Where In The World…
…are the birds?
To find out fly over to I and the Bird #11 which is now up at The House & other Arctic Musings.
Yearly Archives: 2005
The Mad Scientist
Here’s the bait:
“Just imagine it—great pelagic orgies, the males thrusting wantonly with their massive penile arms, promiscuously inseminating any nearby slickly molluscan body. Perhaps they end up sated and exhausted from their frenzied exertions and, oblivious and insensate, drift ashore to die content. Forget March of the Penguins. There’s a great documentary to be made here: Squid Gone Wild. Cephalopod Sex Party. I want to see Michael Medved review it.”
Even if you have figured out who it is go read about him here, now!
Warning: Not ID friendly.
Bad News for Deadheads
In a nutshell, the pioneers of music trading appear to have joined the dinosaurs of the recording industry. Read and weep (there were 2300 shows here yesterday).
I’ve downloaded only a few complete GD shows from the Archive, streamed quite a few more, bought many commercial releases over the years including the just shipping 1969 Box Set (why hasn’t it arrived yet) and never, ever traded one of the Dead’s commercial releases. And still won’t. But I also will not be adding any new commercial releases to my collection for a while, if ever again…hell, I don’t even get close to cycling through my collection once every 5 years.
The music is theirs to control however they want. However, if they want to change the culture I can damn well change my buying habits.
Update: David Gans has some thoughts to share.
Here’s A Nasty Little Business
Seems there are a bunch of folks making at least part of their living by selling your cell phone records. Now they can’t be making huge dollars can they? Really, how many folks want someone else’s call records on any given day? Well, it turns out that there are quite a few business out there offering the service. Enough to make you angry if you think about it a bit:
It’s actually obscene what you can find out about people on the Internet.
says Bob Sullivan who goes on to note:
It may be outrageous, but it’s not new. MSNBC.com first wrote about this problem in October 2001, in a story titled “I know who you called last month.”
The problem was exposed years earlier by a private investigator named Rob Douglas. Banking records, home phone long-distance calling, even medical information, were all for sale, he told Congress.
But, isn’t this kind of illegal? Sure, but who’s prosecuting? Joel Winston, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Financial Practices Division,
…said the agency has never taken such a case to court and does not know how widespread the problem is. He said the FTC must focus its resources on the practices of data thieves that can cause the most damage to large numbers of consumers, such as financial fraud.
Why is this just an FCC issue? It appears to often require fraud to implement the theft. So where are the other law enforcement agencies? Likely all the other law enforcement critters are too busy checking out what books we are reading or staking out some pot user to spend time protecting us. As I argued previously:
Federal standards and regulations are invariably broken and generally never written with individual citizens in mind but Ed’s last point hits the nail on the head.
No institution, government or private, can be allowed to collect or distribute, for free or for fee, any information about an individual without that individuals specific consent on a per incident basis and if the distribution is for a fee then that individual must be compensated at a rate agreeable to the individual.
Perhaps it is time to get serious about instituting alternatives to the existing federal, state and local legal systems. You know, put something in place that can stamp out crime that has victims and perhaps obsolete all those law enforcement agencies that are so focused on victimless crimes.
Via fergie’s tech blog.
Where’s My Aspirin?
Should aspirin, acetominophen or penicillin be used? Derek Lowe argues that today not only would they not be approved by the FDA they likely would not even be submitted for approval:
The best example is aspirin itself. It’s one of the foundation stones of the drug industry, and it’s hard to even guess how many billions of doses of it have been taken over the last hundred years. But if you were somehow able to change history so that aspirin had never been discovered until this year, I can guarantee you that it would have died in the lab. No modern drug development organization would touch it.
I don’t know about you but I would be very unhappy not to have aspirin, etc., in my home arsenal and I had more than one childhood infection cleared by penicillin. On the other hand I have seen first hand the frightening experience of an allergic reaction to one of penicillin’s offspring.
I do, though, lean in the same direction as Lowe:
We can be relieved that we’ve learned so much more about pharmacology, ensuring that the drugs that manage to gain approval today are the safer than ever. Or we can think about how people seem to use aspirin and the other legacy drugs anyway, safety problems and all, and wonder how many more useful medicines we’re losing by insisting on a higher bar.
I definitely see the point of the former, but I lean a bit toward the latter.
The final informed choice on drug use should be made by a well informed patient. If the patient is being treated by a medical professional responsibility for providing the full set of information on a course of treatment belongs to the medical professional. If the patient is self-treating then the patient is responsible for acquiring the information. In both cases it is the patient who must make the final evaluation of a course of treatment.
That many people are not competent to make these evaluations and decisions is one of the great failings of our culture, our education system and our health care system.
Via Marginal Revolution.