Author: Brian Carnell

ArsTechnica’s Mozilla Review

ArsTechnica has a lengthy review of Mozilla 1.0 which gives the browser a rather lukewarm assessment.

The reviewer does have a point about some of Mozilla’s shortcomings. I’ve had a lot of the same problems ArsTechnica reports when it comes to installing plugins.

But those drawbacks are more than overcome by the tabbed interface, which ArsTechnica mentions, and the keyword support which it doesn’t. The tabbed interface is the best implementation of that in any browser I’ve used. Yes, it would be nice if Mozilla could be configured to automatically open new tabs when clicking on a link, but it can be configured to open new tabs when clicking on the middle button of a three-button mouse which works great for me.

Even more powerful are the keywords option. Once you’ve bookmarked a web site, you can go into the bookmark manager and assign each site a keyword. For example, to reach brian.carnell.com I just go to my web browser and type in “BC.”

But wait, there’s more. Mozilla also allows users to assign keywords to groups of sites. For example, I have a list of 12 web sites that are all related that I need to view every day. In Mozilla I just open those sites up once, bookmark that configuration and assign it a keyword. Talk about a time saver.

When Mozilla was being developed I was extremely skeptical that it would ever even come close to being as functional as IE. Now I would imagine web browsing without Mozilla’s excellent tools.

Missing the Point about Palestinians

Dave Winer completely misses Glenn Reynolds’ point about the way the Palestinians fight Israel,

Glenn Reynolds asks a poignant question. “What would things be like for Palestinians now, if Israelis or Americans thought like Arabs? They wouldn’t be like anything at all, of course. There wouldn’t be any Palestinians.” Bada-boom.

Of course it’s just as true that there would be no Palestinians if we thought like Nazi Germans or Klan members in Glenn’s home state of Tennessee.

Which misses the point which was that while there are Klan members in Tennessee (and Michigan and California for that matter), those folks don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of influencing American politics. Similarly, even though Israel is under constant attack by terrorists, there is no serious movement in that country to respond in kind. Israel could simply wipe out entire neighborhoods in retaliation for suicide bombings, but instead it usually goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, allow the moral equivalent of the KKK element to dominate. In fact Reynolds himself has pointed to numerous incidents where Arab media outlets and web sites of terrorist groups like Hamas chose to run anti-Semitic commentary from American racists.

Imagine a place where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are regularly reprinted in newspapers and television commentators openly repeat the Jewish blood libel myth.

Welcome to the Middle East.

My Odd Week

The past seven days have been very odd. First my car died. Died as in when the mechanic comes out and tells you that he can fix it, but the cost to fix is going to be more than the car is worth.

Then my web sites disappeared from the face of the Earth thanks to a mixup between the telco. company and my web host. Here’s my big lesson from that — a week without constant weblogging sucks.

And it also became obvious that we needed another computer — my wife was trying to finish her thesis and ran into a lot of problems thanks to the relatively old machine I had her working on.

Oh, and I discovered that thanks to the lack of oversight by my predecessor in my position at work that the department I manage is actually running a deficit about twice as high as I had originally thought (I know where you’re coming from about the high cost of T1 connectivity, Seth!)

Fortunately, this is the United States where pretty much any problem can be solved by an influx of cash and credit. New car, new computer, new ISP for the web sites (though still handled by Macrobyte despite the outage — more on that later). They say money can’t buy happiness, but what else are you going to use it for?

Is Cryonics a Worthwhile Investment?

With the bizarre legal wrangle over whether or not Ted Williams really wanted to have is body cryonically frozen, Alcor and other cryonics comapnies and advocates were suddenly in the news. Does cryonics represent anything but a Quioxitic effort to cheat death?

I doubt it. I suppose if you’re wealthy enough and don’t mind the idea of havingt your body forzen in liquid nitrogen it might not be an unreasonable idea. After all, the odds of science being able to someday revive cryoncially frozen people is certainly a positive number — but, I suspect, a ridiculously low positive number.

The main problem I see with cryonics is that I don’t want my body to survive, but rather I want me to survive — to make cryonics worthwhile, I would want my consciousness, memories, etc. to be preserved.

But most cryonics advocates seem to have a horribly reductivist view of human consciousness. Certainly consciousness is a biological phenomenon, but cryonics seems to presuppose that it is also an incredibly mechanisitic phenomenon that can be stopped at one state and started decades later like some sort of extremely complex clock.

When looking at what is currently known about how the brain works, however, the evidence seems to be overwhelming that consciousness is largely a process.

Source:

Cryonics: Freezing for the future? The BBC, July 18, 2002.

Could Stem Cell Transplants Extend Human Life?

Researchers at the University of Kentucky report an intriguing finding in mice that one day might offer a way to extend human life spans.

The researchers examined bone marrow stem cells from several different strains of genetically modified mice. The researchers bred the mice, examining which mice had bone marrow stem cells that were the best at resisting cell damage. In this way they were able to identify that part of the mouse genome responsible for the strongest stem cells.

That turned out to be a specific gene on a chromose that had previously been lnked to longevity in mice.

The next step for the researchers will be to create genetically modified strains of mice that have extremely strong stem cells in order to see if it increases their longevity. Researcher Gary van Zant told the BBC, “We hope to show that by making stem cells more hardy we can extend the life span (of mice).”

If they do indeed find further evidence for a connection between strong stem cells and longevity, then this finding might have applications in extending human life span.

Source:

Cell transplants ‘could lengthen lives’. The BBC, July 19, 2002.