SciTech Guy

I’ve been out of touch a bit… apologies for that.  The reason is that I’ve been concentrating on work and and on improving my fitness.  Both are doing great!

After trying many fad diets and unsuccesfully trying to work out on my own plan, a friend turned my into P90X.  This is all about busting you a$$ working out and keeping a good diet.  No tricks!  well, guess what? it works!  I started doing P90X and related workouts and have lost over 38 pounds so far.  If you want to follow my progress and find out how I did it, go to http://coachbioart.com

I’m still planning on keeping this page active, so check back in every now and then!

-bioart

Posting at totonko.com describes the development of semi-transparent concrete.

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They claim 30% lighter than concrete, but lets through ~80% of the light… very cool.

The New York Times has an article on eating less to live longer. Pretty interesting stuff, nothing new.  What drew me to it, was the graphic that came with it:

Pretty cool results, no? Monkey eats less, ages better.  Nice… too bad that he was probably cranky and hungry most of the time.

My complaint with this story is about the proposed human equivalents.  They suggest a vegetarian only diet is good for you while the one with meat and normal food will kill you early.   THIS IS NOT WHAT THE STUDY SHOWED!  Both monkeys had the same type of food, just different quantities.  Based on these results you could still eat 1/2 the hamburgers or 1/2 of anything else on the right side and get the same results.  It’s ok to have an agenda, but don’t be so blatant… oh wait, it’s the NY Times, nevermind

Webdesigner Depot has a pretty comprehensive look at screenshots from games 1990-present.  It is a pretty impresive collection, that really shows an evolution in graphics from color sprites to very realistic environments and characters.  However, the collection is missing the earlier evolution that went from Pong-like games (and the earlier text games, but that doesn’t count unless you argue that bold is a computer graphic, since it emphasizes a story).  Going from Pong to the Atari 2600 was a revolution… going from that to NES was another giant step and so on…

It is pretty clear that Moore’s law can also be applied to computer graphics, though this may be cheating given that graphics depend on processing power… That being said, the drive for better graphics in video games is one of the bigger drives for greater processing power.  In other words, it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem (though both of them can now be rendered in great detail!).

Graphics aren’t everything (old games have a lot of charm and great entertainment value), but as long as they help tell a story and inmerse us into a universe, the better they are, the better our experience will be.  The more believeable the world is, the more we will be willing to suspend our beliefs and just give in (assuming we can get out and face reality at least in small doses).  The is still a need for gameplay, and that has to be more important than the graphics, otherwise you are just left watching a movie.

Wired has a list of 10 amazing science videos.  They cover a wide range of topics, but some of them are very cool.  I especially like the monkey using the mechanical arm and the neutrophil chasing an intruder…

<rant on>

Ok, I’m sick and tired of hearing this, and it is getting worse during the election cycle…

Everyone is comparing drug companies to oil companies.  They are both evil (according to them)

I have to ask… are they really that stupid?

I’m not going to into the goodness or evilness of the oil companies, but I take offense to the tar-and-feathering of drug companies.  As you know, I work in the industry, but this is not about me and my current or future income potential.  This is about common sense.

Drug companies make money, because they sell drugs that people need (or want).  Imagine what life would be if there was no medicine.  Get an infection and die, Get high blood pressure and die of a heart attack, Get cancer and surely die (as opposed to hopefully recover, or at least live longer)… I could go on, but you get the point.  Sure, there are drugs that won’t treat a life-threatening situation (Viagra/etc), but they improve quality of life. (In the case of Viagra, in some cases, it may improve the quality of life of two people, although I guess it could have an inverse effect on the partner .

Now, if you must know, we are not that smart.  Drug discovery is hard, really hard.  It takes a long time to develop a drug and most fail.  Sometimes they fail because the don’t work, but many times they fail because of unexpected side effects/etc.  Clinical trials are long.  Competition is tough.  Research is expensive.

If a company had 100% success rate on drug development, it could be fair to ask them to limit their profit to a certain percent over cost.  The problem is that for every program that makes it into a drug, 100 fail.  Who’s going to pay for that?

Sure, drug companies make money, but most of them they reinvest a significant portion of their profits back into R&D.

Do those people vilifying the drug companies really think that we have all the drugs we need? is it acceptable to let people suffer and die just because we don’t want to spend money on research that may go nowhere?

Keep in mind, most drugs on the market have been found by sheer and dumb luck.  Someone noticed an effect of interest in nature or in a high throughput screen and then kept asking more and more questions about how the compound behaved and how safe it was.  Along the way, compounds are dropped because of various reasons.  Furthermore, positive results in a study are no guarantee of future success.  Remember, every cancer drug that has failed in clinical trials, cured cancer in an animal model.  In other words, there are no certainties in drug discovery, and someone needs to pay for the work.

<rant off>

Whew… it’s been a while. Sorry, life happens…

I have a few interesting posts cooking, so please stay tuned.  In the meantime, check out my latest del.icio.us bookmarks on the sidebar. I think this is much less intrusive.  Courtesy of the del.icio.us plugin for wordpress…

So the experiment is over (for now)… del.icio.us has a tool that will let you post your bookmarks directly to the blog.  In theory, this is a good idea, but I don’t like how it is implemented and how it looks.  The links will probably come back as a side bar, but for now the daily post with the links is gone.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

• Histo-Scientific Research Laboratories
  (tags: cro)

• MetaMouse – AntiCancer
  (tags: cro)
• Usability Testing With 5 Users (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Interesting analysis of how many users are needed to cover usability issues in design
  (tags: usability testing development software)