Hmmm… Here’s a supplier (based in California) who will adapt my Prius to recharge from the mains. $5,000 plus shipping and installation. Bet it voids the warranty. I think I’ll wait for Prius v2.0.
Category Archives: Asides
Markets down, online lingerie sales up
There’s a silver lining in every cloud.
Froggybank.co.uk, an online shopping network of 180 websites, said it had analysed the spending habits of its half a million members for the past three months, only to discover that underwear sales, far from being pulled down by the economic crisis had risen two per cent. Or, in other words, when people think “credit crunch”, they think “pants!”
$5,000 for your genome
From Technology Review…
Starting next spring, a complete human-genome sequence can be ordered for just $5,000, thanks to a new sequencing service announced by Complete Genomics, a startup based in Mountain View, CA. The stunning price drop–sequencing currently costs approximately 20 times that amount–could completely change the way that human-genomics research is done and open up new possibilities in personalized medicine. Researchers say that a $5,000 genome would enable new studies to identify rare genetic variants linked to common diseases, and it could open up the sequencing market to diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, making genome sequencing a routine part of clinical drug testing.
Complete Genomics, which has received $46 million in venture funding to date and has largely stayed under the radar, plans to launch with a bang and anticipates the capacity to sequence 1,000 genomes in 2009 and 20,000 in 2010. That would represent a massive jump: with a price tag of $100,000 to $1 million over the past two years, only a handful of human genomes have been sequenced to date.
Apart from anything else, this is an illustration of what Moore’s Law can do.
Time for a change?
I’ve always been proud of my Irish citizenship. I may have to think again.
The coming October surprise
John McCain has pulled out of Michigan, which is big news because it signals that he has concluded he can’t win there. It looks as thought Obama is pulling ahead. So here’s a prediction: if Obama is still ahead in two weeks and the Republicans are facing defeat, Bush and Cheney will orchestrate a ‘national security’ emergency to, er, bring voters to their collective senses and reach for the Vietnam vet.
What sort of emergency? Well, how about bombing Iran after concocting some sort of Tonkin-type attack to ‘justify’ US action?
UPDATE: Turns out lots of people are thinking like this.
On this day…
… in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit, thereby triggering a chain of events that led to the establishment of ARPA and the funding of the ARPANET, which in turn led to the Internet. Talk about unintended consequences. Full story in my book.
Robbery 2.0
Lovely story in Good Morning Silicon Valley…
As a rule, most criminals are not particularly bright, a fact that gives law enforcement a fighting chance against lousy odds. But once in a while you see a little flash of cleverness that has to be abstractly appreciated despite the way that it was employed. Taking inspiration from similar ploys seen in the movies and adding a Web 2.0 twist, an armored-car robber in Monroe, Wash., escaped Tuesday with the unwitting help of a dozen or so decoys responding to a Craigslist job ad.
According to reports, the suspect — wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask — approached the truck in a Bank of America parking lot, gave the guard a face full of pepper spray, grabbed the cash bag, sprinted about 100 yards to a creek, hopped into a waiting inner tube and floated off to freedom. The getaway vehicle was later found about 200 yards downstream, sans passenger. At the bank, meanwhile, there was no shortage of people matching the robber’s description. A dozen or so men dressed in identical gear were wandering around wondering if their potential employer had stood them up. Each had responded to a Craigslist ad purportedly seeking to hire road maintenance workers for $28.50 an hour, and each had gotten e-mail instructions to show up at 11 a.m. Tuesday near the bank wearing certain work clothing — “yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask … and, if possible, a blue shirt,” said one. The FBI is on the case, hoping the offender was less clever in covering his digital tracks.
Statistic of the day
Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.
Beggar (all) Thy Neighbours
The Irish government’s extraordinary move to guarantee all investments in Irish banks has infuriated Willem Buiter. First of all, he says, it’s illegal under EU rules. And secondly,
Financial crises may not be the best time to make friends and influence people, but the Irish guarantee is the most ‘in-your-face’ beggar-thy-neighbour provocation since medieval armies catapulted bubonic-plague-ridden corpses into the cities they were besieging. Between the attempt to favour Irish shareholders at the expense of foreign shareholders and the poaching of UK sterling deposits (and indeed euro deposits anywhere else in the euro area) through subsidy-fuelled interest rate offers, Ireland should not be surprised to encounter limited support and solidarity in the EU the next time the country is up against it, for whatever issue…
Er, actually the Irish government is already ‘up against it’ in relation to Europe, because of that little local difficulty it had with ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Personally, I’m not sure I’d put money into anything ‘guaranteed’ by a Fianna Fail-led government. One delicious twist in all this is that the EU Commissioner who will have to examine the latest Fianna Fail wheeze is Charlie McCreevy, a grizzled old Fianna Fail hack. How will he square this particular barbed circle? Stay tuned.
The perils of skunk
Agonising article by Patrick Cockburn on his son’s schizophrenia.
I blame cannabis for what happened to Henry. He says he smoked a lot between the ages of 14 and 19, but I didn’t notice at the time.
I would have been concerned, of course, if I’d known back then, but until recently I had no idea about the explosive impact cannabis can have on some people.
I don’t think people realise 19 out of 20 people might take a small quantity of cannabis without ill effects, but for the 20th person who has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, the result is catastrophic.
I don’t believe those who advocate less stringent laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis realise the devastating effect it can have…