A severely burned Irish girl will be the first ever face transplant recipient [boingboing]. Not to be grotesque or anything, but I wonder if the recipient will actually look like the donor after the procedure is done. Or, will the recipient's own facial bone structure greatly change the shape and appearance of the transplanted face? 3:14:23 PM      

With prospects of war, a stale economy and other social problems facing our country, it seems a waste of time and resources for the government to make laws banning cloning [Wired]. Yet, it is an issue that has "ethical" implications. I, on the other hand, feel that the government should spend more time solving the problems of the economy, terrorism and the issue of Iraq.

A handful of human cells is irrelevant. Millions of human cells die each day in a typical human being and no one takes any notice. But, as soon as those cells represent a "human life" than it becomes an issue. If these bundles of cells did, in fact, represent a human life then I might agree that they should have rights. But the fact is that they do not represent a life. Moreover, their utility for preserving human lives is uncontestable. Leave science alone to better life and keep your laws out of what you don't understand. 11:10:14 AM      

Since I haven't been keeping up on my news reading over the past weeks, there is a lot of interesting stuff that I haven't written about. Among other things we have people sneaking into Los Alamos, Pioneer 10 running out of juice, virtual protests, online music subscription services and Ogg Vorbis hardware decoders [via ArsTechnica]. 11:45:34 AM      

A teacher in Chicago is suing Loews Cineplex for showing advertisements before movies [Yahoo! News].

...the theater circuit's policy of playing pre-film product commercials amounts to a deceptive business practice because the ads begin at the time advertised as the start of a feature movie.

I wholly agree with this point of view. However, I actually do enjoy watching movie trailers because I like to know what movies are coming out. It is interesting to note, however, that the name "trailer" comes from when advertisements came after the movie. In those days credits came before the movie and advertisements came after. It's funny how that has been turned around. Thanks, Dave, for the link. 10:03:15 AM      

Garry Kasparov has written an opinion piece about his recent draw against computer chess opponent, Deep Junior [ArsTechnica]. 10:04:52 AM      

The chess match between the highest ranking human player, Gary Kasparov, and the highest ranking computer player, Deep Junior, ended in stalemate this weekend [New Scientist]. Many spectators were disappointed in Kasparov, claiming that he had the stronger board position when he agreed to a draw, but Kaparov counters that his primary goal was to avoid a loss and that any mistake on his part would have been immediately exploited by Deep Junior. 10:12:45 AM      

Linux starts to look more like Windows, Windows starts to look more like Macintosh, Macintosh starts to look more like a lollypop and yet is the software that runs on these systems actually getting better? Here's the point of view of an admittedly non-technical reporter who points out the divide that separates techies from users [The Washington Post].

To overcome this cultural gap between techies and computer users, Mann concludes, tech folk "would need both technical and interpersonal skills."

It is a very difficult task to balance the "needs" of computer users from the technical challenges of meeting those needs. For one, the underlying systems on top of which applications are written continue to change. This forces developers to regularly throw away perfectly good tools for ones that do little more than the old tools. Secondly, the attempts to build higher level frameworks and component libraries that could potentially simplify the development process have never fully succeeded. The problem is much harder than people, even developers, often realize. Third, the desire to produce tight, simple applications usually gets overridden by the demands of end-users for more and better. The result is short timelines to pack more and more features into a release while simultaneously making it unfeasible for developers to catch all of the bugs.

There is little doubt that simple to use, bug free software would be a plus, but is that really what people want? Case in point: I have recently started using AbiWord on my laptop installed with Linux. I found it to be very simple to use and free of bugs. I decided to install it on my Windows 2000 box and found that it was a least as good for my needs as Microsoft Word. Now, AbiWord provides 100% of the features that your average user needs from a word processor. Yet, nobody is really interested in switching to a simple application like this when a more feature rich tool is available. Never mind that they would probably be more productive with the simpler to use tool. It must be part of human nature to want the biggest and the best tool available. So, until you can convince people that simpler tools are good, or even better, software will continue to be bloated and buggy. 10:44:56 AM      

I've been using Struts for a while to build web applications, but I have finally reconciled myself to the idea that Struts breaks object orientation and forces development back into the dark ages of structured programming. So, I have decided to find a framework that looks more like Swing. In other words, a) provides encapsulation of the ugly details of HTTP, b) allows UI components to be connected to the abstract data objects they represent using events and c) provides true separation of presentation (in HTML) from logic (in Java).

I am thinking about building my own framework and am in the process of analyzing this option with a couple of friends who are also interested in a new framework. However, I found a site that has links to many, if not all of the Java web application frameworks that are currently publicly available [Wafer]. Now I face the daunting task of choosing one of these frameworks that is already in development or building my own... 10:34:30 AM      

Follow Chris in his zany adventures with the Space Mormons as they enlighten him about The Book of Space Mormon [The Ruminant]. 9:52:42 AM      

Since I was very young, I have regularly walked and talked during sleep. I first became aware of this when I was about six or seven years old when I would wake up in the morning on the living room couch and would have no idea how I got there. It happened again and again until it finally occurred to me that I must be a sleepwalker.

As I got older, my sleepwalking got more complex. Of course, I had to rely on second-hand accounts to know what had happened, since I couldn't even remember the event the following morning. When I was about twelve, my mom told me how she saw me crouching down behind my bed. When she asked me what I was doing, I told her that I was playing hide-and-seek with my sister. My sister was asleep in her bed, but in my commingled wakeful-dream state, she was right around the corner searching for me.

I have had conversations with other sleepers, tried to storm out of my house in a rage, sung songs fluently in foreign languages that I did not speak (on at least two documented occasions), attempted to hide behind a framed painting hanging on the wall, organized about fifty pens and pencils in a neat arrangement on the floor, danced around the room and many other things, all in my sleep.

When I sleepwalk, most observers don't even realize that I am asleep at first. My eyes are open, my body is coordinated, my speech is clear. However, my perception of reality is usually very skewed. I have always described it as "acting out my dreams," but it may be that that is not an accurate account. The objects in my room turn into different things. For instance I will often become partially aware of my sleepwalking and discover that what I thought was a person, was really a shadow and what I thought was a strange person in my bed, was actually my wife.

As I've gotten older, my sleepwalking has become less frequent, but also more intense. However, I've also "learned" to take note of it and have even been able to arouse myself on a couple of occasions to where I realize that I am sleepwalking and I will return to my bed. But, through all of this, I've never viewed sleepwalking as a bad thing. I've accepted it as part of me, of what I am. I think it is useful to analyze it and to try and understand it better, but to call it a "disorder" is going too far.

Here's a fairly long article on the subject that I friend sent to me today [New York Times].

The article touches on a lot of points and I found myself saying "that's me" on more than one occasion. Overall, I don't have any complaints with the article, but what I do have serious disagreements with is the treatment of sleepwalking as a "disorder." Why does everything that doesn't fit neatly into a prescribed notion of normality automatically become a disorder. I think the sciences of psychology/psychiatry would gain a lot by simply recognizing that phenomena of the human brain exist, possibly then classifying them, but without adding editorial judgment upon these phenomena.

We, as a race, know so little about what it takes to construct a functioning organism, much less an organism that is aware of itself. We are grossly ignorant of the importance of these psychological conditions during our waking life. How many intellects and artists are being suffocated by over diagnosis and over prescription to "treat" the horrendous condition of Attention Deficit Disorder? Maybe this so called disorder conceals benefits that we have yet to recognize.

What unknown side effects would result if I started "treating" my sleepwalking "disorder"? Maybe my intellect would be affected. Maybe my creativity would be impaired. The point is, we don't have the slightest clue. So, I would not dream (pun not intended) of letting a psychiatrist adulter my mind with drugs. Drugs should only be a last resort for people who have a condition that is so severe that it endangers them or those around them.

Whenever I start hearing about reductionistic approaches to the human mind I am left amazed that scientists still believe that the mind will be understood with such simplistic models. "Exceptions prove the rule", but in the case of the mind, "exceptions are the rule." 2:56:59 PM      

I have been on the fence for a while over Xbox vs. PS2. The decision was finally made for me when I received an Xbox for my birthday. Microsoft's quarterly SEC filings certainly haven't made me feel better about the system's prospects with the company reporting quarterly losses that doubled that of last year [Slashdot]. Combine that with their report that they may have to lower the price of Windows and you have to ask yourself where they're going to get the money to keep the Xbox propped up. On the other hand, you can never underestimate Microsoft; you never know what they are going to pull out of their hat. I just hope I get some good playing time out of it before all of the games disappear. 9:44:55 AM      

Microsoft has managed to get a stay on the order to ship Sun's Java with their Windows OS <frown> and they have informed investors that they may have to lower the price of Windows due to competition from the open-source community <grin> [ArsTechnica]. 9:29:44 AM      

The landscape of Linux on the desktop continues to change. Every time I turn around I discover some exciting feature that is being included in the latest version of KDE or Gnome. The latest thing to catch my attention is a vector graphics library that will be used in an upcoming version of Gnome to render icons and even GUI widgets [LibRSVG][via Slashdot]. Apparently, they have been putting a lot of work into the renderer and it is able to render faster than PNG. This is an important point, since you want the UI to render quickly. The advantage of a vector graphic icons, of course, is that they can be scaled up and down without any loss in quality. This is in contrast to raster icons that become more and more pixelated as they are scaled up. Check out a "metatheme" screenshot that uses the SVG library [screenshot]. 10:29:13 AM