links for 2008-​​08-​​31

  • “They cre­ated the tis­sue by coat­ing a three-​​dimensional poly­mer scaf­fold with a gene deliv­ery vehi­cle that encodes a tran­scrip­tion fac­tor known as Runx2. They gen­er­ated a high con­cen­tra­tion of Runx2 at one end of the scaf­fold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no tran­scrip­tion fac­tor on the other end, result­ing in a pre­cisely con­trolled spa­tial gra­di­ent of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibrob­lasts uni­formly onto the scaf­fold. The skin cells on the parts of the scaf­fold con­tain­ing a high con­cen­tra­tion of Runx2 turned into bone, while the skin cells on the scaf­fold end with no Runx2 turned into soft tis­sue. The result is an arti­fi­cial bone that grad­u­ally turns into soft tis­sue, such as ten­dons or ligaments.”
  • “This con­ser­v­a­tive myopia dates back to Pres­i­dent Rea­gan, who gut­ted Jimmy Carter’s multibillion-​​dollar research and devel­op­ment bud­get for renew­ables, and ended the tax cred­its for wind and solar. The sad result is our coun­try is now a bit player in what will prob­a­bly be one of the biggest job-​​creating indus­tries of the cen­tury, an indus­try we launched. We had 90 per­cent of global-​​installed wind capac­ity in the 1980s. Today we have one major wind man­u­fac­turer, Gen­eral Elec­tric, with about one-​​sixth of the market.

    Clean energy shouldn’t be a par­ti­san issue. But it is. And that means those who who want this coun­try to be a leader in clean energy — those who want to avoid cat­a­strophic global warm­ing and avoid the worst of peak oil — need to start becom­ing sin­gle issue voters.”

links for 2008-​​08-​​30

links for 2008-​​08-​​29

GoPlan is upgefuckt

Laura Fisher plurked the mys­te­ri­ous phrase “mit­ten is vaguery” ear­lier this evening. Turns out that in the con­text of the GoPlan project man­age­ment site… she’s right.

Seems like some kind of deep but odd data­base cor­rup­tion has crept in at GoPlan. When­ever a hyper­link to Laura’s account appears on our project site, my name appears; when a link to me appears, her name shows up. Click “Laura Fisher” and you’ll be email­ing me, for exam­ple; I edit some­thing and the RSS feed records her as doing it.

She’s nowhere near as wordy or bossy as I am, so this is clearly a mistake.

Update: Tiago Macedo from GoPlan sup­port responds by point­ing out that Laura’s account record has my name in it, and my account record has her name in it, so ‘if you change your name every­thing will be “as expected”.’

And the big ques­tion right here is: How did pri­vate, session-​​associated data get mixed up, and how often does that typ­i­cally hap­pen in a bug­less, secure, safe Web appli­ca­tion these days?

Scary. Very close to ask­ing for a refund on this one issue. WTF, WeBreak­Stuff?