Saturday, April 01, 2006
Friday, March 31, 2006
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Rainy day
Last night/ this morning, my LCD sponaneously combusted. I was playing Oblivion when the whole screen start flickering black and white and smoke started billowing out of it.
Rainy day today; UT is on a hill so every step is an oncoming stream of water. Decided to skip class so I can get back to the apartment and empty out the gold fish in my shoe.
Last night/ this morning, my LCD sponaneously combusted. I was playing Oblivion when the whole screen start flickering black and white and smoke started billowing out of it.
Rainy day today; UT is on a hill so every step is an oncoming stream of water. Decided to skip class so I can get back to the apartment and empty out the gold fish in my shoe.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Friday, March 17, 2006
Monday, March 13, 2006
Stem cell experts seek rabbit-human embryo
· Hybrid will hasten research, say scientists
· Grey area exposed in regulation procedures
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian
British scientists are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos in the lab by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs. If granted consent, the team will use the embryos to produce stem cells that carry genetic defects, in the hope that studying them will help understand the complex mechanisms behind incurable human diseases.
The proposal drew strong criticism from opponents to embryo research who yesterday challenged the ethics of the research and branded the work repugnant.
Plans for the experiments have been put forward by Professor Chris Shaw, a neurologist and expert in motor neurone disease at King's College London, and Professor Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh University-based creator of Dolly the sheep, as a way of overcoming the shortage of fresh human eggs available for research.
"The fertility of rabbits is legendary," said Prof Shaw. "The most important thing is that with animal eggs, we have a much better chance of generating stem cells and if we wait for human eggs, it's going to be maybe a decade before we can do this. If we can use animal eggs, we could maybe have stem cells within one or two years," he added.
Scientists use eggs in research to create cloned embryos, from which they harvest stem cells. By producing stem cells that carry the genetic defects of diseases, researchers believe they will be able to unravel how a cell's molecular machinery goes wrong, potentially leading to new cures for disease. But the research is progressing slowly, hampered by a severe shortage of "spare" eggs donated by couples undergoing fertility treatment.
Prof Shaw's team will need a licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority before they are allowed to pursue the research. "As with all research involving human embryos, the research team would have to show that the research is both necessary and desirable, and that any embryo created could not be allowed to develop for longer than 14 days or be implanted in a woman," said Dr Chris O'Toole, head of research regulation at the HFEA.
If the researchers are granted consent, they will not be the first to fuse human cells with rabbit eggs. In 2003, Huizhen Sheng at Shanghai Second Medical University published work in which she claimed to have extracted stem cells from hybrid embryos made from rabbit eggs.
To make a hybrid embryo, a human skin cell would be taken from a person with motor neurone disease and injected into a hollowed-out rabbit egg. The resulting embryo would contain only a tiny amount of rabbit DNA in a microscopic structure that generates energy in the cell. The rest of the DNA would be human. If the experiment is successful, within a week, the egg will have divided to form a tiny ball of a 200 or so cells, from which stem cells could be extracted.
The embryos could not legally be implanted into a woman's womb and the stem cells would not be safe to implant because they would be rejected by the immune system. "They will never grow beyond the 200 cell stage and they will have no human features," said Prof Shaw.
The proposal exposes a grey area in British regulation, however, as officials at the HFEA admitted it was questionable whether the resulting embryo was human. "That's the question and it's for the government, the HFEA and lawyers to work out," said Prof Shaw.
Josephine Quintavalle of the lobby group Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: "There is a lot of innate wisdom in the yuk factor, or repugnance as it is also known. My question is: what will they actually create? It is simplistic or deliberately deceptive to say they are simply making stem cells. In order to obtain stem cells they surely have to go through the blastocyst stage; they have to create a 'something' from which to derive the new cells. What is this something? It must be human to be of any use to researchers."
Professor Sir John Gurdon, a Cambridge University researcher, already uses similar technology to investigate how eggs appear to be capable of converting adult cells into stem cells that can potentially grow into any tissue in the body. His experiments have so far focused on injecting DNA from human cells into frog eggs.
He said: "I don't see there's any ethical problem with what they are proposing. I don't see it as a human embryo, but it all comes back to the question of when you think life begins. Scientifically, though, I'm not persuaded it will work. If you put cells from one species into the egg of another, the egg may divide, but you could get a lot of genetic abnormality that won't lead to good quality stem cells."
· Hybrid will hasten research, say scientists
· Grey area exposed in regulation procedures
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian
British scientists are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos in the lab by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs. If granted consent, the team will use the embryos to produce stem cells that carry genetic defects, in the hope that studying them will help understand the complex mechanisms behind incurable human diseases.
The proposal drew strong criticism from opponents to embryo research who yesterday challenged the ethics of the research and branded the work repugnant.
Plans for the experiments have been put forward by Professor Chris Shaw, a neurologist and expert in motor neurone disease at King's College London, and Professor Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh University-based creator of Dolly the sheep, as a way of overcoming the shortage of fresh human eggs available for research.
"The fertility of rabbits is legendary," said Prof Shaw. "The most important thing is that with animal eggs, we have a much better chance of generating stem cells and if we wait for human eggs, it's going to be maybe a decade before we can do this. If we can use animal eggs, we could maybe have stem cells within one or two years," he added.
Scientists use eggs in research to create cloned embryos, from which they harvest stem cells. By producing stem cells that carry the genetic defects of diseases, researchers believe they will be able to unravel how a cell's molecular machinery goes wrong, potentially leading to new cures for disease. But the research is progressing slowly, hampered by a severe shortage of "spare" eggs donated by couples undergoing fertility treatment.
Prof Shaw's team will need a licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority before they are allowed to pursue the research. "As with all research involving human embryos, the research team would have to show that the research is both necessary and desirable, and that any embryo created could not be allowed to develop for longer than 14 days or be implanted in a woman," said Dr Chris O'Toole, head of research regulation at the HFEA.
If the researchers are granted consent, they will not be the first to fuse human cells with rabbit eggs. In 2003, Huizhen Sheng at Shanghai Second Medical University published work in which she claimed to have extracted stem cells from hybrid embryos made from rabbit eggs.
To make a hybrid embryo, a human skin cell would be taken from a person with motor neurone disease and injected into a hollowed-out rabbit egg. The resulting embryo would contain only a tiny amount of rabbit DNA in a microscopic structure that generates energy in the cell. The rest of the DNA would be human. If the experiment is successful, within a week, the egg will have divided to form a tiny ball of a 200 or so cells, from which stem cells could be extracted.
The embryos could not legally be implanted into a woman's womb and the stem cells would not be safe to implant because they would be rejected by the immune system. "They will never grow beyond the 200 cell stage and they will have no human features," said Prof Shaw.
The proposal exposes a grey area in British regulation, however, as officials at the HFEA admitted it was questionable whether the resulting embryo was human. "That's the question and it's for the government, the HFEA and lawyers to work out," said Prof Shaw.
Josephine Quintavalle of the lobby group Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: "There is a lot of innate wisdom in the yuk factor, or repugnance as it is also known. My question is: what will they actually create? It is simplistic or deliberately deceptive to say they are simply making stem cells. In order to obtain stem cells they surely have to go through the blastocyst stage; they have to create a 'something' from which to derive the new cells. What is this something? It must be human to be of any use to researchers."
Professor Sir John Gurdon, a Cambridge University researcher, already uses similar technology to investigate how eggs appear to be capable of converting adult cells into stem cells that can potentially grow into any tissue in the body. His experiments have so far focused on injecting DNA from human cells into frog eggs.
He said: "I don't see there's any ethical problem with what they are proposing. I don't see it as a human embryo, but it all comes back to the question of when you think life begins. Scientifically, though, I'm not persuaded it will work. If you put cells from one species into the egg of another, the egg may divide, but you could get a lot of genetic abnormality that won't lead to good quality stem cells."
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense - Nietzsche
"It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually in flowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.
How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it."
"It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually in flowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.
How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it."
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Denmark's new values
Interesting, wasn't it in the 1990s that Denmark changed its language to less resemble German?
Interesting, wasn't it in the 1990s that Denmark changed its language to less resemble German?
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Scorpions in the Sand Chapter 1: Abdul-Wahab
"My Lord, our scouts are dead," Marshall Eustache Capet related the words to you and quickly retreated from the royal tent.
It has been nearly a century after the rise of the Arab branch of de Hautveilles; 89 years after the birth of Tarique the Great from these arid lands; you've finally made the pillgrimage back to the birthplace of your ancestors.
The air is hot and dry; you shift uncomfortablly in the plated chainmail. You were about to put on your heavy breastplate, embroidered with the hearld of the Kingdom of Italy, Naples, and Venice; a galloping black stallion upon a field of gold. But after a few seconds of deliberation, you thought better.
It is your first campaign in Aleppo, first time in Africa and the Middle East since your cornation. Your grandma Rafiqa use to tell your father, then the would-be King of Naples, of these lands the tales of the buzzing bazzars, the huge palaces, the grand harems of her father, and her father's father... Being a Hailal, she inherited every bit of her family's relentless drive and tribal stubborness. After the Second Crusade, her family became vassals of their conquerors. She and her eight sisters were scattered acrossed the ruins of her family's former empire. All were sent to Catholic nuneries, taught the learnings of the true faith and were married off to crusader lords of Jerusalem and Egypt and their leiges, the Kings of Hungry and Bohemia. Even though she was brought up as a Catholic at a young age, she insisted on keeping her veil. In the grand nunery of Nubia, her teachers were at once repulsed by her insistance on wearing heathan clothes but at the same time awed by her mastery of language and learning. By 16 she has translated the works of Aristotle from Arabic to Greek, and St. Augustine to Arabic. At her wedding day, under the Cathedrals of Roma and eyes of God, she chose a white burka in place of a wedding dress. Years later, after her death, your grandfather would reminisce: "When the trumpets sounded for the entrance of the bride, I saw a slender figure in a white silouhette enter the door. At first I can barely make out that the shape was a woman, and thought she must be one of the stray guests or maids of honor. But more peopled entered, all following the her. She wore a burka with a long, flowing wedding dress tail, with her face covered." Your grandfather would marry three more times, sire a total of sixteen children, including two bastards, over his lifetime.
"She missed her sisters. They were all she ever had," your grandfather use to tell your father, "although I tried to make her happy. I brought back books from her school in Nubia during my campaign, dates from her family's old garden in Sarqihya." At this place, grandfather would then look away into the distance and, without even looking at father, "in the end she felt that her sisters were her only possessions in this world, they and you."
"My Lord, our scouts are dead," Marshall Eustache Capet related the words to you and quickly retreated from the royal tent.
It has been nearly a century after the rise of the Arab branch of de Hautveilles; 89 years after the birth of Tarique the Great from these arid lands; you've finally made the pillgrimage back to the birthplace of your ancestors.
The air is hot and dry; you shift uncomfortablly in the plated chainmail. You were about to put on your heavy breastplate, embroidered with the hearld of the Kingdom of Italy, Naples, and Venice; a galloping black stallion upon a field of gold. But after a few seconds of deliberation, you thought better.
It is your first campaign in Aleppo, first time in Africa and the Middle East since your cornation. Your grandma Rafiqa use to tell your father, then the would-be King of Naples, of these lands the tales of the buzzing bazzars, the huge palaces, the grand harems of her father, and her father's father... Being a Hailal, she inherited every bit of her family's relentless drive and tribal stubborness. After the Second Crusade, her family became vassals of their conquerors. She and her eight sisters were scattered acrossed the ruins of her family's former empire. All were sent to Catholic nuneries, taught the learnings of the true faith and were married off to crusader lords of Jerusalem and Egypt and their leiges, the Kings of Hungry and Bohemia. Even though she was brought up as a Catholic at a young age, she insisted on keeping her veil. In the grand nunery of Nubia, her teachers were at once repulsed by her insistance on wearing heathan clothes but at the same time awed by her mastery of language and learning. By 16 she has translated the works of Aristotle from Arabic to Greek, and St. Augustine to Arabic. At her wedding day, under the Cathedrals of Roma and eyes of God, she chose a white burka in place of a wedding dress. Years later, after her death, your grandfather would reminisce: "When the trumpets sounded for the entrance of the bride, I saw a slender figure in a white silouhette enter the door. At first I can barely make out that the shape was a woman, and thought she must be one of the stray guests or maids of honor. But more peopled entered, all following the her. She wore a burka with a long, flowing wedding dress tail, with her face covered." Your grandfather would marry three more times, sire a total of sixteen children, including two bastards, over his lifetime.
"She missed her sisters. They were all she ever had," your grandfather use to tell your father, "although I tried to make her happy. I brought back books from her school in Nubia during my campaign, dates from her family's old garden in Sarqihya." At this place, grandfather would then look away into the distance and, without even looking at father, "in the end she felt that her sisters were her only possessions in this world, they and you."
King Abdul-Wahab de Hautveille the Lion Hearted, the first of his name, King of Italy, Naples and Venice, Duke of Campagna, Pisa, and Toscana, Shield of Africa, Defender of Faith
Scorpions in the Sand
A Crusader Kings After Action Report by Bincheng Wu
Highlights:
• The Kingdom of England was destroyed by the crusades, leaving a power vacuum on the continent that persist to this day
• The Holy Roman Empire almost devours the Kingdom of France through two centuries of continuous warfare
• The rise of Apulia, eviction of the papcy from Rome, conquest of the decadent merchant republics of Genoa and Venice
• The Mongols sweep through eastern Europe! Reconquest of Byzantium and culling of the horde
• Assasination of the Holy Roman Emperor, immediately followed by the empire loosing two centuries worth of conquered territories
• Reunification of Italy, the HRE gives up the claim to the title of King of Italy
• The second invasion of Europe! The Il-Khanate subjugates Persia, enslaves the Emirs of the Middle East and prepares for the conquest of Anatolia, it is here that our story begin...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)