Month: July 2005

Craig Venter has finally gone public with his latest venture, synthetic genomics, inc. Just as with the synthetic biology company Codon Devices, there’s not much specific information about what they plan to do, but the non-specific version of the story is that they want to make (!) a simple bacterium by subtracting circuitry from it, and then reprogram it to do useful things, like making hydrogen for your fuel-cell roadster.

As wacky as it all sounds, I’m a believer. Humans currently use extraordinarily energy-intensive processes to build things, process that also generate greenhouse gases. A lot of what we melt, burn, and grind into useful products can be grown quietly at room temperature. For instance, the process for making computer chips begins with heating silicon up to 1600 degrees F so that a giant single crystal of silicon can be grown. A sea urchin, on the other hand, sitting in cold seawater and working with whatever materials float by, manufactures its sharp spines by growing single crystals of calcite. Calcite is not silicon, but still! As Laurie Gower, an expert on biomaterials at the University of Florida in Gainesville, says:

The real goal of biomimetic engineering is learning how to draw on nature’s ideas. If you could take any material and learn how to mould it or shape it in this way, you could gain far more control over its optical, electronic or mechanical properties.

Programmable biological material generation. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it’s already in the mail.

This is definitely cool, but I can’t decide if it’s simply cool in a retro backwards-looking kind of way. PressDisplay lets you read 225 newspapers from 55 countries as though you had the actual paper spread in front of you. They’ve got a nifty interface that lets you flip through paper, almost to the point of including the virtual coffee stain circles from your coffee cup. I’m betting that most of the 225 newpapers included here already have web sites, which means that PressDisplay is not only competing with these web sites; it’s also saying that the old newspaper format that evolved across a hundred years of smearing ink on big pieces of paper is still the best, even when viewed on a small pixelated screen (albeit with the help of some magic cyber-shoehorns). Fascinating, but ultimately you have to conclude it’s for print junkies and not people who simply need the news. It’s as if Google Maps included crease lines and made it hard to fold up your map and put it away. PressDisplay is betting on the wrong horse. Call me back if they’re still here in two years.

Interesting things afoot in radio these days. Boston folks may remember talkshow host Christopher Lydon from his old show “The Connection” (which still exists, only without him). He feuded with his host station WBUR and was shown the door. He has wandered in the wilderness for a few years, maintaining a part-time blog at Harvard Law School, but now another Boston station, WGBH, has given him a new show called Open Source. The show, which embraces the blogospherical world of information tech, is naturally available as a podcast, and is featured at Apple’s iTunes site.

I learned all this from ITConversations guru Doug Kaye on his Blogarithms site. In this post he observes that, while the old-school thing to do is encourage your local NPR affiliate to pick up the show, internet podcasts mean that he doesn’t care anymore about his local radio station. It’s no longer in the loop; already it’s fading into dim obsolescence. Ouch!

I find this attitude interesting because I’m sure Lydon only got the show because of an old-school radio deal. He gets a nice studio, fancy equipment, syndicated distribution, stuff that costs real money. We haven’t yet reached the point where it’s easy to do something this elaborate from your basement. And yet the podcasts new radio proclaims are slicing through old radio’s Achille’s tendon. Still, Doug Kaye knows whereof he speaks, sitting as he does atop one of new radio’s prosperous properties. I don’t think anybody knows where the money is going to come from, but Chris Lydon is having fun on the air again, and that’s good news to me.

One of the standard birthday gifts you can get for someone, particularly as they start to get a little, er, older, is a scrapbook of what happened the year they were born, or a fake newspaper of events that happened on the day they were born. But really, who cares what was going on when you were born? You don’t remember any of it. It don’t signify.

What I really want is a service that can provide an uninterrupted hour of music from WKZL, FM 107.5 from about 1982. I want it with commercials, DJ chatter, and everything. Or maybe two hours of Sunday night TV from 1977, including Disney and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom hosted by Marlin Perkins. I would pay good money for that, because I was old enough to remember it.

My friend Roy has found exactly what I’m describing, only it’s from where he grew up: South Africa. Someone is assembling podcasts of old radio shows from the Capital 604 station, some going as far back as 1981. Want to know what the weather was like along the eastern Cape coast on October 1st, 1984? Listen to this. Capital 604 was hugely popular because they had good music, good DJs, and perhaps most of all because they were the first truly independent radio station in South Africa, operating with relative impunity from the hinterlands of the independent black homeland Transkei. Since it shut down some years ago, and since it is so fondly remembered by so many who grew up in South Africa during the 70s and 80s, people are pooling their old recordings of the station and making them available via podcast.

Anybody out there want to dig up some old WKZL tapes?

Talkr (their tagline is “Letting blogs speak for themselves”) is a site that lets you listen to popular blogs being read to you. The catch is that it’s not a person reading, but a computer. If your idea of computer-generated voice is the Speak & Spell toy from the 1980s, you can be forgiven for thinking Talkr is a terrible idea. But the speech synthesis here is surprisingly good. Listen to some of the free blogs they have on this page (they have dozens more that you have to pay to listen to). I enjoy reading the Many2Many blog, and the audio version is remarkably uncrappy. It’s not good enough yet for me to make it part of my information diet, but clearly they’re improving fast. Text-to-speech synthesis is a big deal; I’m sure it will start to show up all over the place now that it’s acceptably good.

I just got back from a week’s vacation on the beaches of North Carolina, and no sooner had I squeezed my family into a Boston cab at Logan airport than a right-of-way squabble broke out. My driver, who turned out to be an affable Nigerian gentleman, was trying to work left into a lane owned by a vocal local who was in turn working right to pick someone up. Everyone was held up by a big bus in front of us both. Our interchange went something like this.

MR. CABBIE: <beep beep> (gesticulating to be let across to the left)
MR. DRIVER: [screaming] Go f**k yourself! You should’ve come in behind me!
MR. CABBIE: Where are you going? You shouldn’t be there! [i.e. stuck behind the bus holding up the traffic]
MR. DRIVER: F**k you, a**hole!
MR. CABBIE: [picking up cell phone] Okay, I can call the police and have them make you move.
[Note: I can attest that this next part actually happened.]
MR. DRIVER: [slight pause] Say you’re sorry.
MR. CABBIE: [without hesitating] I’m sorry.

The confrontation ended instantly, and within seconds we were scooting along on our way home. Brilliant! My faith in humanity was restored. My driver grinned broadly as we dropped into the Ted Williams tunnel: “I will say I’m sorry ten times. It doesn’t cost me anything!” We should all be so wise.