Day: July 20, 2004

Attendant at The National Gallery Stops Woman from Breastfeeding

Earlier this month it was a Texas mall that was in trouble after a guard asked a woman to take her infant into the bathroom if she wanted to breastfeed. A few days later, however, Great Britain’s The National Gallery was hit with a similar controversy after an attendant asked a woman breastfeeding her 11-month-old daughter to move to what the BBC describes as a “mother-and-baby room” if she wanted to continue breastfeeding her daughter.

Of course, as pro-breast feeding advocates were quick to point out, this was a bit odd considering that many of the paintings in The National Gallery depict infants breastfeeding. The woman asked to leave, Catherine Gulati, was quoted by the BBC as noting that,

I thought it was ironic because in another room there was a picture of a bare breast with milk squirting out of it called the Milky Way.

As in the Texas mall incident, The National Gallery blamed the incident on an overzealous attendant and said that breastfeeding is allowed anywhere in the gallery.

Source:

Gallery regrets breastfeeding ban. The BBC, July 9, 2004.

New iPods

I was really hoping Apple would announce a 60gb iPod this week, but like the rest of the world I was disappointed (the price drop on the 40gb iPod tempts me, but my music collection is currently 56.2gb, so I’ll hold out a bit longer).

About a month ago I picked up an iPod mini. I don’t think I could say enough good things about it — this is one piece of kick-ass consumer electronics. I use it mainly to listen to music while weight lifting or audio books while running.

Of course it weighs so little I barely notice it, and the Click Wheel is an amazingly easy-to-use interface for making changes quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

It just works.

The Other Part of the Storage Obssession — Recordable Media

One of the reasons for my oft-mentioned obssession with large hard drives is that even with access to a lot of storage, I generate far more data than I can actually store on even a terabyte of hard drive space. So I end up archiving a lot of material to DVDs. And I am being serious when I mean a lot — typically I got through about 25-30 DVD+Rs a week.

Obviously the cost of DVD writers and rewriters is falling like crazy, but the cost of the media also seems to be taking a nose dive. Last Fall, media in middle-of-nowhere-Michigan cost about $1.50/disc. Now I can buy them at retail for about $.80/disc regularly, with some stores starting to offer them at $.60/disc in volume (I’m assuming if you look online you can find them cheaper than this).

Now, of course, dual layer discs are on the market and already available at a very low price point. Unfortunately the media isn’t here yet in any sort of quantity. According to this story, they’re likely to start out at $12/disc. Ouch. One of my responsibilities at my job is to oversee small-scale DVD production, and I can’t wait to be able to go with dual layers and get the full 2 hours of MPEG-2 on a DVD instead of having to chop programs into two discs or go with lower quality video.

And then further down the road is blue laser discs at 20gb on a single layer.

Excellent.

Sen. Rick Santorum: Stopping Gay Marriage “The Ultimate Homeland Security”

In the past, I’ve found myself agreeing with Sen. Rick Santorum quite a bit on gay marriage (though reaching entirely different conclusions about marriage than Santorum and gay marriage supporters). Santorum of course, voted for a proposed Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. That amendment failed to garner the 2/3rds necessary to move on, but not before Santorum dropped these bizarre comments on the Senate floor,

I would argue that the future of our country hangs in the balance because the future of marriage hangs in the balance. Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?

No, the ultimate homeland security is finding and killing terrorists who hate America precisely because it is a secular nation that tolerates homosexuality (and other numerous vices/sins/whatever).

This is why it’s a shame that the Libertarian Party is such a joke. It would be nice to vote for a party that combined the economic conservatism of the Republicans with the social tolerance of the Democrats. Why can’t we have a party committed to lowering the taxes of wealthy gay men?

Source:

Marriage ban killed in Senate . Associated Press, July 14, 2004.

Incredibly Stupid Software Design Decisions #63

Extensis‘ web site says “We call it digital asset managment.” Funny, I call it dumbass design.

I’m really sick of using Adobe’s latest dumbed down version of Photoshop Album, so I downloaded Extensis Portfolio 7 to evaluate it. The program is great — it has a much better interface for cataloging photographs (which is what I’d be using it for mostly) and I like the ability to embed keyword and other metadata in my digital pictures, which is one of the major features missing from Photoshop Album.

But along with all this power, Extensis Portfolio has one of the dumbest “features” I’ve ever seen. Like many other such programs, you can double click on a picture (or video or whatever) to edit it. But you can’t tell Portfolio to open pictures in Photoshop or whatever editor you’d prefer to use. The manual actually claims that the software guesses which program it should open, though on my machine it appears to simply open a photo in the default application I’ve set for viewing such files (which is not an editing program).

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t believe a $200 program can’t include a simple preference to let me choose which program I’d like to use to edit JPEG files when I double-click on them.

Cheap Anti-AIDS Drugs Hit Asia — Is That a Problem?

The New York Times recently reported on an odd problem — that there are too many companies making too many generic anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV.

Typically, the complaint has been that anti-retroviral drugs made by pharmaceutical companies are too expensive for the developing world, and that what is needed are cheaper, generic drugs. But a report by Treat Asia finds that there are so many companies and drugs that Asia is at risk of rapidly creating drug-resistant versions of HIV.

According to the report, there are at least 27 companies in Asia manufacturing anti-HIV drugs, only three of which have met the World Health Organization’s quality standards.

In addition, throughout Asia there are few doctors to treat AIDS patients, so those who can afford the anti-retrovirals often obtain the drugs over-the-counter and self-medicate.

Kevin Robert Frost of Treat Asia told The New York Times,

Our point is if there is proliferation of the generic drugs, as many are calling for, where is the infrastructure to deliver them? In Asia, the availability of drugs is far outstripping the capacity to deliver them.

Source:

AIDS drugs’ fast rise in Asia risks resistant strains. Lawrence Altman, The New York Times, July 8, 2004.