Jinn of Quality and Risk

Shuttleworth called the journey "the best thing I've ever done" and is taking home two souvenirs — the three-ton remainder of the Soyuz capsule that brought the trio back to Earth and the bulky spacesuit that protected him during the fiery descent. When asked whether he would go up again, Shuttleworth gave a big smile and said without a moment's hesitation: "Anytime." 

A study of treatments for depression compared the famous herbal remedy St. John's Wort with the prescription drug Zoloft: "St. John's wort fully cured 24 percent of the depressed people who received it, and Zoloft cured 25 percent — but the placebo fully cured 32 percent." [Washington Post]

Pass the sugar! 

It's time to colonise Mars. Just because it's a cool place and sounds like good fun. And also because our destiny is in the stars.

More details available in the following books: The Case for Mars and Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization. If you can't go there or don't quite understand the attraction, read excellent science-fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson's award-winning trilogy): Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. See also the Mars Society and buy a Mars map for the cause.

Some people always ask what space travel contributed so far. This site has PDF newsletters in which NASA partially answers that question. Further, ask yourself what has sea travel contributed? 

Scientists produce a "draft" of the mouse genome — the "life code" of the most important animal model in biomedical research. They're finding many similarities with the human genome; R&D in genetic tech will accelerate and profit. The mouse gene-mapping effort was jointly undertaken by a number of research institutes; the (freely available) information produced by this effort includes the mouse, human, zebrafish, fly, and mosquito gene maps. Colourful maps and documentation are at the Mouse Genome Server.

Many moons ago I shared an office with a Logitech developer who was shrinking code to fit it in a small chip on a (computer) mouse. He used creative tricks such as jumping into data tables that happened to contain machine code similar to what he needed. We laughed, knew it was disgusting coding practice, but it felt good to squeeze the last byte out of that memory. 

Current productivity growth is for the most part linked to information technology. Imagine what it will be like when we add biotech and nanotech productivity improvements. Some Perspective: 8% annual growth means doubling productivity every 9 years; 16% growth would lead to a doubling in 5 years; and 24% growth would lead to a 3-year doubling pace — which translates to an eight-fold increase in 9 years, or a 200-fold increase in one generation.

Expect our standard of living to soar since it is proportional to productivity... The direct economic consequence is that capital becomes cheaper, and labour relatively dearer — thus more expensive (read: the future lies in higher wages, not in cheap labour). 

Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed on Saturday. Sweden's median household income at the end of the 1990s was $26,800, or about 68% of the average American income, $39,400. By contrast black American households had a median income about 70% of the U.S. median. [Reuters] 

All your news in seventeen syllables.