Core Dump

Antibiotic use in China is more widespread than almost anywhere else in the world, and it's resulting in strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It may result in exports that we don't want.

Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.

"We have a lot of data from Chinese hospitals and it shows a very frightening picture of high-level antibiotic resistance," said Dr Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.

"Doctors are daily finding there is nothing they can do, even third and fourth-line antibiotics are not working.

"There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

When I was a kid, I was seriously interested in science, and I had a chemistry kit. I don't remember doing anything really remarkable or dangerous with it, but it was neat to mix up various chemicals and observe the results. My lab was the laundry room, because we didn't have a basement bathroom at the time, and the laundry tubs were pretty much impervious to anything I could concoct.

Chemistry kits have been pretty much emasculated by regulators, liablity laws, and the nanny state. But with a bit of work and not a lot of expense, you can put together a home lab that will let you do real science. The folks at O'Reilly and Make Magazine have started a Home Scientist channel on YouTube, featuring author Robert Bruce Thompson doing a series of videos explaining how do some fairly advanced experiments.

For example, he shows you how to test paint for lead, test for fingerprints, and how to synthesize your own basic chemicals and test their purity. This is real science here, at least at the level of an academic high-school course, but very clearly explained and demonstrated. I wish I had access to videos like this when I was taking chemistry courses - it would have helped a lot.

Labels: science, video

Saturday's Globe and Mail had a long article about the Tea Party, the US populist fringe party that's holding its convention in Nashville this weekend. It's making mainstream US politician's quite nervous.

Though their gripes are not always coherent – they're against Mr. Obama's “government-run” health-care proposal, but cling to publicly funded Medicare for seniors – the Tea Partiers are promising to shake up U.S. politics in ways that leave almost no elected official safe. Indeed, often dismissed by liberal foes as Republican-financed “Astroturf” – or fake grassroots – the hundreds of Tea Partiers gathered here seem as mad, if not madder, at the GOP.

They intend to stay angry – at least for the election cycle that culminates with this fall's midterm elections. The Tea Partiers' strong anti-incumbency inclination means that dozens of senators, congressman, governors and judges from both sides of the aisle are facing the toughest re-election battles of their careers.

The Globe article manages to gloss over the extremist side of this movement. For more on that, see this post and this one.

Labels: politics

According to research conducted in 2008, the Arctic sea ice is melting faster than projections and threatens the Arctic's ecosystem.

The melting ice poses different threats. Barber said the ice is full of toxic contaminants, which are released back into the environment when the ice melts. Wildlife in the Arctic is negatively impacted by the loss of ice and degraded habitat. Animals that live in the Arctic will also experience more competition for resources as species move north. And finally, the melting ice contributes to global warming, and while there was no prediction made as to when we might expect the Arctic to be mostly melted, the impacts will be apparent in the world long before most of the ice is lost. Barber said the warming of the Arctic influenced the jet stream, which then causes warm air to move further north.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

Featured links for the week of February 1, 2010

• Interview with Bruce Sterling, SF author and futurist

• Use Google Map Buddy to get full-page, hi-res maps from Google Maps

• A short video with some good Google Reader tips

• University students failing because of poor grammar

Labels: Core Dump

Here's John Scalzi's take on why publishers and publishing won't go away any time soon. It's a satirical, funny, and short three-act play.

CHARACTERS:

ELTON P. STRAÜMANN, a modern-thinking man with exciting ideas
JOHN SCALZI, a humble writer
KRISTINE SCALZI, the wife of a humble writer

ACT I

SCENE OPENS ON STRAÜMANN and SCALZI, standing.

STRAÜMANN: The publishing world is changing! In the future, authors will no longer need those fat cat middle men known as “publishers” to get in the way of their art! It will just be the author and his audience!

SCALZI: Won’t I need an editor? Or a copy editor? Or a cover artist? Or a book designer? Or a publicist? Or someone to print the book and get it into stores?

STRAÜMANN (waves hand, testily): Yes, yes. But all those things you can do yourself.

SCALZI: And I’m supposed to write the book, too?

STRAÜMANN (snorts): As if writing was hard. Now go! And write your novel!

Labels: books, funny

It's been a while since I've looked at the latest developments in web standards, so I can't really say much about why HTML 5 has been creating a lot of buzz recently. But most of it seems to be about video, with sites like YouTube using HTML 5 instead of Flash to display video. The folks at Gizmodo have taken a close look at HTML 5 and hae written a long detailed article about the effect that its about to have on the Internet. If you're working with any form of web technology, you should probably read this.

Here's what's really going on. HTML 5 is already working its way into the underpinnings of web apps you use every day, making them faster and more stable than those relying on Java or other plugins. They're more like real apps. It's helping us inch closer to the dream of having real applications available at all times, on any platform.

HTML is also setting forth a vision of media—specifically video—that doesn't rely on crashy, resource-intensive proprietary plugins. Look in your plugins folder, you will probably see four video plugins at a minimum. HTML is a standard with an optimistic view of the future: You launch your browser, and whatever site you visit, whatever media you choose to play, your browser just magically supports it, without the frustration, confusion and added instability of a plug-in.

But at heart HTML is just a framework, a glimpse, and an ideal: Its real effect on the internet continues to be defined by the companies and web developers who choose to adopt its many pieces—and it is further shaped by those who don't.

Labels: Internet

It looks like the third attempt to film Frank Herbert's Dune is still in production, albeit with a new director, Pierre Morel. He claims to want to make a movie that's closer to Herbert's original vision, which would be just fine with me.

"Everybody now who reads Dune reads it with David Lynch's images in mind," he said. "So we have to get away from that. It's not a remake of David Lynch's movie. We're doing a re-reading, a brand new approach on the book, a very true approach to the book, the original material. So we will have to deal with trying to erase the image that David Lynch did so we can propose our image.".

Labels: movies and television, SF

Here's an article from The ContentWrangler on how traditional (that is, book) publishers can use XML to modernize their processes and help them use their books' content in new ways. From what I've garnered reading authors' blogs, book publishers are still using practices that were modern in the 19th century (some are still accepting manuscripts only on paper), so this article may be a bit optimistic. The publisher cited as the main example, John Wiley, who most readers of this blog will know from their technical and programming books is way ahead of the curve.

It’s time for traditional publishers to follow suit − with a content-centered XML-first publishing approach. Getting there is not the difficult or disruptive process that many publishing executives have assumed. For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word. (XML is an open content standard that drastically reduces the effort required of publishing houses to create eBooks — and every other type of content. XML is designed to help publishers break the dependency of content on proprietary formats and specific devices. XML content can be easily repurposed, reused, shared, sorted, aggregated with other content, and automatically processed, published, and delivered, often on-demand.)

Labels: books, XML

Locus, the monthly newsmagazine of the SF field, has published its recommended reading list for 2009. It's a pretty compreshensive list covering SF and fantasy novels, YA books, anthologies, collection, art books, and short fiction.

I note that both Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock and Karl Schroeders The Sunless Countries made the best novel list.

Labels: SF

DocFetcher is a small, free file search utility that searches both for filenames and for content inside your files. If you have privacy concerns about Google Desktop or want something with less overhead, then this might be worth a look. LifeHacker has a short review.

Labels: software

After the Deadline is a Firefox add-in that checks your spelling and grammar in Firefox. If you do a lot of commenting or writing blog posts, this might be worth looking at as it is more customizable and has more features than Firefox's built-in spell checker.

Labels: software