Archive: March 09, 2004
Fat's Full of True Stem Cells
Cells from human fat have proven to be true adult stem cells, promising a readily available source for treating disease.
It was once thought that adult stem cells, unlike their embryo counterparts, were extremely limited in their regenerative abilities.
In the past few years, however, evidence has been gathering that adult stem cells are far more versatile than previously thought.
"These results suggest that these cells are truly stem cells that could provide a source of undifferentiated cells for multiples uses," says Lott. "We're still a long way from using these cells as therapies in humans, but we're excited about the progress we've made so far."
Killing babies isn't the only way to get stem cells. It's always disturbed me how quick the scientific community was to argue that they needed to harvest stem cells from embryos, even though even I knew that there are alternate sources... such as the placenta, the umbilical cord, and as this article shows, we're increasingly finding other sources. It probably is easier for the time being to "grow" humans to harvest their flesh... but it's morally repugnant.
An anecdote, before I go eat ice cream: I saw a show once about a woman who had like a 300 pound tumor growing in her. She had some phobia where she was afraid of the outside world, and then once she got the tumor that didn't help with that at all, so she never sought help. It was the world's largest recorded tumor, and they were able to get it out in one piece. It turned out to have been benign (which was good for the lady), but when they cut it open to examine it there were all kinds of weird things inside it, like teeth and hair. That would seem to indicate that there was some stem cell specialization going on inside the tumor.
This post at InstaPundit is a must-read. He links to this NY Post editorial about how the complaints against Bush using the most innocuous clips of 9/11 in his campaign ads have been completely manufactured. Rush was the first person I heard to point this out, many days ago. The NY Post article didn't mention, however, that the head of the Firefighter's group that has been complaining is an ardent Kerry supporter, and AFAIK has even appeared with him on the campaign trail.
Glenn has lots more, so go ye and read of it.
I'm normalizing some database tables more than I was hoping to get away with. I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids... er, if I didn't need the ability to rename what I was planning to make a key.
Because MySQL doesn't support subqueries (if there was ever a case of worse-is-better, it's PHP and MySQL), the following very simple query:
UPDATE Bookmark_Keywords SET Bookmark_Keyword_Id = (
SELECT Bookmark_Keyword_Id
FROM Bookmark_Keyword_Info
WHERE Bookmark_Keyword_Name = Bookmark_Keyword
)
is going to require that I write procedural code to update the table. Bust.
Update: For future reference, here's the code I had to write:
<?php
$sql = 'SELECT DISTINCT Bookmark_Keyword_Info.Bookmark_Keyword_Id id, Bookmark_Keyword_Name name
FROM Bookmark_Keyword_Info
INNER JOIN Bookmark_Keywords ON(Bookmark_Keyword_Name = Bookmark_Keyword)
ORDER BY Bookmark_Keyword_Name'; //reformatted to fit layout
$rs_id = mysql_query($sql, $conn) or die("Couldn't select your keywords: ".mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($rs_id)){
$sql = "UPDATE Bookmark_Keywords
SET Bookmark_Keyword_Id = $row[id]
WHERE Bookmark_Keyword = '$row[name]'"; // reformatted to fit layout
print_r($row);
echo '<br> ';
print_r($sql);
mysql_query($sql, $conn) or die("Couldn't update your table: ".mysql_error());
echo '<br>';
}
?>
Any formatting in there (print_r, echo), etc., was for me to see that the right thing was going to happen before I uncommented the mysql_query line. And of course, this is just "one-off" code... for instance, I didn't addslashes() on $row[name] because I knew none of my names had slashes or quotes in them.
I have to get this shirt and wear it when I'm with my brother.
My friend Mark recommended this shirt for me. T-shirt hell has lots of other unique t-shirts.
MozillaZine has info on International Domain Names. I'm interested in learning how they work. Here's a page on the standards involved, including a list of relevant RFCs, and here's a list of "technical documents".
What's interesting is the following:
Encoding Scheme
The encoding scheme for IDNs will be an ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) that will encode the local language characters of an IDN into ASCII characters such that DNS can accurately answer a request for an address record. There are several types of ACE. In order to select an ACE as the standard, IETF must consider the difficult balance between compression and implementation. The preferred ACE will allow the greatest number of characters (code points) to be represented and will not be difficult to deploy. The IETF has chosen an ACE known as Punycode to be the standard.
So it seems they aren't using UTF-8?? Here's the RFC for Punycode. One of the most obvious questions I can think of is "How does Punycode compare to UTF-16 and UTF-8?", yet they don't answer that in any of their FAQs.
OK, after reading a little of the RFC for Punycode:
Punycode is a simple and efficient transfer encoding syntax designed
for use with Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA).
It uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII
string. ASCII characters in the Unicode string are represented
literally, and non-ASCII characters are represented by ASCII
characters that are allowed in host name labels (letters, digits, and
hyphens). This document defines a general algorithm called
Bootstring that allows a string of basic code points to uniquely
represent any string of code points drawn from a larger set.
Punycode is an instance of Bootstring that uses particular parameter
values specified by this document, appropriate for IDNA.
So, Punycode seems to be sort of a BASE64 encoding meant for Unicode strings that decomposes them into ASCII characters. It appears that the canonical form of an internationalized domain name will be in Punycode, so now my only question is how those are distinguished from ordinary domain names (how are the namespaces separate?)
Well, here are some datasheets and whitepapers. I'll have to figure out the rest later.
I hadn't gotten to read any of the provisional Iraqi constitution yet until Josh Claybourn pasted some of it into his blog. Sounds good. Steven Den Beste has some more info. It seems the Iraqi constitution compares favorably in at least a few ways with the EU constitution.
Some Implications of Software Commodification [to read] Via Slashdot.
I've long wondered what effect, for example, OS dominance of Linux would have on the economy. On the one hand, Microsoft would be severely hurt, and they provide lots of jobs and other stimulus to the economy. On the other hand, Microsoft's OS is essentially a tax on every business in the country, and if free software were to replace Microsoft's, the cost of doing business gets cheaper for everybody.
So which, on the whole, would be better for the economy? It seems that there are too many variables in play to know for sure. I'm hoping this article has some insight to offer.
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Tuesday, March 9, 2004
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Keith: Jul 4, 11:32am