Stem Cell Research - Mankind must be still in the Stone Age of this Research

Reading the article Stem Cells and the Experiment That Shook the World, I am thinking we must still be in the flint-shaping age of this, given how crude the tools are. The article describes how James Thomson started his ground-breaking experiment: "With a microscope, a steady hand, and a very thin, hollow glass needle, Thomson removed the clump of cells from inside the sphere and placed them in a laboratory culture dish". Then later, to show the stem cells can be converted into any type of tissue: "...the human cells from the culture dishes and injected them into experimental mice. These mice are engineered to lack an immune system so they do not reject the human cells. Once in the mice, the human cells divided rapidly and formed tumor-like structures made up of all the major human tissue types, including skin, muscle, and bone. "

Excuse me? "steady hand, and hollow needle" and later "inject them into experimental mice" are what it takes to be able to be healing diabetes, spine injuries and who knows what else? Compare those primitive tools with electronic microscopes, particle accelerators and other tools physics uses (or any other branch of science). We are still at the alchymist level here - "pour them together and see what happens". It seems we need a much deeper understanding of these processes and much better tools to take to the next stage. This is just a beginning of a long process!

Microsoft Monopoly, Schools, and Family Feuds.

My twin daughters are first year high school this year, they are taking a business course which teaches basics of internet, word processing, spreadsheet and so on. A pretty good course, well designed and taught. The problem is that it only uses (and assumes the kids have at home) Microsoft operating system, and Microsoft office, as there is always some stuff to be finished at home, mailed back and forth to work on it some more at school next day.

The Microsoft-centric approach of the course is a problem at our home, because I was banning installing Microsoft products at any home computer. The girls have learned (ok, forced to learn) to work in OpenOffice, but over certain complexity of the document, saving stuff in OpenOffice as doc and opening it in school next day in MS-word only brings sweat and tears. It is simply impossible, after several evenings of shouts "I hate this Linux thing" I broke down and installed an old version of Windows at home. Of course it is too old, and cannot open the new formats they work in school with, so the girls outsmarted me, and simply stay longer at school to finish their projects there in the cozy Microsoft-only environment. Family friendly.

What is interesting in all this, is the Ontario School System purchased Sun's StarOffice with province-wide license. But no one is using it, and no one at all is teaching using it. So that is an interesting conundrum, why did Ontario spent my and other's tax-dollars for it? The problem is likely the generic herd behaviour, if the teachers were teaching it using non-Microsoft products, I can hear the parents shouting "why do you teach something my kids will not be able to use at future work" etc.

So all this contributes to the fact that weaning off the Microsoft stuff will take much longer than I thought. But it will happen. I will take either a generation (start counting in 1990, so by 2015 we should be there :) ), or (more likely) a paradigm shift, invalidation of this "computer = office suite + IE" view.

From an interview with Open Office contributor Louis Suarez-Potts
(oct 25, 2005)

http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=5370&page=2

We support over 50 language projects. And every major Linux distributor is involved in the project, with companies like Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva, Propylon; organizations like Debian, and so on participating in building the code. I'm not even counting the hundreds of independent groups and individuals localizing and porting the source. And now, governments are getting into the act. I feel immensely proud and optimistic when governments like those of Brazil, Massachusetts, Vienna, and parts of the French administrations adopt Openoffice.org, even though I personally have had little to do in making the code. Being part of the community has never felt so good.

CSS and the Monopoly.

Last weekend, I have played with CSS after a while. Testing some advanced features, in SeaMonkey and Firefox, I found several things that work there, but do not work in Internet explorer. Expected. So I started to Google around for how to fix that. I have done that for a few things, spend half of my weekend googling, and suddenly it hit me: At least one of the things I had clearly not working in IE was CSS1. 1996 stuff. Here we are in 2005, and the world is spending incredible amount of energy, resources and time that could be used creatively, to bypass errors that, under normal competitive situation, would have been fixed years and years ago. Of course they rely on the fact that developers will finally only ever develop and test on Internet Explorer, because it is impossible to write code that adheres to standards, and works on Microsoft stuff, and it is twice the time to write stuff that does both. Another facet of how monopoly is bad for us all.