David Ronfeldt Is Blogging
David is a very smart guy (he’s done great work on modern tribes and also on netwar with Arquilla).
The Curse
For years, the holding pattern worked, at least according to its own perverse logic. Conflict simmered throughout the [area], but it followed a template that was easy to understand: suffering, frustration, protest, organized uprising, violent crackdown, memorandum of understanding, token development project, discreet cash handout, return to suffering. Year after year, the same tired set pieces were acted out, with only the cast of characters changing, a sort of rotating repertory of protests and pipelines and men arriving in helicopters.
Then, in the late [years], people started getting creative.
– The Curse of Oil by John Ghazvinian. Will we see the same dynamic take hold?
Reverse White Plague
Hell of a story, one I hope works out:
Families facing this kind of medical uncertainty are often paralyzed by their distress. But rather than give in to his anguish, Hugh Rienhoff made an extraordinary decision: He would dig into Beatrice’s genetic code and find the answer himself. A biotechnology consultant by day, Rienhoff has been an avid student of clinical genetics since he earned his medical degree nearly 30 years ago. Now he has used this expertise to transform his Bay Area home into a makeshift genetics lab. Surrounded by his children’s artwork and bookshelves loaded with his wife’s political literature, Rienhoff set about sequencing a number of Beatrice’s genes, preparing samples using secondhand equipment and turning to public databases to interpret the results. On the desk in his attic workspace are a pair of white binders stuffed with charts detailing 20,000 of Beatrice’s base pairs; the data for nearly 1 billion can be accessed from a nearby PC. Whenever he has a spare moment, Rienhoff sequesters himself in this cluttered, carpeted room and sifts through his daughter’s DNA, one nucleotide at a time. He is hunting for the single genetic quirk responsible for Beatrice’s woes—an adenine in place of a guanine, perhaps, or an extra cytosine in a key location. If he can find the culprit, he figures, maybe he can find a treatment, too.
On ThreatsWatch
Thanks goes to the TW team (now including Zen and Adam Elkus) for the invite and opportunity.
Unfortunately, I’m on vacation starting tomorrow and won’t be back until Tuesday, so my first post won’t be until then.
Onzo: Household Energy Dashboard
Very slick, very clear information presentation. Uses less than a 1 cent of electricity itself. USB enabled. Stores long run (10 year) consumption data.
Available later this year. Snazzy!