BBC News: “Skin transformed into stem cells”

After 12 days in the laboratory clumps of cells grown to mimic heart muscle tissue started beating.

This indirectly means significant progress in learning how to build a pancreas from scratch, thus being able to heal diabetes type 1 patients, not just treat them.

Exciting.

At the same time, it does raise plenty of moral issues. I disagree about the extent of the government’s involvement in deciding on those (especially the great lengths the US has gone through), but I strongly feel people should pause and think about just how far we can go with medicine before we seriously start altering evolutionary processes.

Clearly, we are capable of enormous, amazing research. But are we capable of it so we can use its results, no matter what they are? Or, rather, do we also have the ability to analyze their merits for good reason?

FreeRice helps you practice some more obscure English words while simultaneously donating grains of rice to third-world countries. It’s also a fun (and somewhat educational) way of killing time. I assume the trick here is in the displayed (but fortunately not ridiculously distracting) ads: regardless of whether someone gets a word right, the pay-per-view ad revenue does come in, yet the rice is only donated when words are correct. (Via AppleNova)

On that note, Mike Lee’s “The Power of Charity” (a bit of a follow-up to “Dinosaur Ranch”) goes into insane, smart, creative and perhaps even feasible ideas of how a software business can be profitable and charitable at the same time.

Via Tay: “Knife In Car Equals Felony Charge For Teen”

A school officer found a Swiss Army knife in Chandler’s car’s console. Under the school’s zero tolerance policy it was an automatic suspension for Chandler.
[..]
A Cobb School District spokesperson said their policy states a knife with a blade that’s more than 2 inches — the Swiss Army knife is 3 inches — results in an automatic suspension and an automatic criminal charge.

Perhaps the only thing missing from the article is some remark as to how 9/11 changed everything, and everyone – including, of course, a high school – has to be more alert these days. Or, better yet, about how Will Chandler may have wanted to pull a Chuck Norris and stab three fellow students and one teacher until a cleaning lady manages to hit him over the head from behind with a broom.

“Zero tolerance”? Zero tolerance is just a fancy way of saying you’ll shut your brain off and consider everyone guilty until proven innocent. I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel. It angered me when they introduced the concept into Uru Live regarding potential harassment, but I didn’t feel like bringing it up because just about everyone appears to disagree on with me on this. With a zero tolerance policy, nobody puts any effort into figuring out the rather, ahem, crucial question of: was it harassment?

What a sad thing society is becoming. Judgmental, prejudiced, quick to point fingers, and potentially ruining lives like that of Will’s by charging him with a felony when he didn’t even do anything. And for what? For the illusion of extra safety.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany is trying to get YouTube to pull nazi propaganda films, according to heise. If that weren’t silly enough, they didn’t even bother contacting YouTube about it, but rather went straight to German television and states that they “expect” German public attorneys to “do something about it”.

Now, perhaps things aren’t quite so fancy down there in Mainz, but where I live, we receive overwhelmingly thorough, critical and insightful education on nazi Germany, including several speeches from contemporary witnesses (though, obviously, that won’t be possible any more soon enough) who get invited to the school. We are encouraged to look at the nazis’ propaganda, whether in film form or as newspaper article with obvious bias.

If the council’s real concern were that some Germans might fall for this cheap video (which, mind you, is so boring, pointless and laughable that you’ll just skip through it), they should work towards improving education, rather than attempting to censor. Wasn’t censorship one of the worst aspects of Nazi Germany to begin with?

There’s a lot awry with German education, but I’m relatively confident that the vast majority of Germans have taken away very valuable lessons on this topic. The few who haven’t (I am, of course, not denying that they exist) won’t be further fueled by such a silly video either.

This is a Google cache the product page Logitech QuickCam Fusion. The page currently no longer exists, for whatever reason. Among the claims:

Image Clarity
Let them see the twinkle in your eye.

True 1.3-Megapixel: Get fine detail and fluid video.

That last sentence is what we’re at. Do you read this as the “video” not just being “fluid” but also “finely detailed”, namely at 1.3 Megapixels? This guy did, and chances are he’s not alone.

However, that camera contains an SPCA525A controller chip. (Not convinced?) And per the press release announcing said chip, you’d be mistaken to think so:

The SPCA525A is a USB2.0 PC camera controller designed for high-end PC camera market. The built-in MPEG/JPEG encoder and 8-bit MCU enable it to meet the capture of up to 1.3MP still image, 30 fps of VGA motion picture and 16-bit audio ADC.

Emphasis mine. The 1.3 Megapixels (probably at 1280×1024) can only be achieved when making a still image, not during video. Video, instead, is at VGA resolution, which is 0.3 Megapixels, or 640×480 – less than a quarter the display area.

Deliberately misleading marketing is yucky.