alexyacoub.com

If you’re at all like me, then YouTube has become a staple for you, not just for video, but for music.  Whenever I want to listen to a song that I don’t have, my first stop is YouTube, and there’s almost always some kind of video that has the song (usually a music video). This is great, if not a little heavy duty.

No more.  I recently discovered Songza, which is basically a front-end to all the music on YouTube.  The interface is much cleaner and there’s no video to distract you!  You can even create playlists.  The name isn’t my favorite, but at least it’s not SongTube. What can I say?  I’m a minimalist and this site caters to my needs.

Did you know you could patent discovered genes? Not engineered genes, but discovered ones. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, but this just seems crazy.

According to a study published in Science, 20% of all human genes are patented. Granted, according to the article in National Geographic, the patent doesn’t exactly cover the gene, but instead covers anything you do using the gene, such as creating a drug. However, what this amounts to in my mind is that if someone finds out what gene causes Alzheimer’s, they can patent it and be the only ones to create a genetic cure.

Now, I understand the idea behind patents. By allowing one to patent an invention, we promote the publishing of the information (as a patent) while still guaranteeing that the inventor can reap some profit from his or her work. This is especially important in fields where the R&D costs are astronomical, as is the case in the health industry. These patents promote expensive research with the understanding that people will earn back the money they spent.

However, genes are not inventions, they are discoveries. While I can understand the ‘high cost v. reward’ question, it seems to me that the patenting of a gene creates a chilling effect. It’s not like another company can just invent another gene that does the same thing differently — genes do very specific things. The patent essentially prevents anyone else from curing that genetic disease. As the article mentions, it even raises the cost of research. Why can you patent the whole gene (and thus a whole class of inventions) instead of just that specific drug or process that results? The article discusses many of these questions.

The bleeding heart liberal in me thinks that since there’s a lot of federal money already going into this research, the public shouldn’t so easily give up the knowledge that money reaps. Hell, why not just move the realm of the research completely into the public arena–say at universities and federal research institutions. Conservatives would go crazy, but there are some benefits. First, the pharmaceutical industries won’t have to take the kinds of R&D risks they are now. They probably won’t rake in the crazy profits, but risk would go down, and drug costs would shoot through the floor. The public wins because of drug costs and the fact that the knowledge is then in the public domain. Pharma companies can then focus on creating the new Viagra.

I doubt the drug companies would be ready to give up their status, because such a plan would turn them from high-powered research conglomerates into simple manufacturers, in some senses. But why should they get federal money and then keep all the profit? That’s really the big issue for me: they try to go both ways on this one.

Well, that was just rambling and pie-in-the-sky. I agree that the situation is a lot more complicated than I let on. But hey, I’m interested in hearing what other people have to say about these issues.

So you have a long PDF that you want to read, but you don’t want to read it on your computer, and you can’t really afford to print the thing. Check out Print(fu). Upload your PDF to their website, or give them a link and they’ll format, print, bind, and ship you the PDF in book form! It’s cheap too. I’m sure for smaller orders, the shipping and the binding takes up most of the costs. Your 250 page book will cost $11.25, and 500 pages will only set you back $17.50 (that’s the final cost, including shipping).

It’s a pretty neat idea, and it seems rather cost effective — assuming all the dead trees don’t bother you.

For those of you that use RSS in Safari, you’re probably as annoyed as I am that you can’t scroll by hitting space, because the search field is automatically selected. Well, macosxhints.com has a fix for this little bug.

Also, there are some really good plugins for Safari over at pimpmysafari.com.

And while I’m on the subject of computers, did you know shift-space scrolls up on OS X?

A lot of people have yet to discover RSS, which I think is a travesty. These are usually the same people that complain that my blog isn’t on LiveJournal, and so they can’t just read my entries on their “Friends page”.

Enter RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. This is a format (or really, a bunch of different formats) for publishing data that updates on a timely basis, like blogs, news, podcasting, announcements, or what have you. This means the meat of the website is published. No glitz or prettiness, just the data.

The great thing about this is that because feeds are published in standardized formats, they are machine readable. This means that you can get software to read RSS, or aggregate all the feeds that you want to read. An RSS reader will poll all the websites that you tell it to subscribe to, and it will let you know when there’s something new. That means that you don’t have to visit 15 different websites to see if they’ve updated anything, your reader can keep track of it for you. That means you aren’t tied to LiveJournal or any other site.

You can do a lot of neat things with RSS, too. For example, Craigslist does RSS, so you can read classifieds as they update. In fact, they let you get an RSS feed of a search! Search for what you want to buy, toss it into your RSS reader, and just wait for something to pop up. Most news sites do RSS feeds, not just of the front page, but of different columns. If you really like someone’s column, subscribe to that specific RSS feed. Many of the commercial comics don’t have RSS feeds, unfortunately, but a lot of the lesser-known ones do. Subscribe to that and you’ll have all the comics waiting for you in one place in the morning. Flickr does RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to all your friends Flickr accounts and see what pictures people are posting. My photo gallery will soon do the same. The list goes on.

The only drawback I see is that it makes it a lot harder to happen upon the comments that people leave on blog entries. There are comment feeds to many sites (including this one), but I don’t like how they work.

So what RSS reader should you use? Well, Firefox supports RSS, but it’s not done in such a way that it’s easy to use. What it does is lets you add the RSS feed to your bookmarks, so new posts will show up in your bookmark menu. That’s not too great for most things, I think. However, Firefox will give you a nice little orange icon in the bottom bar when you’re on any site that support RSS, so at least you’ll know.

On the Mac, the Safari browser also supports RSS. Their support is a lot nicer, in my opinion. It will load a page that displays the RSS feed, so you can read. It also lets you aggregate multiple feeds into one page, kind of like the LiveJournal friends page. Like Firefox, it does auto-discovery of RSS. What I do is put my RSS feeds into categories on my bookmarks bar, then set it up so you can click on the category. The bar will let you know how many new posts there are in each category, too.

Also on the Mac, NetNewsWire Lite is a dedicated RSS reader program (scroll to the bottom of that page to see the Lite version, which is free). A lot of people really like this. I’ll let Martin describe what he likes about it, since he’s a big user.

On Windows, there doesn’t seem to be any really good dedicated feed reader. Luckily, there a many online aggregators that work very well. One such site is Bloglines which is recommended by people I know who use it. Melanie did a writeup about Bloglines, as well.

As for my site, the RSS feeds are available at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!