“The One” I refer to as “Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH, PUNK” (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein Obambi” Obama - Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters, Previously Unaccomplished Nonsupporter of Kin) finally has a song befitting his self-grandiosity.

Now THIS is entertainment:

From Los Angeles: (video here):

UCLA mathematicians appear to have won a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a 13-million-digit prime number that has long been sought by computer users.

While the prize money is nothing special, the bragging rights for discovering the 46th known Mersenne prime are huge.

“We’re delighted,” said UCLA’s Edson Smith, leader of the effort. “Now we’re looking for the next one, despite the odds,” which are thought to be about one in 150,000 that any number tested will be a Mersenne prime.

Prime numbers are those, like three, seven and 11, that are divisible only by themselves and one. Mersenne primes, named after the 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who discovered them, take the form 2P - 1, where P is also a prime number.

In the new UCLA prime, P = 43,112,609.

Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the complex and tedious calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes. The prize is being offered for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits.

Smith and his UCLA colleagues have, since last fall, harnessed the power of the 75 machines in the university’s Program in Computing/Math Computer Lab, which is used by students for computer projects. Smith, a system administrator, realized that the lab was using only a fraction of its available CPU power. Rather than let it go to waste, he and his colleagues decided to use it for the GIMPS project. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

From the company’s home page, this is a Positivity Post because there are video demos at the site show that the technology works:

Memjet technology is a patented breakthrough in print engine components that delivers the benefits of ink and laser technologies at radically new price/performance levels. Memjet technology is comprised of four tightly integrated components: page-width printheads, driver chips, ink and software. Printheads are comprised of individual microchip segments, joined together into page-width printing systems with 70,400 nozzles in a standard A4/letter printer, delivering color page-width printing at 60 pages per minute. The printheads and driver chips can scale from 20mm to large format sizes, enabling printing in virtually any width. Customized water-based inks ensure great print quality whether printing photos, office documents or industrial labels.

You must see at least one of the video demos available at the site. Some of them are:

• Photo retail — shows 4×6 photos printing in 1-2 seconds.
• Wide-format — a 1600 dpi banner at least four feet wide is produced at a rate of 12 inches per second.
• Home and office — full-color documents at 60 pages per minute.

As we head towards Christmas, don’t forget that Christmas 1944 was dominated by news of the Battle of the Bulge. Imagine if we had second-guessing like this during that time. Yes, in hindsight we weren’t very smart. But someone, who should have been Time’s Man of the Year, figured it out, and was heeded. I’d say the glass is mostly full, not partially empty.

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Underappreciated tech development of the year — Inkjet all-in-one units (print-copy-scan) are virtually the same price as inkjets that only print. Standalone printers may become obsolete very soon. Of course, the need to print may be obsolete sooner than we think.

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There’s a really bizarre thing in this article about payday lending:

Critics liken payday lending to legalized loan sharking, and many at the hearing wore badges with a shark biting large wads of cash. Supporters sported yellow “I support payday lending” stickers; a group of about a dozen - many of whom were payday lender employees - approached during a break declined to comment.

“I love payday lending” stickers? What, no room for pom-poms? I’d decline to comment too if I was wearing something that dumb.

I also note that this guy wasn’t around.

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Does anyone remember “The Angela Merkel I Know” web site? Who thinks that Mrs. Thatcher would ever have set up a “The Maggie I Know” site? Then why is there a need for The Hillary I Know? (no, I’m not linking)

Can there be anything more trivial? Oh yeah, news coverage that takes it seriously.

Update: Owe, Brother. Cries of foul are totally empty, given this.

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Cynthia McKinney has declared for the Presidency. I can see her peeling off a couple of points in certain states, and possibly having an impact (thank you, Ralph Nader, for Florida 2000). The dream ticket: Two Cindys, with Mama Moonbat Cindy Sheehan as Veep.

From the Plain Dealer’s blog, by David Briggs:

New Cleveland imam quits before he starts

Imam Ahmed Alzaree announced Monday, three days before he was to start work as the spiritual leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, that he was resigning.

Alzaree said allegations by bloggers that he was anti-Semitic and was associated with individuals suspected of having terrorist ties so poisoned the atmosphere in Northeast Ohio that he and his wife, Marwa, decided to look elsewhere.

“Cleveland now is a nightmare for her,” Alzaree said. “It will never be a good start for me and the Jewish community.

The mosque has accepted Alzaree’s resignation, Zahid Siddiqi, general secretary of the mosque’s executive committee, said Monday afternoon.

“We certainly don’t want to impose on him and his family,” Siddiqi said.

Alzaree is the former spiritual leader of the Islamic Center of Omaha.

Well, well.

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UPDATES (exclusively at BizzyBlog):

Update 1: Don’t miss Patrick Poole’s post-departum on Alzaree. And this should have been said hours ago — intense appreciation is owed to Patrick for his lion’s share of the research.

Update 2: Briggs posted a much longer piece just after 5PM, apparently for the Metro section.

Update 2A: Here are the final five paragraphs from Briggs’s update:

As of Thursday afternoon, Alzaree had been planning to come to Cleveland, vowing to make an extra effort to reach out to Jewish and Christian leaders.

But as Web sites such as Central Ohioans Against Terrorism and Jihad Watch continued to probe, using such terms as “two-faced jihadist,” Alzaree said he and his wife concluded they could never have a good beginning in Northeast Ohio.

“I leave the field” to the bloggers, he said Monday. “I have peace now.”

Alzaree said he will decide among a half-dozen other job offers.

The Parma mosque will resume its search for an imam, said Zuhair Hasan, the new mosque president.

Apparently curiosity is still in short supply at the Plain Dealer. You would think inquiring minds would want to know what happened to extensively-quoted and now-former mosque president Dr. Jalal Abu-Shaweesh in the past few days. Abu-Shaweesh took over the mosque’s presidency in late 2005, and was interviewed in the December edition of the Cleveland Muslim (go to page 3 at the link). 22-23 months doesn’t seem like a normal presidential term (/understatement).

Update 3: Others taking note — LGF, RAB, WOIO, The C-Square.

Update 4, Oct. 30: Still others — Right Wing Rebel, Eye on the World (”A good Muslim can’t even call for the death of the Jews? Oh, the humanity!”), zTruth (”What would he have been teaching? I think you know the answer.”), Jawa Report, Interested-Participant, The Path.

Update 5, Oct. 30, 1PM (this item is also noted at Wide Open and NewsBusters): Oh for cryin’ out loud, the Associated Press has found a way to simultaneously hit rock bottom and continue digging — “Blog critics force imam to resign at Ohio mosque.” And it’s all over the place — Ohio.com, MSNBC, JPost, IHT, with surely others to come.

Two words for AP: As if.

Update 6, Nov. 1: The UK Times Online’s Faith Central has a short post.

Update 7, Nov. 20: Andrew Bostom of the New English Review, and whose articles on Islam and jihad have appeared in Frontpage Magazine and The American Thinker, has this to say about Damra, Alzaree, and the Hadith:

And just this past October 30, 2007 it was announced that Imam Ahmed Alzaree—the first permanent successor to Damra—resigned as the new “spiritual leader” of the Islamic Center of Cleveland three days prior to officially beginning the job. Alzaree, who at one stage of the vetting process expressed the unusual reservation that “he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background,” ostensibly accepted the position as noted on October 26, 2007, then pre-emptively resigned a few days later, after the contents of “khutbahs ” (sermons) he had delivered on March 7, 2003, were revealed.

Alzaree’s March, 2003 sermons are in fact far worse than has been portrayed by the Cleveland media. One assumes that either they have not been read at all, or at best only perused, and those reading these sermons, by and large, have no idea about the virulently Antisemitic motifs in the Koran and hadith (i.e., the words, deeds, and even physical gestures of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters). Moreover, these sermons were also virulently Christianophobic, invoking combined anti-Christian/Jew-hating motifs from the Koran (for example, Koran 4:157-159), as well as anti-Christian eschatology (linked explicitly to Jew-hating eschatology) from the hadith, particularly with regard to “Jesus,” or to be precise, the Muslim simulacrum of Jesus, “Isa,” as characterized in Islam’s foundational texts. Alzaree simply recounts Islamic doctrine (as per the Koran and hadith) regarding “Isa”—the Muslim Jesus—which emphasizes the Jews overall perfidy, especially their gloating (but unknowingly “false”) claim to have killed Isa.According to this sacralized Islamic narrative, Isa is merely a Muslim prophet whose ultimate “job description” includes the destruction of Christianity. Thus Alzaree’s sermon invokes the canonical hadith that this Muslim Jesus—who was never crucified—the perfidious Jews prodding the Roman’s to kill Isa’s “body double”—will return as a full-throated Muslim to break the cross, kill the pig, and end the payment of the deliberately humiliating Koranic (9:29) poll-tax demanded of Christians (i.e., the jizya). This hadith states, “He [Isa] will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizya”—because Christians will be converted to Islam (and thus exempt from the jizya), or eliminated—“Allah will perish all religions except Islam.” Alzaree concluded the second sermon with an apocalyptic canonical hadith—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Charter (in article 7)—stating if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!

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Previous Posts:

• Sept. 25 — Meet the New Imam, Same as the Old Imam?
• Sept. 29 — Ahmed Alzaree Follow-up: Who WAS That Cleveland.com Blogger? (at the Plain Dealer’s Wide Open blog)
• Oct. 2 — COAT’s Imam Ahmed Alzaree Follow-up
• Oct. 25 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree and the Islamic Center of Cleveland Follow-up: Part 1
• Oct. 25 — Imam Ahmed Alzaree and the Islamic Center of Cleveland Follow-up: Part 2

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org and Wide Open.

Over 15 months after the initial wave of publicity, Joey Vento of Geno’s Steaks was going before the Thought Police, er, the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission. The hearing, Illegal Protest originally reported, was to be on Thursday, September 27th at 9am at the Philadelphia Free Library. But now it has been postponed. Illegal Protest thinks it’s because PHRC doesn’t think it has a case, and is dragging its feet. I hope IP is right.

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Nicholas Sarkozy is taking on the French welfare state. Update: That didn’t take long — the public-sector unions are calling for a national strike of rail and power workers.

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Mike Adams is keeping the heat on jihadist Kent State prof Julio Pino and the school’s Provost. As he should.

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Make Rooma for Ooma:

Ooma turns the traditional phone model on its ear. You shell out $399 ($599 starting in 2008) for a slick gray-and-white box that is smaller than a typical answering machine. This Ooma Hub connects to your high-speed broadband Internet service and whatever telephone handset you have lying around. From then on, all local and long-distance calls in the USA made through that phone are free. You can plug in additional handsets by buying optional $39.95 devices called Ooma Scouts. Scouts aren’t required for additional cordless handsets

This bears watching. It could be the death of the local phone company. My tear ducts are dry.

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Bill Kristol made a great point at the Weekly Standard yesterday (HT Taranto at Best of the Web) about Columbia University and its invitation to Mahmoud “Champion of the Dispossed” Ahmadinejad to speak while he is visiting the United States:

As Columbia welcomes Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia students who want to serve their country cannot enroll in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at Columbia. Columbia students who want to enroll in ROTC must travel to other universities to fulfill their obligations. ROTC has been banned from the Columbia campus since 1969. In 2003, a majority of polled Columbia students supported reinstating ROTC on campus. But in 2005, when the Columbia faculty senate debated the issue, President Bollinger joined the opponents in defeating the effort to invite ROTC back on campus.

Taranto’s follow-on is even better, noting that Columbia doesn’t want ROTC on campus because of the school’s “objection to the law, signed by President Clinton, that prohibits open homosexuals from serving in the military.” Meanwhile, the dictator in charge of a country that brazenly executes homosexuals is welcomed at Columbia with open arms.

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James Dobson won’t support Fred Thompson.

Mr. Dobson supported the carpetbagging, illegal-voting, Eritrea-lobbying, Amway/Quixtar-flogging, House Bank-overdrawing, still-in-office pretending, Elections Commission-reprimanded, resume-inflating (second item at link) Bob “H-S” McEwen for Congress in the Ohio’s Second District Special election in the Spring of 2005. Dobson even narrated a personal endorsement of McEwen in a radio ad. All of the items I have noted were not known at the time, but enough were that Mr. Dobson really should have known better.

Jim Dobson is by all reasonable accounts a fine man, but he has zero political instinct. Given Dobson’s recent track record, his non-endorsement is the last thing Fred Thompson needs to worry about.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to explain that “H-S” thing I just threw in.

It becomes more evident as time goes by that if a stem-cell development isn’t based on embryonic research, it probably won’t get the attention of the Formerly Mainstream Media.

The announcement early last week by Cellerant Therapeutics appears to involve a company more interested in advancing human health than in generating unsupported hype. Because it represents real progress, Cellerant’s announcement (of course) involves adult stem cells (link to dictionary definition of “hematopoietic” added by me):

April 23, 2007 10:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Cellerant Therapeutics Reversed Autoimmune Disease in Lupus Mice with Transplant of Purified Donor Blood Stem Cells

SAN CARLOS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cellerant Therapeutics today announced the publication of data suggesting that established autoimmune disease can be reversed or stabilized by the transplantation of purified allogeneic (donated) hematopoietic (blood forming) stem cells (HSC) in a mouse study of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). Subjects that underwent this procedure exhibited improved overall survival and decreased lupus symptoms. The research, led by Dr. Julie Christensen with colleagues from Cellerant and Stanford University, was published on April 13, 2007 as a First Edition Paper in the online version of the American Society of Hematology’s journal, BLOOD (Smith-Berdan et. al., DOI 10.1182/BLOOD-2007-03-081497).

“The demonstration of successful reversal of the disease using purified stem cells with non-myeloablative conditioning offers a novel strategy to treat autoimmune diseases such as lupus with decreased morbidity,” said Ramkumar Mandalam, Ph.D., Vice President of Pharmaceutical Operations. “This study also provides further support for our belief that purified stem cells may make it possible to use un-matched donors, such as a parent or non-identical sibling, for a variety of HSC treatment procedures.”

“The publication of this preclinical data further validate Cellerant’s unique use of pure hematopoietic stem cells for a wide range of therapeutic applications, including lupus and other autoimmune disorders, as well as for cancer and blood disorders,” commented Bruce Cohen, Cellerant’s President and CEO. “This finding is consistent with recent reports on successful use of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and merits evaluation of pure stem cells in treating such diseases.”

Cellerant researchers worked with specialized mice that are prone to an autoimmune condition that closely resembles human SLE. The study evaluated both non-ablative conditioning, which leaves the subject’s immune system intact, and fully myeloablative conditioning, which eradicates the subject’s immune system, prior to purified HSC treatment. Traditionally, full, and potentially lethal, myeloablative treatment was considered critical for engraftment success. The researchers found that non-ablative conditioning prior to HSC treatment was not only sufficient to ensure engraftment, but the procedure resulted in improved overall survival. The recipient subjects developed durable mixed chimerism, where the resulting immune system was a mixture of donor and recipient cells. Subjects with established autoimmune disease experienced a reversal of symptoms, including decreased appearance of proteinuria, of circulating immune complexes and of auto-antibodies to nuclear antigens.

The donors and recipients in this study were haplo-mismatched, yet successful engraftment was achieved and graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) was avoided. These results suggest that using a HCT treatment that has been purified of all or most host T cells and NK cells may eliminate the need for complete donor/patient stem cell matching. T-cells were not found to be necessary for engraftment in the procedures performed.

About HSC

Cellerant’s highly purified hematopoietic (blood-forming) adult stem cells are isolated from donors or patients undergoing stem cell transplants. This process is designed to provide an improved outcome when used for stem cell transplant indications where a high level of purity is desired or required. After purification, this material contains only stem and progenitor cells, with no detectable contaminating cells such as tumor cells or the T-cells which cause graft-versus-host disease in donor-to-patient transplants. Cellerant is developing hematopoietic stem cells for cancer, genetic blood disorders and autoimmune disease.

In August of last year, Advanced Cell Technology’s alleged embryonic stem-cell research breakthrough (that wasn’t one) that supposedly “did not harm embryos” received blanket Old Media coverage. Yet, despite real news to report, Old Media is paying no attention to Cellerant’s announcement. A few different placements of Cellerant’s press release from five days ago will be the only things you’ll see in a Google News search.

All of this could be viewed as just a PR war, but for one thing: Companies that get favorable press coverage will tend to be more successful in obtaining funding to continue their efforts. Advanced Cell, for example, was able to get over $13.5 million in additional private financing that was directly related to its “breakthrough” announcement. Post-hype objections usually don’t achieve the visibility of the original hype. Though the complaints about Advanced Cell’s claims got wider coverage than usual, that coverage was dwarfed by the saturation reporting on the company’s original announcement.

Since Cellerant is a private, venture-backed company, it’s not possible to quickly determine what kind of financial shape the company is in. But in general, to the extent that companies like Cellerant don’t get the funding that they need to continue their progress at the rate they would like because overhyped, no-results-to-date embryonic research companies and organizations are getting the attention and the capital, progress in fighting disease and advancing human health may be held back.

An exaggeration? Jennifer Clark of the Center for Arizona Policy summed up the current status of stem cell research very succinctly for Life News two weeks ago:

We know this much about embryonic stem cell research — besides the ethical concerns, not one human has received a successful treatment with them. People are being cured and treated every day with adult stem cells. It seems pretty obvious where the funding should go.

But it largely ISN’T where the funding, especially the public funding, is going.

Five or ten years from now, will we be asking ourselves how many lives that could have been saved or improved by adult and other non-embryonic stem cell research efforts were instead sacrificed because of money diverted to the black hole of embryonic stem cell research?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE, Apr. 28: The VentureBeat blog is reporting that Cellerant got $4.4 mil in second-round financing. That is good news, but note that it’s only 1/3 of what the hypesters at Advanced Cell received for accomplishing nothing of note.

I want this:

Researchers break Internet speed records
By Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press

NEW YORK — A group of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has broken Internet speed records — twice in two days.

Operators of the high-speed Internet2 network announced Tuesday that the researchers on Dec. 30 sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols. The next day, using modified protocols, the team broke the record again by sending data over the same 20,000-mile path at 9.08 Gbps.

That likely represents the current network’s final record because rules require a 10% improvement for recognition, a percentage that would bring the next record right at the Internet2’s current theoretical limit of 10 Gbps.

However, the Internet2 consortium is planning to build a new network with a capacity of 100 Gbps. With the 10-fold increase, a high-quality version of the movie The Matrix could be sent in a few seconds rather than half a minute over the current Internet2 and two days over a typical home broadband line.

Researchers used the newer Internet addressing system, called IPv6, to break the records in December. Data started in Tokyo and went to Chicago, Amsterdam and Seattle before returning to Tokyo. The previous high of 6.96 Gbps was set in November 2005.

As a non-techie, I wonder what keeps the speed through “the tubes” we use so much slower?

Dramatic, and of course, non-embryonic:

April 11, 2007

Diabetics cured by stem-cell treatment

Diabetics using stem-cell therapy have been able to stop taking insulin injections for the first time, after their bodies started to produce the hormone naturally again.

In a breakthrough trial, 15 young patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes were given drugs to suppress their immune systems followed by transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood.

The results show that insulin-dependent diabetics can be freed from reliance on needles by an injection of their own stem cells. The therapy could signal a revolution in the treatment of the condition, which affects more than 300,000 Britons.

People with type 1 diabetes have to give themselves regular injections to control blood-sugar levels, as their ability to create the hormone naturally is destroyed by an immune disorder.

All but two of the volunteers in the trial, details of which are published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), do not need daily insulin injections up to three years after stopping their treatment regimes.

From a subscription-only Wall Street Journal column by Scott McCartney (HT Dean at Hewitt):

WiFi in the Sky: Airlines Prepare Cabin Hotspots
BlackBerrying, Web Surfing Expected Aloft Within a Year;
Cellphone Service May Follow

After years of discussion and delay, U.S. airlines will start offering in-flight Internet connections, instant messaging and wireless email within 12 months, turning the cabin into a WiFi “hotspot.” Carriers are expected to start making announcements around the end of the summer, with service beginning early next year.

The bad news (for some):

The days when airplanes offer a hiatus from being connected to the office are numbered.

Intrusive bosses are in heaven.

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UPDATE: Per the FCC — WiFi yes, wireless phones no (phew).

I’m a sucker for a good list (plus, it’s Friday), and this one certainly is an interesting retrospective look at the neat tools that were, and in most cases still are, available to web users and developers.

The eWeek slide show from a couple of weeks ago goes through the 30 that Jim Rapoze thinks are the most important, but apparently in no particular order:

XML
HTML
Netscape Navigator
HTTP
Apache

NCSA Mosaic
CERN httpd
Internet Explorer 3
NCSA httpd
Firefox

SSL
ViolaWWW
WAIS
CGI
Internet Information Server

Squid
Java
HotMetal
Flash
PHP

Dreamweaver
RSS
WebTrends
Blogger
PlaceWare

Lynx
Perl
Opera
Eclipse
Spyglass

It is probably a sign of excess geekdom that I actually understand what about 2/3 of these things are (but I wallow in total ignorance about those “httpd” thingies). That isn’t to say I know diddly about how to use them, mind you.

The original obituary of Neild Oldham is in the New London Day, where it will only be accessible without a paid subscription for a short while. Fortunately, it is also available at the Some Things Considered blog. Don’t fail to read it.

Mr. Oldham’s name appears at three posts (here, here, and here) relating to what became known around here as Kelo Crunch Time, the period during mid-2006 when it appeared that the City of New London would exercise its newly-minted Supreme Court-granted power of eminent domain to evict and impose an onerous settlement on Susette Kelo and the remaining Fort Trumbull holdouts.

What Oldham did during Crunch Time may very well have been what forced New London’s recalcitrant City Council to negotiate with Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell after it had previously refused.

Council had voted to begin initiating the eviction process when Oldham and his Coalition to Save the Fort Trumbull Neighborhood, in a space of less than 2 weeks, gathered and submitted 586 signatures (over 200 more than needed) to call a voter referendum on whether the properties of the final holdouts should be taken. Though I doubt you’ll ever get them to admit it, I think it is very likely that because they knew that the petitions would be ruled valid, that the desired referendum would therefore be held, and that the city would almost certainly lose badly at the ballot box, Council decided to bargain again with Governor Rell, leading to the ultimate settlement.

I read Oldham’s obituary and came away with this thought: What a piece of work. And though we certainly would not have seen eye to eye on every issue, that’s meant as a compliment. I must believe that he is dearly missed.

This long USA Today article (yeah, they actually exist :–>), only very partially excerpted here, describes what the company is up to with its fiber-optic service:

The carrier plans to spend $23 billion to make fiber-optic broadband connections available to 18 million households by 2010. For that princely sum, Verizon will reach about a third of its sprawling territory in 28 states and the District of Columbia.

Verizon hasn’t said when, or even if, it plans to upgrade the rest of its footprint. Meanwhile, it’s taking a meat ax to operations it has deemed not cost-effective to rewire: It recently announced plans to sell systems, many rural, in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, and more sales could be forthcoming.

One thing’s for sure: Once the massive upgrade is completed, Verizon will control one of the most advanced communications networks on the planet. The network — dubbed FiOS for Fiber Optic Services — will be capable of easily handling an endless array of phone, high-speed data and video services, including high-definition TV.

Consumers are the biggest winners in Verizon’s high-stakes engineering gamble, says Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst at Ovum. As phone and cable companies gird for war and beef up their networks, they’ll be able to offer a cornucopia of new services. Bargains won’t be far behind, he predicts.

“Ultimately, this is a great battle over the hearts and minds of consumers, and as a result, consumers are getting really good deals,” he says.

For pure horsepower, FiOS is impressive. Data services can be delivered at mind-bending speeds of 100 megabits per second or more. FiOS has nearly unlimited capacity for video, which is transmitted via a separate, dedicated wavelength. That way, Verizon says, video can’t interfere with data transmissions, and vice versa.

It’s going to be pretty amazing if it works. And “somehow” Verizon is managing to make it available at what appears to be a pretty affordable price without the yoke of “network neutrality” being forced on it. The key is going to be what percentage of users they can sign up for premium services.

Those of us not in Verizon’s territories are surely wondering what’s going to be available to the other 82 million households in the US.

A boy’s heart started beating days after it stopped following a gym class collapse. That is nothing short of a miracle, but you also shouldn’t miss the point that it wouldn’t have happened without the amazing technology that kept Daniel Walker alive until then:

NEW YORK, Feb. 12, 2007

Daniel Walker was on his final lap jogging in his high school gym class when he collapsed, his flawed heart giving out on him.

Days later, his heart at a standstill, kept alive by a bypass machine, it began beating again. The 17-year-old’s parents called it divine intervention. His physicians were no less amazed.

“I’ve been a surgeon for 10 years, and this is probably one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Abeel Mangi, one of Walker’s cardiac surgeons at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Walker’s father described his son’s recovery in spiritual terms. “God turned around, put His hand on my son, and recharged him,” said William Walker, 58, a retired sanitation worker.

His son’s ordeal began Jan. 19 when he collapsed in gym class. The younger Walker suffered from a rare congenital heart flaw that left his coronary artery pinched, giving him only 10 percent of normal heart capacity. He was shuttled to two hospitals before finding himself at Columbia, waiting for a heart transplant, attached to the bypass machine.

“I was on my final lap, and I felt real woozy. I knew I was messed up,” the teen told the New York Daily News. “I’m glad those guys were there,” he said of his doctors.

Walker’s cardiac surgeons said they could not account for the young man’s recovery.

“It’s a miracle,” Mangi said. “There’s really no other way to put it.”

Two days after it began to beat on its own, surgeons were able to fix the flaw in Walker’s heart, increasing its capacity to 60 percent.

Mangi, along with Dr. Rachel Bijou, helped save Walker with CPR and electric shocks from a — making him the first person with that particular heart condition to be successfully revived. “He had no pulse at all,” Mangi told the Daily News. “It was just like on TV. We didn’t give up. We were able to get him back.”

This is one of those “weekenders,” i.e., a longer Positivity piece of the “read the whole thing” persuasion (reproduced in full for fair use and discussion purposes due to linked paper’s seven-day archive policy):

Miracle in Memphis
Sunday, February 4, 2007

A young boy sits in a wheelchair, a blue ballcap covering his head. A man, most likely his father, gently rubs the boy’s legs.

Just a few feet away, a woman lovingly strokes a girl’s back. The girl sits slumped over, her head in her hands.

The faces of these children, these families, show signs of stress, exhaustion, fear.

Yet in this place where they wait and worry — St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis — there also is hope.

Hope can be found in the hands of the doctors, nurses and other hospital workers who not only provide life-saving treatments, but also comfort in a simple touch or smile.

It can be found in the minds of the scientists who work tirelessly to find better treatments for the catastrophic diseases that bring hundreds of children to Memphis each day.

It can be found on the hospital’s walls, where the names of countless donors are engraved as a reminder that generosity can make a profound difference in people’s lives.

It can be found in the eyes of first-time visitors — including five from Quincy, Ill., — who are inspired to return home and convince as many people as they can to support the cause.

And, of course, it can be found in the hearts of the patients and their families.

Hope, indeed, can be found on this sprawling, 60-acre campus, in this place that the late entertainer Danny Thomas founded in 1962 because of his belief that “No child should die in the dawn of life.”

Fulfilling a promise

Danny Thomas was a struggling young entertainer when he knelt in a Detroit church before a statue of St. Jude Thaddeus — the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes — and promised the saint he would build him a shrine if he would show him his way in life.

The prayer was answered and Thomas moved his family to Chicago to pursue a career in show business. He would go on to become a television and film star, and his most famous role was in “Make Room for Daddy.”

His promise to St. Jude was delivered in the form of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

In 1957, Thomas founded the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), which became the fundraising arm of St. Jude. Five years later, the hospital opened its doors.

Since opening, St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and more than 70 foreign countries. Its mission is to find cures for children with catastrophic diseases, mainly cancer, through research and treatment.

About 4,900 patients are seen yearly, and most are treated on an outpatient basis as part of ongoing research programs. The hospital maintains 60 inpatient beds and treats about 230 patients each day.

St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatments that are not covered by insurance, and families without insurance are never asked to pay.

The hospital also pays for lodging, food and travel for patients and their families.

“The work being done here is just remarkable,” said Donna Young, who works for ALSAC. “And we never ask a penny from the patient’s family.”

Young recently served as a tour guide for a group of people who are involved in St. Jude Runs, a major fundraising effort for the hospital.

Each August, runners participate in a unique, 465-mile event, the St. Jude Memphis to Peoria Run, which takes them from the Memphis hospital to its Midwest Affiliate in Peoria, Ill. In addition, auxiliary runs take off from various Illinois and Missouri communities, including Quincy.

For the first time, run co-founder Mike McCoy and other St. Jude Run officials were able to coordinate a bus trip to Memphis for run coordinators, runners and volunteers.

McCoy, of Peoria, said it was a way to say thank you for their fundraising efforts, and to show them where the money goes.

“You can’t really imagine, unless you see the facility, what everybody’s hard work and fundraising goes to,” said Rick Meehan, run coordinator for the St. Jude Quincy to Peoria Run. “It makes you realize how fortunate you area and it makes you strive to raise more money.”

In addition to Meehan, the Quincy contingent on the bus trip included Meehan’s wife, Becky, volunteers Mildred Becks and Rebecca Stump and Herald-Whig reporter Kelly Wilson, as well as volunteers from Bloomington/Normal, LaSalle/Peru, Springfield, Lincoln, Champaign/Urbana, Galesburg, Pekin, Peoria, St. Louis and the Tri-County area.

“It’s overwhelming to be there,” Stump said. “It becomes so much more real to be there, to see the kids. You’re left in awe in how the whole process works.”

Stump, who was a runner/fundraiser in the first two years of the Quincy run, says she initially got involved because she thought it was for a good cause.

Now, she knows for sure.

“You become so much more passionate about it,” she said. “It makes you go the extra mile.”

Becks, who will take part in the event for the first time this year, left Memphis with a strong incentive to raise funds.

“I can’t imagine going through that with one of my children,” said Becks, who has three daughters. She was impressed with how much support the patients and families receive, from housing and food to multiple activities that bring some fun into the children’s lives while they’re fighting cancer or other diseases.

“Everything was just so well thought out,” Becks said. “It’s amazing the love and care they give to these families to make sure they’re comfortable.”

Meehan, after walking through the Target House, a residential facility that gives long-term patients and families a home-like place to stay, shook his head in amazement.

“And all of this from one man’s dream.”

***********

Dr. Joe Mirro, chief medical officer at St. Jude, says the hospital’s major focus is pediatric cancer.

“We try to focus on the diseases where we can make the most significant impact,” he said.

“We’re not competing with children’s hospitals,” Mirro added. “We’re focused on one thing, finding the biological reason for catastrophic diseases, mostly cancer.”

Mirro says St. Jude employs about 3,200 people, with a little more than a third providing clinical care. “We have 96 employed physicians and 100 additional consultants,” he said.

One-third of employees are involved in laboratory research and the remainder are support staff.

St. Jude pioneered a combination of chemotherapy, radiation and, when necessary, surgery to treat childhood cancers. About 80 percent of St. Jude patients have a cancer diagnosis.

The hospital continues to expand the use of bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for pediatric cancers and genetic diseases. It was the first institution to cure sickle cell disease with a bone marrow transplant, and is the first to receive government approval for a unique transplant procedure that makes it possible for parents who are not exact matches to be donors for the children.

The bone marrow transplant program enables doctors to perform about 185 transplants per year.

In addition to pediatric cancer research, St. Jude focuses on some acquired and inherited immunodeficiencies, infectious diseases and genetic disorders.

Mirro says St. Jude currently has 400 open research protocols.

Current research includes work in gene therapy, bone marrow transplantation, chemotherapy, the biochemistry of normal and cancerous cells, radiation treatment, blood diseases, resistance to therapy, viruses, hereditary diseases, influenza, pediatric AIDS and psychological effects of catastrophic illnesses.

St. Jude also conducts long-term biostatistical investigations on its patients and is the only pediatric research hospital that has been awarded a National Cancer Institute cancer center support grant.

Research efforts since the hospital’s inception have brought survival rates for childhood cancers from less than 20 percent to more than 70 percent overall.

Current survival rates for selected childhood cancers are:

* 94 percent for acute lymphoblastic leukemia;
* 90 percent for Hodgkin disease;
* 85 percent for medulloblastoma (brain tumor); and
* 90 percent for Wilms tumor (kidney tumor).

The 94 percent survival rate for ALL, the most common form of childhood cancer, compares to a 4 percent survival rate in 1962.

Mirro stresses that research findings at St. Jude are shared with doctors and scientists all over the world.

“The benefits are communal benefits,” he said. “If you give your money in Quincy, it is benefiting Quincy.”

Mirro, who has participated in two Memphis to Peoria runs, says fundraising is vital to the hospital’s operations. It takes $1.2 million to operate the hospital for just one day, and that comes mostly from public contributions.

“If we didn’t have the support of people like you, we couldn’t do it,” Mirro told those on the bus trip. “Without you, we close off 70 percent of the operations. It’s critical we have your support.”

Dave Selzer, ALSAC regional director in Peoria, also thanked the volunteers for their fundraising efforts.

“Without the money you’ve raised, we couldn’t do the job our families need us to do,” he said. “But it’s not about the money. It’s about the lives that you’ve saved and the hope you’ve raised.”

While science and technology are the driving forces behind St. Jude’s success, the compassion shown to patients and their families also makes an impact.

“They really care about people,” said Josh Smith of Winchester, Ill., whose 13-year-old son, Jake, is being treated for a brain tumor at St. Jude — for the second time.

“Not only do they give you first-class treatment, they have so many activities,” Smith said. “Jake likes playing putt putt, and they had a place to go play.”

When Jake was at St. Jude the first time, at age 5, the family lived at the Target House.

The Target Corp. partnered with St. Jude to open the facility in 1999. Since then, 510 families from 38 states and 26 countries have lived there — at no cost.

Target House is for patients and their families who have to stay in Memphis for treatment long-term, which is three months or more. A St. Jude tour guide said some families have stayed for up to five years.

It can accommodate up to 96 families at a time in apartment guest suites that feature separate bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms.

Target House features lavish common areas where families can relax and spend time with their children. There’s the Tiger Woods library and pavilion, the Amy Grant music room, indoor and outdoor play areas, a teen room and a garden patio.

Figure skater Scott Hamilton donated a family fitness center and spa, as well as an arts and crafts room where patients can use their imagination to create artwork, some of which is displayed in a hall gallery.

One piece by a patient was an image of the Target House titled, “Close to Home.”

Target House is just one part of St. Jude’s housing program. The NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies partnered with the hospital to open the Memphis Grizzlies House in 2004, a hotel-like environment for patients undergoing treatment from one to seven days.

The five-story Grizzlies House can accommodate up to 100 families at a time. An enclosed playground and basketball half-court are located outside the facility.

Selzer says St. Jude patients have a third housing option, the Ronald McDonald House, for medium-length stays.

The focus on comfort also can be seen in the hospital itself. Brightly-colored murals cover the walls to give children a cheery environment. Waiting rooms have play areas.

Young, the hospital tour guide, says St. Jude staff go to great lengths to ensure that “the children can be children.”

Patients play a role in the hospital’s decor. Their artwork hangs on walls. One striking, memorable part of the hospital is the “ABCs of Cancer” wall, which was created about seven or eight years ago.

The wall features 26 posters, one for each letter of the alphabet. Patients wrote down thoughts that coincided with each of the letters.

The poster with the letter “V” draws the most attention: “V is for vomet (sic) … I sit and wait but it’s just to late,” a patient writes.

Some are poignant: “T is for tears … we cry when we lose some one we love.”

Some are filled with hope: “L is for ‘Lil Miracles — small things that happen.”

Meehan personally knows two ‘lil miracles. Spencer Waters and Jacob Sorrill, both of Liberty, Ill., were treated at St. Jude for bilateral Wilms tumor — and both are healthy boys today.

“I always remember Nancy and Kathy (the boys’ mothers) saying St. Jude is awesome for the families,” Meehan said. “Now I know what they meant.”

A major barrier to further improvement in processor speed has been pushed to the wayside (link is to KeepMedia, where about 20% of the article and none of the material excerpted below is present; full article requires Forbes subscription):

Last month (Intel) said it was exiting the silicon business–in a manner of speaking.

….. as wires and switches are shrunk and packed ever closer together, with thinner and thinner silicon insulation, the chance of current leakage rises. Experts have long predicted that this leakage, or “tunneling,” would bring Moore’s Law to a halt. And when that happened, there would be a dramatic slowing of new technology products and tech-driven industrial productivity.

Bad news indeed. Not just for the tech industry but for the American tech-driven economy.

Thanks to Intel, it seems we’ll dodge this bullet. Intel’s new insulator replaces silicon dioxide with a metallic alloy called hafnium. This alloy isn’t new–it’s been used as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants–but hafnium’s use as a chip insulator required a fabrication breakthrough. Intel apparently has made it. Using hafnium insulators, Intel has built prototype chips that are 45 nanometers wide and run Windows, Mac OS X and Linux software. No leakage. These chips require much less electricity and generate less heat, too.

New Era of Products–and Productivity

Intel’s breakthrough–a competitive IBM-AMD joint project that also uses hafnium is close behind–will give new life to Moore’s Law. We’ll soon see cell phones capable of storing movie-length videos. Better yet, we’ll see products we can’t even imagine today, just as few of us imagined the iPod ten years ago.

Best of all, the motive force in today’s dynamic U.S. and global economies still has room to run. As Brian Wesbury, chief economist of First Trust Advisors, notes: “This type of progress is symbolic of the entire New Era Economy. Productivity is booming. And rapid productivity growth explains why corporate profits, jobs and income growth have all accelerated at the same time.”

Moore’s Law triumphs again. Full speed ahead.

The only downside I see is that “Hafnium Valley” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

______________________________

UPDATE: Here’s more from USA Today.

From London, they’re not kidding:

Last updated at 22:00pm on 5th February 2007

A romantic chap hoping to surprise his young lady with a bunch of red roses on Valentine’s Day would have trouble hiding these behind his back.

Unless, that is, he happened to be ten feet tall. The supersize blooms grown high in the Andes are the longest stem plants in the world.

They are 6ft from top to toe – three times the normal size – and have a flower six to eight inches in diameter with more than 60 petals, although the fragrance is only slight.

One variety is a deep crimson, the other a lighter red with blood-red streaks. And they come at a supersize price — at least £150 a dozen.

The roses, some of which should make it to Europe in time for the 14th, are grown in rich Ecuadorian soil at an altitude of 9,000 ft.

The stems are as thick as a man’s finger and very thorny. California wholesaler Gerald Prolman also supplies a special deep steel vase to display them, costing another £40 on top.

He said the 400,000 blooms grown this year were selling fast. “People who are giving flowers want to make an impression, and this is the ultimate impression you can make.”

My reax to this (HT FYI News):

• Men around the world hope this works with their mates.
• Salesmen and saleswomen around the world are trying to figure out how to steal it and “lose” the technology.
• Voters want to try this on political candidates, and politicians in general.