And I thought Terry Pratchett was pushing the limits with dragons...

Thank you. With a truly desperatly bad week - you have made me chuckle.

I believe the cat is, even now, synthesising these chemicals in her secret laboratory beneath Her cat litter. She will dominate the northern hemisphere with Her weapons of pungent destruction soon.

Edited by author 08-03-2004 04:17 PM
 Re: Ignition!

 I read this book thirty years ago, in a library where there were armed guards on the doors and high-energy chemists were in the business of providing the fuses for much more energetic devices. Alas I couldn't take it home with me so I was stuck reading it in half-hour chunks over lunchtime. Absolutely hilarious.

I want to nobble the Apogee Books folks at the worldcon and see if they're interested in it. While I'm at it I suppose I should pitch "The man in the hot seat" at them, too ... (the autobiography of Doddy Haye, Martin-Baker's test pilot, er, monkey, er, kamikaze, er, what do you call someone who test-flies ejector seats?)

Edited by author 08-05-2004 09:03 AM
A Morte-sedianaught? (Sketchy on the latin, but I think it might be close [and I may be mixing greek, with the 'naught' bit).

IgnitionExclamationPoint is one of my favorite books. I fear I may have inadvertently driven its price up by singing its praises on the Net for many years. Still haven't found a used copy of the hardcover at a reasonable price, but Henry Spencer did, so he kindly gave me the photocopy he used to have. And there are libraries.

Would love to see it in print again. Getting the Apogee folks interested is a good idea.

Did you know that Clark sold a few SF stories, co-authored a famous essay about Conan the Barbarian, and roomed with L. Sprague de Camp at college?

Edited by author 08-18-2004 06:59 PM
Hi Charlie,

In the abstract, I view the message of this article (see link below) as BS.

<http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040813-030557-8146r>;

I have read many versions of this crap for years. Technology tends to reinvent itself regularly, if not predictably. (It is true however that those jobs that can be easily specified and can therefore follow a script will move to Asia.)

That said, I am interested to learn your thoughts on this admittedly large topic. Does a new wave of innovation or creativity lurk somewhere over the horizon...?

I realize you likely scramble as you prepare for your extended visit to the States.

Travel well, travel safe,
David

Biotech is interesting but the regulatory regimes in the US, UK, and rest of the developed world basically stifles innovation -- it costs roughly US $400M to bring a new drug to market, for example, almost all of which is wasted on meeting bureaucratic testing targets rather than going on actual useful trials to determine whether it meets the criteria of efficacy and safety, and to determine the actual side effects. (For example, until relatively recently there was no requirement that medicines be tested on children, the elderly, or women -- as distinct from the usual clinical trials subjects: healthy males aged 21-40. So a lot of our current pharmacopoeia has only been tested on a group that makes up 10% of the population, but will be prescribed across the board for all of us.)

Having said that:

Back in 1986 or thereabouts, Eric Drexler published a set of time-lines for molecular nanotechnology -- an optimistic one, a pessimistic one, and what he deemed a "realistic" middle path. As of 2002, we were slap-bang in the middle of the middle path. The one that leads to assemblers around the 2018-2022 time frame ...

And lest you say that's got no relevance to biotech, let me add that we have an existence proof for nanoassemblers. They're called ribosomes. And one side-effect of the genome and proteome projects is that we're learning how they're programmed and how to make things with them.

Food for thought, there.

Is this a glimmer of the plugged-in future I see on the horizon?

From Briefing.com:

Cyberkinetics/CYKN, a bulletin board stock, is up 80% today after being profiled on CNBC this morning:

The company's BrainGate System is a device that allows people to control computers entirely by their thoughts. The implanted sensor is about the size of a baby aspirin and contains 100 electrode probes thinner than a human hair. Implanted in part of the brain responsible for movement, the probes detect the electrical activity of brain cells. BrainGate has allowed a 24 year-old quadriplegic man to check email and play videogames using his thoughts. The system is in an ongoing pilot study under an Investigational Device Exemption from FDA. These initial clinical results were presented on Oct 8 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

BTW, CYKN has little financials to speak of, as it's a development stage company. However, the stock has jumped to over $7 from $1 when the Oct 8 data was presented.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anyone have any thoughts or comments?
David

This is the beginning of profitability for this great startup company. The HUD designation allows a quick side step to the FDA burden to allow this company to begin to help people with spinal cord trama. Buy while you can!