I am loving this. I just went to check on the pistachio recall. I was checking out a link to FDA recall notices when I found this:
http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/rssRecalls.xml
I’m kind of stoked on that – a perfect utilization of news feed technology.
Now if we could just get the FDA to use Twitterfeed to push those to their Twitter account…
I went looking for people who’d posted the famous Eli Cash quote, “Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t?” I got some good results.
My favorite so far was the one on Good Reads. Someone has posted a review of the fictional work, “Old Custer” by Eli Cash. Eli Cash was the character portrayed by Owen Wilson in the Wes Anderson film, The Royal Tenenbaums.
I guess it’s a good idea to search for some your favorite, more esoteric movie quotes on the web. It’s such a big world out there, and every day more and more people are publishing themselves, you never know what you might find.
What a weird world we live in.
Sitting at the doorstep of the world’s largest domestic economy, yet stripped of the right to legitimate trade with that nation, Cuba has been forced to seek some products on its own.
To some countries, the products of our pharma companies are our greatest export. Unable to acquire these drugs directly from US manufacturers, Cuba has had to develop its own means of producing pharmaceutical medicine.
An interesting consequence of this has been their development of CimaVax EGF, a lung cancer vaccine that virtually eliminates the continued development of cancer cells in patients with non small cell lung cancer.
A cancer vaccine is not exactly what you would think. You might think that you’d give this to a baby to keep them from ever getting cancer. That’s not exactly correct. As I understand it, what it does is to cease the growth of existing cancer. As cancer is not an infectious disease, a vaccine against it is not designed to inhibit its contagion from person to person. Rather, what it is supposed to do is this: if you give it to someone who has lung cancer, they still have the cancer they had when you gave it to them, but the cancer stops growing.
So if you can get rid of the cancer they already have (not easy if its on their lungs) your efforts to extend their life are going to have far better results.
Pretty cool, huh?
But US citizens aren’t going to get a crack at the drug. At least not domestically. Because the drug was developed in Cuba, and because we won’t trade with Cuba, the Cuban government has no interest in seeking FDA approval of the drug. So, while countries like Peru, Japan, the UK and Canada are all currently conducting clinical trials of the drug, we are apparently pretending that this drug does not exist.
Our foreign policy is still staunchly in favor of the preservation of an endangered species: the Cold War adversary. With that mindset, this cancer vaccine somehow threaten our national security.
Hopefully it won’t be long before Fidel Castro bestows the ultimate gift to the people of Cuba. We probably won’t normalize trade with them until that happens. Unfortunately, it looks like their medical technology is pretty sophisticated, so they might wind up keeping him alive a lot longer than we thought. He’s already been in power for fifty years. He’s really giving Queen Victoria a run for her money (Queen Victoria held the throne for sixty-three years).
I kept looking for a good photo to use for a tile-shift effect. I finally found one that I took not too long ago at the Sawtelle Shopping center in West LA. I think it works pretty well, but I’m not 100%. I think I have a ways to go yet in getting the effect down right.
Click for embiggenned version.
Here is the Tilt-Shift group on Flickr.
Okay, now I’m pretty sure that APIs, combined with some mix of RSS/JSON + AJAX, really are emerging as the defining technology of the web.
I’m still trying to piece it all together because it seems like a lot of this stuff is really intelligently heading toward some kind of unification. There’s no doubt an elegance to its evolution. If laissez-faire economic theory weren’t so gauche right now I’d make reference to an invisible hand guiding the development of the stuff.
This stuff is really awesome and is collectively responsible for my post frequency dropping off so dramatically over the past week. I’m completely consumed with it and only now, in my weary state am I incapable of working with it and forced to transition to sleep by writing a boring blog post.
Everywhere I look on the web I’m wondering if certain sites have an API and if so what could I do with it. It really keeps reminding me of Douglas Copeland’s book Microserfs and the development software the characters are creating in the second half of the book. Everything feels like lego blocks now. And when I try to explain that to the luddites, they just look back at me with a blank look on their face, not understanding WTF I’m talking about.
It reminds me of when I was back in high school and I have to give a presentation on a current event that I thought was significant and then explain why I thought it was important. This was back in 1993. For a few years at that point I’d been hearing about Apple’s move to adopt a new processor architecture. They’d been using the 68000 series Motorla processor since their start and to move to another processor would mean changing all of their architecture, including their operating system.
They changed over to a new processor called “PowerPC” which, iconically then, had been co-developed by IBM, which many of us still incorrectly perceived as Apple’s rival. It was the same processor that would be used a few years later in the first Playstation (which had two, one for graphics, one for regular operations).
I knew that the chip was heralding a major change in the computing world and, coupled with what was happening with computer networking and the first public ISPs starting to show up, we were on the dawn of a new era in information architecture. And I got up there in front of a bunch of seventeen year-olds and told them all this and they stared back at me like I was humping the chalkboard.
Of course, I turned out to be right.
And I think I’m right this time too. This stuff, and maybe location awareness coupled with an expansion of the web into the mobile realm, are going to be major players in the next five years of web development. Even if the economy continues to tank. Maybe even because of it…
QuantumTom