(01.02.09) Recommends:

New Year's Resolutions (Written on, and From the Prosepective of, My Blackberry Curve).

1. Lose the smudges. I want to come standard with a protective cover that prevents unsightly smudges and tiny micro-fractures in the screen. I'm becoming the Tammy Faye Baker of mobile devices. Ugh.

2. Flash people more often. I want to come with a web-browser that supports mutliple tabs and Flash (and a media player that can be easily minimized).

3. Become a sharp shooter. In a world under the reign of Web 2.0, convenience is increasingly valued over quality. But If I marginally increase the quality of my camera, I'll be Panglossian.

4. Learn to speak in tongues. When users are riding on the metro and publish blog posts to, e.g., Mobile Blogger, html tags should be recognized. (In reality, this is probably more of a Gmail issue. But, alas, the unexamined life is not worth living.)

5. Get fatter. My keys should be a little bigger, so even novices can confidently type with the meaty part of their thumbs rather than tentatively peck with the nail portion of their thumbs. (The BB Bold -- that tramp -- has the perfect sized keys, but I have the perfect amount of "clickiness")

6. Get braces. The F and J key -- or some appropriate combination -- should come with little notches, like on a standard keyboard, so even novices will be able to type while looking at the screen rather than looking at the keyboard.

7. Get timed. Changes in time zones and day light saving should occur automatically. Does this really not already happen?? Don't think it does. There's both a BB and "network" source for time and date, but nobody wants to take they time to figure out the difference.

8. Be nicer to friends. Texting a number not already in the address book takes too long. You have to scroll all the way up to the Use One Time (or whatever) option. As a result people never use me to text and everybody thinks I hate them. Sad face. (Of course, if my friends were really friends, they'd have BBM and this resolution would be mooted. Hint, hint ppl. Srsly.)

9. Get Logged. My call log feature is laughable. I know I'm a mobile computing device first and a phone second, but really, c'mon.

That's my 949 suckas!

Haziyah's & Waie's Birthday

January 2, 2009 - Hope Begins in the Dark

It’s a new year. Most of us are very glad to leave 2008 behind, with all the economic turmoil of recent months. May we have much better news in 2009!

There’s some encouraging news already on the cancer research front. A researcher at Cornell University named Michael King has developed something he calls a “lint brush” for the blood – “a tiny, implantable device that captures and kills cancer cells in the bloodstream before they spread through the body.”

This tiny, tubelike device contains a special protein called “selectin” on its inside surface. As blood cells flow through the tube, free-floating cancer cells bond to the selectin and are held there, so they can do no harm. Early test results indicate that about 30% of cancer molecules stick to the selectin on each pass. Since our blood circulates through the body constantly, this means that just one of these devices can eventually filter the body’s entire blood supply. Each repeated pass results in more cancer cells being corralled on the surface of the tube. Then, a second protein is released, causing the cancer cells to die.

I wonder if this device could work in the vessels of the lymphatic system, just as they do in the bloodstream?

Another article tells how scientists are scanning the ocean floor to discover new compounds that can be developed into anti-cancer drugs. The University of California at Santa Cruz has a set-up whereby sea-floor sediment is piped into special, chemical-scanning robots, that analyze them for compounds that could be useful to the pharmaceutical industry.

From the article:

“In its first year of operation, the lab has already had two interesting hits. One, the as-yet-unnamed product of a rod-shaped marine bacterium, is 98 percent efficient at killing the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness, a fatal disease common in sub-Saharan Africa. The other, dubbed ‘tamoxilog,’ is biologically similar to tamoxifen, a drug commonly used to treat breast cancer, though preliminary tests suggest tamoxilog is twice as powerful.”



Maybe the next big lymphoma drug is at the bottom of the sea, waiting to be discovered. Stranger things have happened.

Christian essayist Anne Lamott has written: “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

I doubt if Anne was thinking about the inky darkness of the ocean floor when she wrote that. Her words are oddly appropriate, though: for this is surely a story of hope that begins in the dark.