This is a first: a cancer treatment that sounds like it isn't god-awful.

Using a combination of high-tech CT scans, radio waves, salt water, and chemo poison, this treatment targets the tumor more specifically than others. As Wired reports:

The 21 women who took part in the initial trial had been diagnosed with inoperable and inflammatory tumors. Seventy percent of the victims of this type of breast cancer do not survive past five years.

At the end of the four-session, 12-week trial, there were no visible signs of tumors in seven of the women; and in all the rest, the tumors had diminished to an operable size.

Some day, people will look back on our current treatments for cancer the way we look at leaching, trephaning, and dosing with arsenic.

6:56:27 PM    please comment []

Tonight I went to see Attack of the Clones. I'll spare you an extended review, except to say that it wasn't as bad as The Phantom Menace. But a movie is in trouble when the audience giggles instead of swooning when the hero declares his love for the princess (Senator).

No, what I'd like to comment on was one of the previews. I love previews, and am always deeply disappointed if I arrive in the theatre too late for them. By contrast, I despise other kinds of advertisements at the movies, a contemporary innovation spawned by Satan (imported from Europe, actually). Ahem. Where was I?

Oh yes, the previews.

As those of you who have been following along know, I live in Washington, DC. So before ATOC we are treated to a trailer for The Sum of All Fears. Like other entries from the Tom Clancy thriller-mill, the plot features Jack Ryan saving the day. Except in this case there's an actual nuclear explosion. In Baltimore.

Maybe it's because of September 11. Maybe it's because of the sabre-rattling tensions in Kashmir (does nobody remember what these weapons can do?). Maybe it's because the DC audience is both better-informed than average and feeling especially vulnerable and/or responsible. But you could feel the audience cringing in the dark.

I hereby predict that this movie will not do terribly well in the Washington DC/Baltimore metropolitan axis. It may be well-made, with great production values and good acting, but I have the feeling that it cuts a little too close to the bone for us. I wonder whether audiences elsewhere in the US will feel the same way.

I have friends in the military. I have a friend who is an analyst for the CIA. I have done nuclear disarmament work myself (in the distant past). Nuclear terrorism ~ it just doesn't seem like a good topic for entertainment to me at the moment.

12:42:54 AM    please comment []