Moonbats (and non-moonbats) often accuse me of being a “right-winger” and a “conservative.” I guess that’s because I don’t think that George Bush is Hitler reincarnated, and that removing dictators who support terrorism is a good thing. But if anyone really wants to know why I’m not a conservative, Will Saletan has an interesting example. So-called liberals are afraid of cloned animals and cloned food. Conservatives seem to look askance at cloned humans. I’ve got no problem with either.

…if it really works:

Associate Professor Michael King of the University of Rochester Biomedical Engineering Department has invented a de-vice that filters the blood for cancer and stem cells. When he captures cancer cells, he kills them. When he captures stem cells, he harvests them for later use in tissue engineering, bone marrow transplants, and other applications that treat human disease and improve health.

It’s not clear from the article how close it is to actual use on humans.

Less than four years away?

According to Joystick, Seagate boffins are apparently working on a hard-drive which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) techniques.

The boffins think that this will mean that they can shove 50TB of data into a single square inch of drive space, or around 300TB of information on a standard 3.5-inch drive.

This means that you can stuff the entire Library of Congress onto your hard-drive without any compression.

Man, that will hold a lot of 3D holographic pr0n…

Of course, by then Vista 2010 will require 250 TB for a standard install…

David Brin has a long, but useful essay on the future of technology and humanity. I may have some thoughts later.

Lawrence Altman describes the tremendous advances in medicine that we’ve made in the last half century:

Few people appreciate that medicine has advanced more since World War II than in all of earlier history. Newer drugs and de-vices and better understanding of disease mechanisms have vastly improved the care of patients. For male babies born in this country in 1960, the life expectancy was 66.6 years; for female babies, it was 73.1 years. In 2004, the figures, respectively, were 75.2 and 80.4. Medical advances account for much, though not all, of the gain.

My father had his first coronary in 1968, at the age of 45. He had a second one a little over ten years later, and died at age 55. I’m now several years past the age at which he had his first, and approaching the point at which I’ll live longer than he did, partly due to massive changes in lifestyle (he smoked and was overweight, and grew up on a typical Jewish diet of that era), but also because we can now monitor such things, and keep control of blood pressure and cholesterol, and if I do have a coronary event, I’ll have a much better chance of rapid and useful care than he did in either case. I continue to hope that I’ll live to see actuarial escape velocity.

Even more interestingly (at least to me), he also writes about the hubris and unjustified arrogance of the medical profession:

During my training, most professors said that all diseases were known. That hubris left doctors unprepared when AIDS came along in 1981 to cause one of history

This is timely. I’ve been planning to do some system upgrades, but haven’t been paying that much attention to the last couple generations of processors. Here’s a nice overview of the situation and a buyers’ guide.

I remember when this issue of Popular Electronics came in the mail. I wanted one, but couldn’t afford it at the time (or at least, I couldn’t justify spending the money on what was essentially a toy). As this article notes, it first became publicly available thirty-two years ago today.

I’m sure that Bush and Rove will get the blame for this any minute now.

For some 20 million years, the baiji, also called the white-flag dolphin, frequented the Yangtze

I haven’t had the time to read through this whole thing (we’re moving foliage into the house and decorating it, to the annual consternation of the cat), but I think it’s worth a read. The Singularity continues to approach, and by definition, we are not prepared.

Phase-change memory:

Scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda said they developed a material that made “phase-change” memory 500 to 1,000 times faster than the commonly-used “flash” memory, while using half as much power.

“You can do a lot of things with this phase-change memory that you can’t do with flash,” IBM senior manager of nanoscale science Spike Narayan told AFP.

“You can replace disks, do instant-on computers, or carry your own fancy computer application in your hand. It would complement smaller technology if manufacturers wanted to conjure things up.”

The day’s not far off that you’ll be able to carry an unimaginable amount of knowledge around in your pocket.