Dana Blankenhorn

Rice Science Friday: Nuclear Weapons Against Cancer

School is back in session so it's time for another edition of Rice Science Friday. Or Monday. Or Wednesday. Or whatever.

Today's subject is cancer. Specifically, that last cancer cell which defines whether you're really cured or just "in remission."

When patients are given radiation, they're just given beta particles, which move quickly but lack real power. Alpha particles, which contain protons and neutrons, pack more of a punch and move more slowly, but they can also kill you.

Grad student (and demon flag footballer) Keith Hartman worked with a radiation oncologist and research scientist at the University of Washington (Go Huskies) to load radioactive astatine inside carbon nanotubes. (The astatine came from the UW's cyclotron.) This can go after a single cancer cell and absolutely obliterate it.

This Week's Clue: A Party of Belief

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 34  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of August 27.

Enjoy.

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The Democratic Party has always been about governing, not belief.

This is a property of its history. The party from the beginning has been based on Southerners and urban machines. It was a party for working men, but also for racist elites.

So it became about power, and for a century only New York could really pull the strands together. New York reformers Grover Cleveland and Franklin D. Roosevelt were the only Democrats to win majority support between 1860 and 1960. Both were upstate New Yorkers who ran around their own party's elites, Cleveland to the Mugwumps and Roosevelt to the Populists, in order to win. (Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman were, like Bill Clinton, elected by a plurality of the popular vote, not a majority.)

It is belief which sustains a party, which transforms it into a movement that can win majority support even without a great leader.

For 40 years Democrats have mainly run against something. "We're all Nixon's niggers now," said George Carlin   in 1973, and that's been the heart of the party's platform ever since. We know what we're against. We know who we're against. What we stand for is unclear.

This is especially true now that the Nixon Thesis of Conflict has reached its end. While Netroot bloggers continue to argue against the latest atrocities, both federal and state, they have spent far less time laying down their own belief systems, their own points of agreement, their own myths and values.

I have stated here that the new Thesis for Democrats should be based on the myths and values of the Internet. Consensus moves us forward. Access to the tool is the key to progress. Transparency is essential. These are the values we have seen work on the Internet, in standards bodies, in business models, and in governance. When the Internet's working right these are the values which prevail, and I believe most Netroots bloggers have internalized them to such a degree they're not even aware of it.

But what about the candidates?

The Only Way I Get Into Space

It is still possible that you, and I, can reach space in our lifetimes.

It's still possible thanks to the imagination of Arthur C. Clarke and the hard work of people like Rice researcher Wade Adams.

Dr. Adams, an Air Force graduate, is now director of the Smalley Institute at Rice. This makes him head cheerleader and bottle washer for all those other Rice scientists -- professors, graduate fellows, graduate students and (yes, because it's Rice) even undergrads -- working to solve big problems like the space elevator.

A space elevator is just what it sounds like. It's basically two strips of material, arranged in a giant ellipse, reaching from the surface of the Earth to a point in geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles in space. Clarke first conceived of the idea in 1947. In Clarke's fiction the bottom of the elevator is in Sri Lanka, his home for many decades now. When most Americans talk about it, they think of a place in the mid-Pacific. Whatever.

Dirty Little Secret for Blog Traffic

Want to get a ton of worthless traffic to your blog?

Just do what I do. When you copy a picture over to illustrate your blog post, file it under its real name.

When newspapers and other large sites file pictures, they use names like this -- 11883006_400.jpg. When I file a copy of a picture, I write what it is. And that name carries over when the picture appears online.

Here are two quick examples.

One of the most popular posts I ever wrote here involved my 1966 Game, a series where I looked for equivalents of important 1966 figures in the headlines of 2006. For one post I found an old picture of Grace Slick from that period, on a search engine, and used it in the post. The name I gave the picture file, after I downloaded it, was Grace_Slick.jpg. (Oh, the answer was Ann Coulter.)

Ever since then, every day, I've gotten a few, or a few dozen, hits to that page. Almost all from image search engines. I don't know if those people are reading what I wrote, or enjoying it, or what. Why they want an old picture of Grace Slick from my blog is beyond me, but it must be popping up to the top of Google Images and people remember here. (I hope this pleases her.)

The Duke of Oil - Chapter 17

The following is a work of fiction. Here is the Table of Contents, which is updated as new chapters are written.

The Duke of Oil is the third in a series of sci-fi novels of the type known as alternate history. What's different is that this series takes place in our time, with characters familiar in your real life.

The first book in the series, The Chinese Century, was written late 2004. Its table of contents is here. The second,  The American Diaspora, was written in 2005. The table of contents for that book is here.

A synopsis of the series is here.

Has YouTube Cracked the Video Business Model Puzzle?

One thing has become clear since I began covering the business of the Internet in 1994. It's much harder to innovate business models than it is technology.

Many companies have figured this out and begun acquiring tech outfits even before they have a business model.

The most notorious such acquisition was Google's purchase of YouTube. And now, over a year later, they claim to have that business model problem licked.

The answer -- overlays. Clickable ads run on a portion of the screen, for a portion of the clip's run-time. The alternative, running ads before, during or after the clip, was rejected by Google because, it said, users wouldn't stand for it.

Shoeful Mike

The coming end of the Michael Vick story has me thinking about another, similar story from the distant past, that of Shoeless Joe Jackson. (Picture from the sport gallery of Andy Amato.)

Like Vick, Jackson was a man with country origins, laid low by a Commissioner who was trying to "send a message." In the Jackson case, however, the hysteria was far more intense, a conspiracy to "fix" the 1919 World Series. Jackson actually hit .373 during the series, but he made some crucial errors, and admitted taking $5,000 from gamblers as part of the conspiracy.

Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis was brought in as Commissioner of Baseball to deal with the mess. The way he dealt with it was to throw Jackson, and the other "Black Sox" out of baseball for life. Without the conspiracy, Jackson was a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame. At the height of the furor a kid reportedly begged the outfielder, "say it ain't so, Joe." Jackson had no reply.

Vick's case is different. There is no doubt of his guilt. CNN resident legal idiot Jeffrey Toobin said today that "lots of athletes have come back from wife-beating charges," and this is just dogs, but no athlete ever abused a wife as Michael Vick did his dogs, and the breed in general.

Is Fred Thompson's Cancer Back?

It's the question that dare not speak its name.

Has the cancer Fred Thompson's doctor said was "in remission" several months ago now come back, with a vengeance?

I'm not involved in this. I'm a Democrat. I have friends and relatives who have had cancer, some of whom have come back strong, others of whom have passed on. This is not a political point.

But for a political reporter, it is a question which demands to be asked.

Yet it isn't.

Short Term Values, Long Term Values

When political assumptions are shiny and new, idealism abounds. As those beliefs are validated by events, they become rigid. When they are challenged beliefs can become an ideology. (Picture from BakedZiti.)

After this ideology triumphs and you enter a period of excess, the next crisis may have nothing whatsoever to do with the original political assumptions. You meet the new challenges as you met the old, it doesn't work, and you're left practicing short term values.

Short term values differ from pragmatism in that their justification is ideological. You're just trying to get past the crisis, which is not the problem at hand but the next election.

This turns out to be a brief biography of Karl Rove (right). Rove started as an idealist, then became an ideologist and, at the height of his power, began practicing the short term values meant to get George W. Bush past elections, not problems.

The tragedy has been repeated time-after-time throughout American history.

• Jacksonian Democracy couldn't deal with the collapse of its ideological assumption about how sections must be balanced. So we had James Buchanan trying to paper over the nation's split in the 1850s.
• Lincoln's Thesis of Union could not deal with the new urban-rural or labor-capital splits of the 1890s. So we had Grover Cleveland borrowing gold from J.P. Morgan to keep the government going.
• Theodore Roosevelt's Progressivism couldn't deal with the crisis of the Great Depression. So we had Herbert Hoover re-nominated by acclamation in 1932.
• Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Liberalism could not deal with the social breakdowns of the Vietnam Era. So we had Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.
• The Nixon Thesis of Conflict has no Clue about dealing with the climate crisis, the War Against Oil or the aging of America. So we have Iraq, and Katrina, along with the corruption of our system and values.

This is not to excuse those leaders who followed these assumptions to their end for their personal responsibility involving what followed. Just to explain it.

Which is what I think Democrats need to do now with Rove. Leave him behind. And the way you do that is by understanding why he did what he did, why he practiced short term values. Then practice long term values.

It was a simple lack of vision, an ideological floundering in the rising tide of a new era, which un-did Rove.

And he is undone. That's another important point. Treating him seriously at this point is silly.

He is an historical artifact, nothing more. He has no more relevance to the future than does James Buchanan (left), or Grover Cleveland, or Herbert Hoover, or Lyndon Johnson.

A Synopsis of The Chinese Century, The American Diaspora and The Duke Of Oil

I have been writing what is turning into an alternate history trilogy online for almost three years now.

It occurs to me that, when you read a new chapter in the latest book, The Duke of Oil, you may have no clear idea what you’re reading because you lack any background in what has come before.

It is especially hard to follow since the first two books were written while I was writing Mooreslore at Corante and thus may be hard to find. Also, since many of the characters are, in fact, real people, living real lives which have nothing to do with my fiction, well the more explanation the better.

So for those new to my fiction, here is a synopsis of the stories so far.