'm on the "liberal" side of most of those issues, I recognize that I'm something of a libertine by comparison to others. What I do find fascinating is that most people consider premarital sex okay, and consider having kids outside of marriage okay, but most consider it immoral to have extramarital affairs. I sense a strong cognitive dissonance in our national psyche on that.

Check out this little mind-reader trick. It's the cleverest of any I've seen on the internet yet.

Can you tell how it works?

I'm not a big fan of dogs, honestly. Never have been. To me, dogs are too much work to take care of, and most of the time they're too obsequious for my liking. Although I occasionally meet dignified, decent dogs who I can respect, mostly I'm not a fan of the animal.

That said, I realize that most people do like dogs, and I find the human-dog relationship interesting. It appears that dogs have been evolving in a symbiotic relationship with humans for at least a hundred thousand years if not longer. Studies on dog behavior notes that most of them are quite aware that they are not humans, and interact markedly differently with humans than they do with their fellow canines. In other words, they've evolved behaviors specifically in how they treat us that are different from how they treat each other. In some ways, they can "train" us almost as well as we train them. We also know from recent study that dogs can learn a vocabulary of a couple of hundred human words, and appear to be roughly as smart as 2-3 year-old children, on average.

Now I find it fascinating that they've uncovered evidence that many dogs can detect oncoming epileptic seizures in children, up to five hours before the seizures take place. This is rather remarkable.

It's an interesting relationship, that between man and dog.

Today I am proud to be member of the human race!

My lovely wife will be appalled to know that a clean kitchen spreads bacteria.

I knew it. I knew it all along!

(Via Chris Kilmer.)

Well, Spaceship One is almost home safe here a bit after 11:00 Eastern. Word now is that they made it into space....

Hey, wouldn't it be funny if it made it almost to the ground, then suddenly tumbled and crashed? (Sorry, sick joke.)

Watching now. It's 10:50 and none of the news channels are showing anything but commercials. Grr.....

If you've got Internet Explorer, you can click here to go to MSNBC's site, scroll down, and look for the link that says "live streaming-video coverage." They hid it pretty well but look for it, it's there.

(Via Dave Mercer.)

A few minutes ago I watched White Knight take off with Spaceship One snuggled safely in her womb. They took off about 20 minutes late (at about 6:50 a.m. Pacific unless I misread my watch), but without incident. It's supposed to take about an hour to get to altitude and light the candle, so look for it around 10:40 a.m. As I write this both CNN and Fox News are watching the story. Nothing's going to happen for about another 40 minutes but if you tune in you can watch.

Rand Simberg and Andrew Cory will be doing regular updates so be sure to check in with them as well as here, I'll watch as close as I can....

Test pilot Michael Melville has been tapped this morning to become the world's first true private-citizen astronaut.

At 6:30 a.m. Pacific time (it's 3:45 Pacific as I type this), Melville is scheduled to pilot Spaceship One into space.

Does anyone know if any of the news networks or any other source will be broadcasting the flight? If so please leave me a comment.

This is like witnessing the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. I've got goosebumps.

* Update * I may not be at my computer when the big event arrives but I'm told CNN will be broadcasting the event, and I'm quite certain that Rand Simberg will be having regular updates so be sure to check in with him!

It appears that Libertarians will win the Presidency in a lock this year. Nothing can stop it!

Heh.

What this actually shows is that internet polls don't mean anything. It also turns out that the Libertarian has been urgng his supporters to vote for him in polls like this. Talk about skewing the results...

(Via John Dibble.)

Some people are afraid of Google's Gmail service, citing privacy concerns. It's not something I'm at all worried about though, and neither is Melonie. She explains why better than I can.

I must say I'm also completely addicted to the Orkut social networking service. If you're on Orkut please feel free to look me up. Orkut doesn't demand any information that I'd consider dangerous.

By the way, I'm no longer giving away Gmail addresses since I'm giving any spare invites I get to the Gmail for the Troops project, but if you're a regular commenter here on Dean's World I can invite you into Orkut if you like.

I mentioned last week that my favorite web browser, Firefox, has been updated to verion 0.9. It's a much nicer and more secure browser than Internet Explorer, being far less vulnerable to spyware and such. I still recommend it highly.

But I also just noticed that its cousin application, the mail program named Thunderbird, has also been updated, and is now at version 0.7. It keeps getting faster and more reliable with every release. I highly recommend it.

Scientists at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center think they have identified a potentially useful protein in fighting cancer. Essentially, what it does is prevent cancer cells from growing blood vessels to feed themselves. Though they don't have a therapy just yet, it looks quite promising. Cancers need to feed themselves just like any tissue, and they frequently grow blood vessels to do it. In theory then, if you could stop the formation of new blood vessels, you could stop the growth of many forms of cancer.

The coming decades. It's breathtaking to contemplate. I still envy my son for being born when he was, there's so much neat stuff he's going to get to watch happen as he matures.

But he probably won't appreciate it much. That's the way of the world, isn't it?

The Wright Brothers. Alan Shephard. Yuri Gagarin. Neil Armstrong. And soon, possibly, Douglas B. Shane, Peter Siebold, Brian Binnie, and Michael W. Melville, the pilots of White Knight and Spaceship One:

Scheduled for tomorrow morning, 6:30 a.m. Pacific, we hope to see this amazing craft:

...will be the first manned spacecraft funded entirely by private enterprise, without so much as a dime of tax money. And, if successful, it'll be one of a fleet of cheap spaceworthy craft.

Godspeed, boys. We'll be watching, and thinking of you constantly.

It's like being alive to witness the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.

My old boss Ian Murdock has an interesting take on Google's Orkut: he says it's the beginnings of Microsoft Passport, but done right, from the bottom-up rather than the reverse.

Very insightful, and likely true. Clever folks, the Google people. I must admit I'm completely sold on Orkut, and have found all kinds of folks to list as friends in it. It's a very useful tool that way and, as Ian says, a great way to be able to look up useful information on friends and business associates--information they're willing to let you look up on them, I mean.

By the way, Ian is travelling extensively in Europe, and is looking up to hook up with any fans of Debian Linux....

Charles Hill has a list of books you should read.

Back when I was a kid, I devoured eveny Robert H. Heinlein book I could. One of the major reasons was how he portrayed the future in such a realistic fashion. One of his recurring themes included quick thumbnail descriptions of the local spaceport. Heinlein's stories frequently included throwaway references to "Goddard Field," or similar.

Reality has finally begun to catch up. Mohave Airport is now Mohave Spaceport.

And it's a private enterprise.

Maybe not too far off in the future we'll hear something like "Mohave Interplanetary Spaceport Flight 209, now leaving for Luna, Mars, and Ceres."

This article was cross-posted from the Gantry Launchpad.

Brian doesn't think much of T-Mobile.

I think he's being too pessimistic, but Rand Simberg is pessimistic about the space report that I was excited about below. He also helpfully points to the actual report recommendations.

I think he's missing a major point: at this point, NASA is a pork agency not a space agency. Its primary purpose is to fund jobs for voters in certain Senators' and Congressmen's areas. That being the case, any truly radical reform is simply impossible. He may be right about the missed opportunity as far as getting schoolchildren engaged, but beyond that, I think the best we can ever hope for is small incremental changes that move NASA toward relying more on private industry for actual launch services.

A non-partisan review panel commissioned by President Bush has recommended give private enterprise a greater role in getting into space, and changing NASA to more of a research agency.

They've needed to do this for a long, long time. Let's hope the President and the Congress can be talked into it. It will require some major fancy thinking and fast footwork to get it through the Congress though; Congressmen and some Senators will be against disruptions of what they see as NASA pork for their districts.

The always-excellent American Digest has a neat historical juxtaposition of man's image of the planet Saturn that you should see.

The Army's settled on new combat uniforms, and I must say I'm impressed with how much thought went into them. Rather high-tech in terms of material, and quite thoughtful in their design. They're actually rather ugly, but look extremely comfortable and very practical, which is far more important.

Check it out, it was more interesting reading than I thought it would be.

Now here's a guy we all owe a big thank-you to.

(Via Big Dan.)

While I've definitely been in a position of offering to do something for free for someone and not been appreciated for it, I have to say this would really hurt if it were me.

But this is why I've always said that anyone using a "free" service really needs to remember the dangers.

Opening your own domain with a hosting provider costs as little as $5/month or so, and gives you the ability to back up your data and move it to another provider very easily. Anyone with a blog on a "free" blog service should really be looking for one of the paid alternatives. $5-$10/month is a pretty cheap hobby. Heck, I still install weblogs for people for free if they ask (you pay the hosting fees, I do the install). But you don't even need me to do that anymore, what with services like Powerblogs, Cowblog, Bloghosts, TypePad, and so on.

My favorite web browser, Firefox, updated to version 0.9.

It kicks butt all over Internet Explorer. I love it.

Remember Lord of the Peeps? I honestly thought that had been the epitome of sublime absurdity. Could you think of a more amusing and complete waste of time?

Perhaps not, but someone did. I submit now that the true epitome of sublime absurdity is the Star Wars Scout Walker Kama Sutra.

Beat that. Go on, just try. I don't think it can be done.

Finally, for once, big media has an article on weblogs that actually gets them right. Just as amazingly, they waiting until almost halfway into the article before mentioning Andrew Sullivan and didn't even mention Instapundit until the end. I wasn't sure such things were humanly possible.

A couple of my favorite parts:

What makes blogs so effective? They're free. They catch people at work, at their desks, when they're alert and thinking and making decisions. Blogs are fresh and often seem to be miles ahead of the mainstream news. Bloggers put up new stuff every day, all day, and there are thousands of them. How are you going to keep anything secret from a thousand Russ Kicks? Blogs have voice and personality. They're human. They come to us not from some mediagenic anchorbot on an air-conditioned sound stage, but from an individual. They represent — no, they are — the voice of the little guy.

And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest writing being published. Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions as good taste, accountability and objectivity — and that can be a good thing. Accusations of media bias are thick on the ground these days, and Americans are tired of it. Blogs don't pretend to be neutral: they're gleefully, unabashedly biased, and that makes them a lot more fun.

Yup. While I cringe at the "little guy" phrase (it always strikes me as elitist), it's basically correct. That's one reason I'm often so amused by people who talk as if some blogger they don't like is a dangerous and pernicious influence with a hidden agenda and under the influence of nefarious dark forces.

Anyway, if there was one flat note in the piece, it was a much-repeated canard:

Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.

The truth of the matter is that the above is only possible on a blog that rarely links out to anything but the most intellectually constrained materials, and allows no dissenting comments or trackbacks. This was true, for example, of the Howard Dean campaign weblog: discussions were tightly constrained, and links and trackbacks to dissenting voices were practically nonexistent. Of coruse that turns into a bubble.

On typical blogs, however, you will find more diversity of opinion, and more sources of differing information and perspective, than you can possibly expect to find in your average newspaper or magazine. That's not a swipe at newspapers or magazines, either; what other news sources do is important and is something most webloggers are dependent upon. It's just a note about the technology and the way people use it. A print magazine or newspaper can't possibly offer the broad flexibility a weblog can.

Besides, even without blogs, couldn't I restrict my entire broadcast and print news intake to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and WorldNet Daily? You don't need blogs to isolate yourself to extreme views. Blogs make it harder to do this, not easier.

Indeed, it is because of the rapid-fire linking of multiple sources, not to mention frequent cross-blog debates, that I have seen very, very few weblogs that are true "echo chambers." Certainly, on any weblog there will be commenters who frequent that blog and often agree with each other; that's normal human behavior.

Then again, while like-minded people always congregate, there is constant dissent in the comments here on Dean's World, and except for the occasional "Bush is Hitler/you're a Nazi" troll who gets edited, just about anything goes here, and if you don't like what you see you'll get links from me on a regular basis that goes to sources I don't always agree with--not to mention that I've got a blogroll over there on the right which is full of people who often disagree with me. (That's that whole "Liberal tradition" thing which some people insist on misinterpreting even after I explain it to them.) And that's typical; I look at the blogrolls of most of the people I read regularly, and with rare exception they all link to sources they often disagree with.

Hell, don't all of the most popular blogs devote time to linking things they disagree with, just so they can tell you why they disagree? I'm not sure I can think of any exceptions.

Anyway, it's a pretty good piece. Read the whole thing.

And when you're done with that, George Miller will also explain to you why weblogs are more accountable than any other medium. And he's quite right: There's no more humbling experience than making a claim and then having to retract it because someone proves that you got your facts wrong.

(Via Bill Hobbs.)

Joe Gandelman has a pretty good essay on how weblogging changes you.

Not that everyone has to have a weblog to be so changed. But it's certainly true that the experience of crossing swords with others, of being held accountable for the things you say you believe, is both humbling and empowering.

Andrew and I discuss the matter.

The Mail & Guardian report that a Japanese group has recently demonstrated a prototype invisibility cloak in San Francisco.

I have a long memory so I remember when I first linked about Professor Tachi's device. You can find an old photo of the technology from early last year right here, although I do wonder if there have been improvements.

In any case, I want one.

(Well, I mean really now, don't you?)

Aaron seems rather impressed with this Israeli doctor who claims to have invented a female aphrodisiac that heightens sexual response and makes attaining orgasm easier for inorgasmic women.

To be blunt, though, I'm more than a little skeptical of the claim. While I do believe that some herbal remedies work as advertised, I'm not very impressed when one doctor all by himself makes huge claims without any double-blind peer-reviewed studies.