Genetic Engineering

by

NZ billboard protesting genetic engineering

Here’s an eye opener for you — a New Zealand billboard from Mothers Against Genetic Engineering protesting genetic engineering experiments that asks “Why not just genetically engineer women for milk?”

Aside from the obvious (and brilliant) attention-getting shock tactics of the image, there’s some interesting questions being raised here.

New Zealanders are allowing a handful of corporate scientists and ill-informed politicians to make decisions on the ethics of GE. Our largest science company, AgResearch, is currently putting human genes into cows in the hope of creating new designer milks. The ethics of such experiments have not even been discussed by the wider public. How far will we allow them to go?

Unfortunately, it’s time for me to head out the door to get to work. Discuss amongst yourselves.

(via MeFi)

Democrat fundraising outdoing Bush

by

Very interesting tidbit in the midst of this MSNBC look at Democratic fundraising:

Taking the party-wide view, [Democratic fund-raiser Simon] Rosenberg pointed to what almost no one else has noticed: Based on the preliminary estimates for the third quarter, the 10-person Democratic field collectively will have outraised the Bush campaign, an indication of how fired up Democratic donors are.

“If Bush is this supposed fund-raising king, then this so-called ‘weak’ Democratic field — to use Karl Rove’s word — is outraising him,” Rosenberg said.

(via Mathew Gross)

Fire up the shredders

by

I haven’t said much (anything) about the current scandal over the outed CIA operative, but this blew my mind. From an NPR interview between Robert Seigel and Nina Totenberg, as quoted by Atrios:

The White house asked for and got permission earlier this week to wait a day before issuing a directive to preserve all documents and logs which led one seasoned federal prosecutor to wonder why they wanted to wait a day, and who at the justice department told them they could do that, and why?

Why, indeed? Why in the world — in any potential scandal, especially one of this magnitude — would the guilty parties be given 24-hour notice so that they could clean out their e-mail inboxes, fire up the shredders, or do whatever else might need to be done to cover their tracks?

Wacom Photography Contest

by

Wacom is currently having a “Go Platinum / Go Pro” photo/design contest.

Go Platinum: design a cover for a stock photography CD.

Go Pro: submit a photo for inclusion in a future stock photo CD.

The winner of each contest will get a 40Gb iPod and $1000 as payments for the rights to use their submission.

Pretty cool, I think — I’ve submitted my Post Alley photograph. Worth a shot, at least!

Meme 2: iTunes

by

iTunes FoldersAnother meme that Kottke pointed out — iTunes usage methods.

How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes extremely important. Luckly, iTunes has everything I need in order to keep track of what I have, find things easily, and discover music I hadn’t heard in a while (and at times, didn’t remember that I even had).

One of the godsends of iTunes is the “smart playlists” feature — I use smart playlists almost exclusively (they’re the purple-colored icons in the screenshot). Essentially, a smart playlist allows you to set certain criteria that determine what songs are in the playlist, which is then automatically updated by iTunes. For instance, I keep three smart playlists synced to my iPod at all times: “new additions”, “random unplayed”, and “random 1gb”.

  • Random 1Gb: the single most important playlist, for me. This randomly grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that 1) I haven’t listened to in the past 2 months, 2) is rated three stars or above, and 3) isn’t in the “Christmas” genre. Whenever I listen to a song, it removes it from the playlist, and grabs another one. This syncs with my iPod, and as the iPod tracks what I listen to each day, the playlist is automatically updated at night when I get home from work, and in the morning just before I leave. The end result — roughly 20 hours of songs that I know I like, but haven’t heard in a few months.

  • Random Unplayed: this playlist grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that I’ve never listened to. This comes in handy when I’m importing a lot of music (like now, as I re-import all 1200 CDs to AAC rather than .mp3) — as long as there’s something in this playlist, then I know that there’s songs that I haven’t listened to yet (either just to listen, or to check to ensure that the rip was completed successfully).

  • New Additions: this is, quite simply, any songs that have been added to my library within the last two weeks. Great for being able to explore a new album right after buying it.

Other smart playlists that come in handy: “recently played” (anything I’ve listened to in the past two weeks, handy for tracking down something I know I heard recently), “top 25 played” (a pesudo-best-of list), “top rated” (any songs rated four or five stars), and the various by-year playlists (listening by era can be quite interesting sometimes).

The only two “normal” playlists I have at the moment are one for Poems for Laila (from when I was making CDs for Prairie last weekend), and one for Sony’s excellent Soundtrack for a Century collection. Other than those two, it’s all smart playlists for me.

Meme 1: The Dock

by

My dock

There’s a meme propagating around the OS X corner of the ‘net right now, started by this O’Reilly article, propagated by Jason Kottke, and since picked up by many others, looking at how different people keep their dock arranged. Bottom, left, or right? Hidden or visible? Magnifying or not? And so on.

So, not being one to let a silly pointless meme pass by, I give you my current dock! I’m sure you’re all thrilled. It’s actually fairly boring at the moment, but that’s partly because I don’t use the dock as a launcher at all, instead preferring to use it only to show currently running applications. As I’ve had this machine for all of five days now, and there were a few restarts as I got things installed and configured, my list of running applications hasn’t grown terribly much yet.

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my dock on the right hand side of the screen. I’m right handed, so it’s a very natural movement for me to swing over that way to switch from app to app when I’m mousing around (which is actually a little odd, as on my Windows box at work, I keep the taskbar anchored to the left hand side of the screen — one of them is backwards). Keeping it on the bottom never really worked for me, as it takes up screen real estate that I’d rather have useable for windows — I’m far more likely to want as much vertical space as possible for reading pages than horizontal space.

Here’s what I’ve got running right now, top to bottom: The Mac OS X finder, Pathfinder (a finder replacement), Mail (email), iPulse (system monitoring), iTunes (music), iChat AV (.mac/AIM IMing), System Preferences (not usually open, but I’m still tweaking things), GraphicConverter (excellent graphic manipulation program), Safari (web browsing), NetNewsWire (news aggregator), QuickTime Player (had to watch the Return of the King trailer a couple times last night), and iCal (calendar/secheduling).

Exciting, huh? ;)

Longhorn gets Scoblelized

by

Robert Scoble has started a Longhorn blog. Information might be light until the upcoming PDC, but it could be a good source of info on Microsoft’s next OS. I may be a Mac user, but it’s good to keep an eye on the other side of the fence. ;)

A couple thoughts, purely on the presentation. The UI looks bearable, and seems to match some of the leaked Longhorn shots we’ve seen so far. The headers for each of the sections in the sidebar look a couple pixels too high to me, though, like they’re crowding the divider lines. Who knows how much of that is just a web rendering issue (or even a browser issue), though. Comment support, but no Trackback, which is a shame (or maybe Trackback is there, but Robert doesn’t have it turned on — I see a ‘Trackback’ counter under the ‘Statistics’ section of the sidebar).

Code-wise, it’s less of a mess than I’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but it could use some improvement. While the main content is structured with CSS, the overall page is still heavily table-based. Images are missing title tags, and there’s still some ALL CAPS tags used (according to specs, HTML tags should be lower case). Still, it’s at least readable code, which is better than I was guessing I’d see when I pulled up the source, and it doesn’t seem to have any IE-specific nastiness. Maybe there are a few people in Microsoft who are starting to get a clue. ;)

Five million in ten days

by

Wow. It looks like I owe the Dean campaign something of an apology. In my Dean/Clark post last Friday, I said this:

…his campaign’s current “5 million in 10 days” fundraising drive struck me as fairly ludicrous when I saw it (even with the fundraising skills they’ve demonstrated, that’s a lot of money in very little time, and if they don’t make their goal, then no matter how much money they do raise, it will be perceived as a “failure” because for the first time, Dean couldn’t meet or break a fundraising goal…they seem to be setting themselves up for bad press)…

While the bat graphic hasn’t been updated since sometime last night, it appears that they pulled it off. Joe Trippi posted a big thank you note last night, with the final count:

Our original goal for this quarter was \$7.6 million — to match what you accomplished last quarter. When we saw that we would surpass that goal we raised the bar to matching the record set by President Clinton. 10 days ago we had raised \$9.7 million and we set the goal of raising \$5 million dollars in just 10 days. You did that. Tonight we sit at \$14.8 million — \$5.1 million over 10 days.

That’s just incredible. Congratulations to the Dean campaign, and to everyone who chipped in to fill those bats. Good work.

Saving embedded Quicktime movies on OS X

by

Thanks to this comment on Mac OS X Hints, I found an incredibly easy way to save Quicktime movies that have been embedded into a page (like, say, the recently released trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).

Well, easy if you’re comfortable with using the Mac OS X terminal, at least.

Simply create a shell script (I named mine getmov) with the following commands:

#!/bin/sh
ditto -rsrcFork /tmp/501/Temporary Items/QT* ~/Movies/$1.mov</code>

Then drop that shell script into your /usr/bin directory, rehash, and you’re set. Now anytime you’re at a page that has an embedded Quicktime movie that you’d like to save, just leave the window open, and call that shell script, setting the destination filename at the same time. For instance, to save the trailer for RotK, I simply typed getmov returnoftheking, and suddenly ‘returnoftheking.mov’ was sitting in my Movies directory.