Letter Never Sent

From eWeek:

As Apple Computer Inc. draws up its game plan for the CPUs that will power its future generations of Mac hardware, the company is holding an ace in the hole: a feature-complete version of Mac OS X running atop the x86 architecture.

According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS. The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the “South Park” cartoons) has been ongoing inside Apple since the early days of its transition to the Unix-based Mac OS X in the late ’90s.

Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company’s mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.

..living in your spinal fluid? This is crazy.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Swedish scientists have found a tiny, mysterious particle in the spinal marrow fluid which may be a new form of life and which could help explain the cause of schizophrenia.

“They may be involved in the development of the disease or may result from the disease process in brains of schizophrenic patients,” the researchers said in an abstract of the study published on Friday.

There’s so much we don’t know. Amazing.

From the UPI:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 (UPI) — A domestic violence expert who advises the Pentagon said Thursday that the military should look into whether an anti-malaria drug associated with aggression and suicidal thinking could have triggered any of the recent incidents in which Fort Bragg soldiers are suspected of killing their wives and, in two of the cases, also killed themselves.

Army troops in Afghanistan and other malarial countries are routinely prescribed Lariam, which is also known as mefloquine.

At least one of the four Fort Bragg soldiers suspected of killing his wife this summer, Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, had almost certainly been given Lariam, according to an Army medical source familiar with Nieves’ duty in Afghanistan. …

Lariam has been blamed for psychotic episodes and suicidal behavior for more than a decade. The official product information sheet for Lariam, written by drug manufacturer Hoffmann-La Roche and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, states that Lariam has been associated with aggression, paranoia and suicidal thoughts.

This article from the BBC made me realize how rarely I actually see women breastfeeding in public. Is our society so schizophrenic that we influence women to be ashamed or embarrassed to breastfeed in public? Breastfeeding has been shown to have enormous benefit for both mother and child. I found this statistic troubling:

Although 69% of mothers initially breastfeed, 21% of these stop within the first fortnight and another 36% within the next six weeks.

They don’t call it ‘mother’s milk’ for nothing!

Related:

1. Breast feeding mothers and newborn babies emit odours that may boost the sexual desires of other women. See, breast feeding is sexy!
2. TV ‘deters breast feeding’
3. US breaks breastfeeding record for simultaneous breastfeeding. 1,000 mothers in Berkely, CA.
4. BreastFeeding FAQ from La Leche

..or to not eat mammals. Three outdoorsman have died recently from a mad-cow like disease which was most likely caused by injesting infected deer and wild game like elk and caribou. Mad-cow and other similar diseases are actually caused not by viruses or bacteria but by self-replicating proteins called prions. The prions then are absorbed from the infected tissues and are transported by the lymph system to the brain where they cause the spongey holes characterisitic of these diseases.

Microsoft has just released Service Pack 3 with lots of new big fixes and security updates.

I swear, do people really the environment remains unaffected by human beings?

BBC: Alaska glaciers raise global warming fears

They say their finding also adds weight to the growing body of evidence for climate change, which climate experts predict may cause sea levels to rise by up to a metre over the next century.

An Israeli scientist has developed a featherless chicken. This thing looks just wrong. He says he’s ‘just helping evolution’. Everyday, I’m more and more glad I gave up eating meat. What’s next boneless chickens, headless chickens, vat-grown chickens, hairless cows, walking steaks? Something about this is seriously fucked up.

1. Researchers develop featherless chickens from Alanta Journal Constitution Get an eyefull of a large pink cock.
2. Cluck! Cluck! Chickens in Their Birthday Suits! These birds look so nasty.

From The Economist, The future of mind control:

IN AN attempt to treat depression, neuroscientists once carried out a simple experiment. Using electrodes, they stimulated the brains of women in ways that caused pleasurable feelings. The subjects came to no harm?indeed their symptoms appeared to evaporate, at least temporarily?but they quickly fell in love with their experimenters. …

Yet neuroscientists have been left largely to their own devices, restrained only by standard codes of medical ethics and experimentation. This relative lack of regulation and oversight has produced a curious result. When it comes to the brain, society now regards the distinction between treatment and enhancement as essentially meaningless. Taking a drug such as Prozac when you are not clinically depressed used to be called cosmetic, or non-essential, and was therefore considered an improper use of medical technology. Now it is regarded as just about as cosmetic, and as non-essential, as birth control or orthodontics. American legislators are weighing the so-called parity issue?the argument that mental treatments deserve the same coverage in health-insurance plans as any other sort of drug. Where drugs to change personality traits were once seen as medicinal fripperies, or enhancements, they are now seen as entitlements.