Monday, 23 May 2011
William Burroughs' colour walks
(From “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” William S. Burroughs in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1985)
“For example, I was taking a color walk around Paris the other day…doing something I picked up from your pictures in which the colors shoot out all through the canvas like they do in the street. I was walking town the boulevard when I suddenly felt this cool wind on a warm day and when I looked out all through the canvas like they do in the street. I was walking down the boulevard when I looked out I was seeing all the blues in the street in front of me, blue on a foulard…blue on a young workman’s ass…his blue jeans…a girl’s blue sweater…blue neon…the sky…all the blues. When I looked again I saw nothing but all the reds of traffic lights…car lights…a café sign…a man’s nose. Your paintings make me see the streets of Paris in a different way. And then there are all the deserts and the Mayan masks and the fantastic aerial architecture of your bridges and catwalks and Ferris wheels.”
(Burroughs, from an interview with Brion Gysin in 1960)
@'Word Object'
The Elephant in the Green Room
“Let’s make a deal,” Ailes told Beck flatly.
During a 45-minute conversation, the two men agreed on the terms: Beck would give up his daily 5 p.m. program and appear in occasional network “specials”—but even that didn’t solve their problem. Tensions flared over how many specials he would appear in. Fox wanted six, Beck’s advisers wanted four. At another meeting, Beck choked up; he and Ailes had always had a bond. And when Ailes thought Beck’s advisers were jerking him around, he threatened to blow up the talks. “I’m just going to fire him and issue a press release,” he later snapped to a Fox executive.
On April 6, Fox and Beck announced he would be leaving the network. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes knew that a public meltdown would alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers. Most of all, he didn’t want Beck’s departure to be seen as a victory for the liberal media; that would ruin the most important story line of all...
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The stupidity of our copyright laws is finally laid bare
Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys' representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron's first party conference as leader. Given that, it's only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.
Cameron's worship of Google did, however, have one tangible result. Mortified by the Google Guys' assertion that the UK's intellectual property regime would have made it impossible to launch their company in the UK, he decided to commission an inquiry into said regime under the chairmanship of Professor Ian Hargreaves. This was a mite puzzling, because the previous government had in 2005 commissioned a similar inquiry under the former FT editor Andrew Gowers. His report had concluded that the UK's intellectual property was fundamentally sound but made 54 specific recommendations about possible improvements. Most interestingly, though, Gowers also concluded that copyright on music recordings should not be extended from its current limit of 50 years after the date of recording, a finding that reawakened Cliff Richard's fears that his heirs and descendants would be reduced to penury. For the copyright industries, therefore, Gowers had clearly reached the wrong conclusion, a fact that their representatives lost no opportunity of pressing upon Lord Mandelson on various luxury yachts moored off the coast of Greece.
Some of us feared, therefore, that Hargreaves would be pressured into being more sensitive to the needs of hard-pressed pop stars and their agents. His report, published this week, suggests that we seriously underestimated him. What he has produced is a tough, intelligent and radical analysis of our current IP regime. "Could it be true," he asks, "that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators' rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth? The short answer is: yes."
Hallelujah! At last we are getting somewhere. The notion that laws framed in an era when copying was difficult, imperfect and expensive could work in an era when copying was effortless, perfect and cheap was a proposition that only imbeciles and industry lobbyists could entertain. But up to now, our politicians subscribed to it.
Hargreaves usefully explains why this ludicrous state of affairs has persisted for so long. "Lobbying," he writes, "is a feature of all political systems and as a way of informing and organising debate it brings many benefits. In the case of IP policy and specifically copyright policy, however, there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes. Further distortion arises from the fact (not unique to this sector) that there is a striking asymmetry of interest between rights holders, for whom IP issues are of paramount importance, and consumers for whom they have been of passing interest only until the emergence of the internet as a focus for competing technological, economic, business and cultural concerns."
It's a measure of the ludicrousness of our intellectual property regime that some of the most mundane, commonsensical recommendations in the Hargreaves report read like great leaps forward. Take, for example, for example, the idea that henceforth none of us – or at any rate, none of us who use an iPod – should be criminals. Eh? Well, under current arrangements, if you copy music from a legally purchased CD and transfer it to your iPod, then you are, technically, breaking the law.
Then there's Hargreaves's proposal that, in future, British lawmaking on intellectual property should be "evidence-based". As opposed to what, asks the legal scholar James Boyle: "Astrology-based?" But our lawmaking in this area has been so weird that the idea that we might try rationality for a change seems genuinely radical.
Hargreaves is also very good on the thorny problem of "orphan" works – works still technically in copyright but for which no rights-holder can be traced. He wants the government to legislate to enable the licensing of these works – a commonsensical idea but one that in the insane world of IP lawyers sounds like revolutionary talk.
No doubt there will be lots of expert cavilling about this report. But overall it's a refreshingly intelligent and welcome document. I've a good mind to start a Facebook page for it – and invite Ed Miliband to click on "Like".
John Naughton @'The Guardian'
Cameron's worship of Google did, however, have one tangible result. Mortified by the Google Guys' assertion that the UK's intellectual property regime would have made it impossible to launch their company in the UK, he decided to commission an inquiry into said regime under the chairmanship of Professor Ian Hargreaves. This was a mite puzzling, because the previous government had in 2005 commissioned a similar inquiry under the former FT editor Andrew Gowers. His report had concluded that the UK's intellectual property was fundamentally sound but made 54 specific recommendations about possible improvements. Most interestingly, though, Gowers also concluded that copyright on music recordings should not be extended from its current limit of 50 years after the date of recording, a finding that reawakened Cliff Richard's fears that his heirs and descendants would be reduced to penury. For the copyright industries, therefore, Gowers had clearly reached the wrong conclusion, a fact that their representatives lost no opportunity of pressing upon Lord Mandelson on various luxury yachts moored off the coast of Greece.
Some of us feared, therefore, that Hargreaves would be pressured into being more sensitive to the needs of hard-pressed pop stars and their agents. His report, published this week, suggests that we seriously underestimated him. What he has produced is a tough, intelligent and radical analysis of our current IP regime. "Could it be true," he asks, "that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators' rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth? The short answer is: yes."
Hallelujah! At last we are getting somewhere. The notion that laws framed in an era when copying was difficult, imperfect and expensive could work in an era when copying was effortless, perfect and cheap was a proposition that only imbeciles and industry lobbyists could entertain. But up to now, our politicians subscribed to it.
Hargreaves usefully explains why this ludicrous state of affairs has persisted for so long. "Lobbying," he writes, "is a feature of all political systems and as a way of informing and organising debate it brings many benefits. In the case of IP policy and specifically copyright policy, however, there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes. Further distortion arises from the fact (not unique to this sector) that there is a striking asymmetry of interest between rights holders, for whom IP issues are of paramount importance, and consumers for whom they have been of passing interest only until the emergence of the internet as a focus for competing technological, economic, business and cultural concerns."
It's a measure of the ludicrousness of our intellectual property regime that some of the most mundane, commonsensical recommendations in the Hargreaves report read like great leaps forward. Take, for example, for example, the idea that henceforth none of us – or at any rate, none of us who use an iPod – should be criminals. Eh? Well, under current arrangements, if you copy music from a legally purchased CD and transfer it to your iPod, then you are, technically, breaking the law.
Then there's Hargreaves's proposal that, in future, British lawmaking on intellectual property should be "evidence-based". As opposed to what, asks the legal scholar James Boyle: "Astrology-based?" But our lawmaking in this area has been so weird that the idea that we might try rationality for a change seems genuinely radical.
Hargreaves is also very good on the thorny problem of "orphan" works – works still technically in copyright but for which no rights-holder can be traced. He wants the government to legislate to enable the licensing of these works – a commonsensical idea but one that in the insane world of IP lawyers sounds like revolutionary talk.
No doubt there will be lots of expert cavilling about this report. But overall it's a refreshingly intelligent and welcome document. I've a good mind to start a Facebook page for it – and invite Ed Miliband to click on "Like".
John Naughton @'The Guardian'
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense (1984)
1. Psycho Killer 2. Heaven 3. Thank You For Sending Me An Angel 4. Found A Job 5. Slippery People 6. Burning Down The House 7. Life During Wartime 8. Making Flippy Floppy 9. Swamp 10. What A Day That Was
11. Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place) 12. Once In A Lifetime 13. Genius Of Love 14. Girlfriend Is Better 15. Take Me To The River 16. Cross-Eyed And Painless
Vox Pop - How we use the internet
Any kid at primary school has grown up with computers and the internet as the norm. We talk to grade 3s and 4s about how they use the internet.
(Thanx Stan!)
(Thanx Stan!)
Can a vaccine stop drug abuse?
The idea of vaccinating drug addicts against their affliction is an intriguing one. In principle, it should not be too hard. The immune system works, in part, by making antibodies that are specific to particular sorts of hostile molecule. Such antibodies recognise and attach themselves to these molecules, rendering them harmless. Vaccines work by presenting the immune system with novel targets, so that it can learn to react to them if it comes across them again.
The problem is that the molecules antibodies recognise and react to are the big ones, such as proteins, that are characteristic of bacteria, viruses and other infectious agents. Small molecules, such as drugs, go unnoticed. But not for much longer, if Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego has his way. In a paper just published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Dr Janda and his colleagues suggest how a vaccine against methamphetamine, a popular street drug, might be made. If their method works, it would open the possibility of vaccinating people against other drugs, too.
The idea of a methamphetamine vaccine is not new. The problem is getting the immune system to pay attention to a molecule that is such a small target. The way that has been tried in the past is to build the vaccine from several components.
First, there is a large carrier protein that forms a platform for the target. Then there is the target itself, a set of smaller molecules called haptens that are attached to the carrier. These may either be the drug in question or some analogue of it that, for one reason or another, is reckoned to have a better chance of training the immune system. Finally, there is a chemical cocktail called an adjuvant that helps get the immune system to pay attention to the carrier protein and the haptens.
Dr Janda noticed that past experiments on methamphetamine vaccines had all revolved around tweaking either the carrier protein or the adjuvant, rather than tinkering with the haptens. He thought he might be able to change that, on the basis of work he had carried out previously, trying to design a vaccine against nicotine. In particular, nicotine is a highly flexible molecule. That makes it hard for the immune system to recognise. To overcome this, his team on the nicotine project had to work out how to fix their haptens to the carrier protein in a way that rendered them less capable of twisting and turning, and thus made them easier for the immune system to identify.
In the new study, Dr Janda and his colleagues report that they have performed a similar trick with methamphetamine haptens. They used computer models to visualise the haptens in three dimensions and thus work out how the molecules could be rearranged such that they could not spring, twist or turn when being examined by the immune system. In light of this information they designed six new methamphetamine-like haptens. Once built, they attached the new hapten molecules to carrier proteins, mixed them with adjuvant, injected the results into mice and waited. After several weeks they tested the mice to see if the animals’ blood contained antibodies to methamphetamine.
Of the six new haptens, three successfully provoked the mice to make such antibodies. As a bonus, one of those three also stimulated the production of antibodies against another widely used drug, amphetamine. That is still a long way from providing a working vaccine, but it is an important step forward. And if human immune systems react in the same way to the new vaccines as murine ones do, the day when a drug addict might be offered vaccination rather than opprobrium will have come a little closer.
@'The Economist'
The problem is that the molecules antibodies recognise and react to are the big ones, such as proteins, that are characteristic of bacteria, viruses and other infectious agents. Small molecules, such as drugs, go unnoticed. But not for much longer, if Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego has his way. In a paper just published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Dr Janda and his colleagues suggest how a vaccine against methamphetamine, a popular street drug, might be made. If their method works, it would open the possibility of vaccinating people against other drugs, too.
The idea of a methamphetamine vaccine is not new. The problem is getting the immune system to pay attention to a molecule that is such a small target. The way that has been tried in the past is to build the vaccine from several components.
First, there is a large carrier protein that forms a platform for the target. Then there is the target itself, a set of smaller molecules called haptens that are attached to the carrier. These may either be the drug in question or some analogue of it that, for one reason or another, is reckoned to have a better chance of training the immune system. Finally, there is a chemical cocktail called an adjuvant that helps get the immune system to pay attention to the carrier protein and the haptens.
Dr Janda noticed that past experiments on methamphetamine vaccines had all revolved around tweaking either the carrier protein or the adjuvant, rather than tinkering with the haptens. He thought he might be able to change that, on the basis of work he had carried out previously, trying to design a vaccine against nicotine. In particular, nicotine is a highly flexible molecule. That makes it hard for the immune system to recognise. To overcome this, his team on the nicotine project had to work out how to fix their haptens to the carrier protein in a way that rendered them less capable of twisting and turning, and thus made them easier for the immune system to identify.
In the new study, Dr Janda and his colleagues report that they have performed a similar trick with methamphetamine haptens. They used computer models to visualise the haptens in three dimensions and thus work out how the molecules could be rearranged such that they could not spring, twist or turn when being examined by the immune system. In light of this information they designed six new methamphetamine-like haptens. Once built, they attached the new hapten molecules to carrier proteins, mixed them with adjuvant, injected the results into mice and waited. After several weeks they tested the mice to see if the animals’ blood contained antibodies to methamphetamine.
Of the six new haptens, three successfully provoked the mice to make such antibodies. As a bonus, one of those three also stimulated the production of antibodies against another widely used drug, amphetamine. That is still a long way from providing a working vaccine, but it is an important step forward. And if human immune systems react in the same way to the new vaccines as murine ones do, the day when a drug addict might be offered vaccination rather than opprobrium will have come a little closer.
@'The Economist'
The last days of Bill Haley
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Michael Hall @'Texas Monthly'
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