The New Yorker's "Drug War Bulletins" are sure to boil your blood: a man who died for want of a liver transplant because the hospital insisted he needed "drug treatment" for his medical marijuana use; a suburban San Diego housewife who will spend the next 20 years in jail because she was peripherally involved in a heroin deal while she was in college in 1975; and a pulmonologist who'd been favored by the drug warriors until his giant, well-funded, unreproachable study concluded that pot didn't give you lung cancer, and who is now a pariah whose research conclusions have been boycotted by the press.

The War on Some Drugs is as unwinnable and destructive as all the other wars on abstract nouns. Who needs terrorists to rip America apart when you've got drug warriors killing off, imprisioning and shunning its innocents?

.In Seattle, a fifty-six-year old man died last Thursday after being refused a liver transplant because he had followed his doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana to ease the symptoms of hepatitis C. From the Associated Press story:

His death came a week after a doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list. The team had previously told him it would not consider placing him on the list until he completed a 60-day drug-treatment class…

The Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system, leaves it to individual hospitals to develop criteria for transplant candidates.

At some, people who use “illicit substances”—including medical marijuana, even in the dozen states that allow it—are automatically rejected. At others, patients are given a chance to reapply if they stay clean for six months.

The cruelty and stupidity of this beggars belief. This patient did not need “drug treatment.” He was already undergoing drug treatment. Nor did he need to get “clean.” He was already clean. It’s the drug war that’s dirty. (H/t: John Leone.)

Link (via Making Light)

You know how the mobile carriers charge you a couple cents to SMS a few characters' worth of text over their network? When you add it up, you're paying about a zillion bucks a meg for that traffic -- seriously! A space scientist from Leicester has calculated that SMS data is four times more expensive than receiving data from the Hubble space telescope.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.

He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

Link (via Consumerist)

In certain markets, Sprint has always used affiliates to sell its service, rather than building out its own efforts. Some of those affiliate relationships caused problems back in 2004/2005 when Sprint merged with Nextel -- as Nextel's service existed in some of those markets, potentially "competing" with the Sprint affiliates who had agreements that Sprint would not compete directly. So, with the new WiMax joint venture with Clearwire, Sprint knew that the big affiliate iPCS would be upset. In fact, last week, Sprint sued iPCS in Delaware seeking a declaratory judgment that the new joint venture did not break their agreement with iPCS. That lawsuit appears to have been filed slightly before iPCS filed its own lawsuit in Illinois against Sprint. Chances are the two suits will be combined in some manner, but it's yet another hurdle that Sprint needs to clear before it can get this new WiMax offering off the ground. Sprint may have a decent claim here -- as the agreement with iPCS is focused only on 1.9GHz spectrum, whereas the WiMax network is on 2.5GHz spectrum. Either way, it seems like these affiliate relationships may be a lot more pain than they're worth.

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religious freak sends word of the public beta of Powerset, a closely watched San Francisco startup that promises an "understanding engine" to revolutionize Web search. An article in SearchEngineLand points out that Powerset is reaching higher than for mere "natural language." Techcrunch has more details and analysis. For the beta, Powerset makes available all of Wikipedia to search — not all the Web. It's said that their understanding engine required a month to grok Wikipedia's 2.5M articles. The Web is currently at least 8,000 times as large.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smivs writes "US researchers say they have developed an effective way to kill unwanted plants and animals that hitch a ride in the ballast waters of cargo vessels. Tests showed that a continuous microwave system was able to remove all marine life within the water tanks. The UN lists 'invasive species' dispersed by ballast water discharges as one of the four main threats to the world's marine ecosystems. For example European zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) have infested more than 40% of the US's inland waterways. Between 1989 and 2000, up to $1B is estimated to have been spent on controlling the spread of the alien invader."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Slashdot first started up, it automatically put the name "Anonymous Coward" into its comment system for anyone who chose not to leave a name. When we started using Slashcode ourselves in the early days, we followed suit, and have kept it up ever since (which still gets amusing when people assume all of the Anonymous Coward comments are by the same person). However, it looks like a malicious hacker (or, cracker, if you must) in Chile has decided to take that name a bit further. After stealing data on 6 million Chileans (including the daughter of the president) and posting it all online, it came out that the hacker was using the name "Anonymous Coward" to brag about his exploits. Hopefully, the Chilean police don't now try to shut down Slashdot.

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Fractal 23, from New York's Takeshi Miyakawa Design, might just be the coolest chest of drawers I've ever seen. Link (via DVice)

Man Babies is a bizarre blog that has nothing but photos of dads whose heads have been swapped with their kids' . Link

Fields writes "It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered, but few people actually use a recovery service because they're expensive and not always successful. Even fewer people ever get any insights into the process, as recovery companies are secretive about their methods and rarely reveal any more information that is necessary for billing. Geek.com has an article walking through a drive recovery handled by DriveSavers. The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process. From the article, "'[M]y drive failed in about every way you can imagine. It had electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage. Seagate considered it dead, but I didn't give up. It's actually pretty amazing that they were able to recover nearly all of the data. Of course, they had to do some rebuilding, but that's what you expect when you send it to the ER for hard drives.'" Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics is reporting that NASA — faced with the looming retirement of the space shuttle, and planning for longer missions like the one to Mars we've been discussing — is looking to free up its budget and depend a lot more on private space startups to carry key payloads into orbit in the next few years. For an agency so steeped in bureaucracy, it seems like everyone from NASA chief Mike Griffin to contracted officials to the key players in this in-depth podcast roundtable is finally acknowledging that commercial rocketeering (space tourists aside) is a more efficient a means of getting back into space for NASA. Quoting: 'Because of a new focus for NASA's strategic investments — not to mention incentives like the Ansari X Prize, which spurred the space-tourism business, and the Google Lunar X Prize, which could do the same for payloads — private-sector spaceships could be ready for government service soon, says Sam Scimemi, who heads NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. "The industry has grown up," he tells PM. "It used to be that only NASA or the Air Force could do such things."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following New York's decision to change its laws to force Amazon.com to collect sales tax for New York-related transactions, other states are apparently going back and reevaluating Amazon and taxes. Texas, for example, has been alerted to the fact that Amazon probably should be paying sales tax in the state. This is different than the situation in New York. The rule has always been that, if the company has a "physical presence" in the state, it is required to collect and pay sales tax. The question in New York was what counted as a physical presence. Amazon doesn't have offices or a distribution center in New York, but New York was trying to claim that all its Amazon affiliates in New York represent a physical presence. In Texas, however, Amazon actually does have a physical presence in the form of a distribution center. It's just that the state of Texas didn't recognize that until someone from a Dallas newspaper pointed it out. So even if Amazon is successful in fighting the law in New York, it looks like the renewed interest in forcing online retailers to collect and pay sales tax is catching up to Amazon in other ways.

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Brian McConnell says:

The Worldwide Lexicon is a community translation system that enables a website's readers to translate to the languages they speak. We're beta testing a multilingual blogging service, Der Mundo.

You can find Boing Boing at boingboing.dermundo.com where you can view, edit and score translations, and help make Boing Boing accessible to everyone who speaks your language. Der Mundo translates new posts using machine translation services, after which readers can edit or replace these rough translations to improve them. Der Mundo guesses which languages you speak based on your browser preferences, and tries to display articles in your language first. It falls back to the original text if a translation has not been posted yet.

Readers can score translations via a simple five star rating scale, and can edit existing translations by clicking on a pencil icon adjacent to each item. Readers can contribute translations by clicking on English --> ____ links below each article headline. This will take you to a web editor where you can create or edit a translation, as well as view the revision history.

WWL is an open source project, and is developing a suite of tools to enable websites and blogs to go multilingual, using a combination of machine translation, volunteers (readers) and professional translators. The project's goal is to eliminate the language barrier for interesting content by making it easy for people to form translation communities and services around topics, websites or languages. They will be releasing a professional translation hub, under the New BSD license, in early summer. If you're interested in contributing code to the project, or in helping localize the interface to more languages, contact Brian McConnell (brian@worldwidelexicon.org)

Link

Keeping track of my expenses was one of my resolutions this year. I've been using a terrific web-based application called PearBudget to help me keep my promise to myself. PearBudget is streamlined, lightweight, and elegant, and because it's web-based, I can use my iPhone to enter receipts as soon as I get them.

I asked Charlie, the co-creator of PearBudget, to explain why he and his partner Sarah made PearBudget.

At the core of our wanting to make PearBudget was that we wanted simple control over our finances.

Quicken and other more advanced accounting programs are overkill for the simple task of tracking your expenses and making a budget. Financial services that automate everything don't compel you to actively reconsider your spending habits. We wanted to be in control, but we didn't want to be overwhelmed. We designed PearBudget to ride that line.

Our background isn't in programming or banking, but in information design — Sarah's a map designer; Charlie's a typesetter and occasional web designer. So our interest in developing a better financial tool had a lot to do with creating a simple presentation of the user's information, and with giving the user a good experience developing and keeping a budget.

It's a truly beautiful app. You can try it for 30 days for free; after that it's $3 a month. Link

Linux.com has an interesting look at Google Gears and one of its leading evangelists, Brad Neuberg. "For Neuberg -- as for most developers -- the idea of expanding the Web's capabilities is intriguing in itself. But both inside and outside Google, his argument is that there's more at stake than just a particular piece of technology. In fact, he does not even seem particularly concerned whether Gears or some rival project takes on the role he envisions. What matters, he says, is that finding a solution to the problems of the Web is essential not only to the continued evolution of the Web, but also to its continued freedom. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Click on image for enlargement) The latest city to meet the perfect pixel placers at eBoy is Los Angeles, my beloved home. Link

DesignObserver's put together a great book/slideshow/Flickr group of beautiful table of contents pages from various books:

In this book, we have gathered together thirty Table of Contents pages from our personal collections. On the surface, the selection may elude standard organizational conceits: why a design collection that also includes poetry and fiction? Why Philip Larkin and not Billy Collins, Ayn Rand and not Philip Roth, Paul Rand and not Jan Tschichold? Like “next” itself, there’s no intentional logic or over-arching plan: we just found these examples engaging, the discrepancies between them even more so.

Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary. There are odd, even anachronistic cultural references, gestures that date these books in a manner oddly soothing. They remind us that what we will be has, by its very nature, a great deal to do with where we’ve been — and that there is no future without a past.

Link (via Kottke)

Livejournal's Snuffykin followed the plans in Craft magazine to replace the uppers on her worn-out shoes with knitted versions. The newly remade Converse kick all kinds of ass.

The shoe part:
* I cut the uppers and tongues off of Champion flat tops, then put several layers of gesso on the surfaces to whiten them up. I finished this with a few coats of matte sealer.

* Heavy duty yarn is hard to find. I found it at Joann Fabrics, finally. * Since the Champion shoe material was leather and not fabric like Converse, a sewing needle didn't go through easily. I used a bookbinding awl to punch holes through the layers of leather around the sole before sewing. Still, it was tricky.
* The Champion heel was shorter than the Converse heel, so I seamed the pieces rising above short heel.
* Running out of time, I sewed using running stitch, which actually holds up.

The results:
The shoes are wearable, walkable, but floppy. Partly because the heel is too short. I could have just followed the instructions for a size 8 for a more snug fit. They're messy looking, due to my rush to finish, but I'm not going to change a thing. I never wore those shoes anymore, but now they're just for special occasions. :)

Link (via Craft)