“We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way–an honorable way–in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered…

My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaK5-YnIUIw&x-yt-cl=84924572&x-yt-ts=1422411861

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This is my dog…. [seen on craigslist]

I have had her for six years. She has been frustrating and infuriating at times. She has cost me money I wanted to spend on other things. She has been inconvenient at times. I’ve had to arrange my life with her in mind. I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything in the world, because I love her and she brings me joy.Now, to get to the point of this post. I want to tell you about something amazing that I did. I MOVED. I moved three times actually. Amazingly, I KEPT MY FUCKING DOG! Can you imagine? Did you know someone can move and still keep their dog? What an amazing concept, isn’t it?Oh, I also got married, had a baby, and changed jobs, AND STILL MANAGED TO KEEP MY DOG! Am I the only human being alive who’s been able to do this?See that little cat next my dog in the picture, well we just found out she has AIDS, yes, feline AIDS. She will require expensive medicine for the rest of her short life. Guess what? I’M KEEPING THE FUCKING CAT TOO. I’m not going to dump her off on Craigslist to assuage some mild hint of guilt I feel because I’m too lazy, weak and irresponsible to fulfill a commitment I made to a living, loving animal.To all you who do otherwise, FUCK YOU! I hope your spouse leaves you, penniless and alone. May God keep you, though you don’t deserve it.

• do NOT contact me w

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETB-eh5bXb0&x-yt-cl=84503534&x-yt-ts=1421914688#t=248

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We Suck at HTTP

By Deane Barker on January 7, 2015

I absolutely loved this New York Times column which lamented the world of apps, where we don’t have the capability to link to content anymore:

Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links. They do not have web addresses. They live in worlds by themselves, largely cut off from one another and the broader Internet. And so it is much harder to share the information found on them.

Yes, yes, for the love of God yes.

We have broken HTTP. We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away.

URLs have a purpose. We are very cavalier about that purpose. We don’t use canonicals. We’re sloppy about switching back and forth between HTTP and HTTPs. We don’t bother to logically structure our URLs. We rebuild websites and let all the links break. We don’t appreciate that crawlers are dumb and they need more context than humans.

Did you know there’s something called a URN – Uniform Resource Name?

This was supposed to be one level above a URL. Your resource would have a URN, which would be a global identifier, and it would resolve to a URL which was just where the resource was located right now. URNs never caught on, but they web would be better if they had. Content could then have a “name” which was matched to it forever, regardless of its current URL. (The “guid” element in RSS probably should have been named “urn,” in fact.)

And it’s not just URLs. HTTP status codes exist for a reason too. Did you know that there are a lot of them? In fact, there’s one for about everything that could happen for a web request. Did you know there’s a difference between 404 and 410? 404 (traditionally “Not Found”) means it was never here. 410 (traditionally “Gone”) means it was once here but is now gone. Big difference.

Ever hear of 303 and 307? They’re meant for load redirects (mirrors). The human readable descriptions are usually “See Other” or “Temporary Redirect.” Did you know there was a “402 Payment Required”? There’s a bunch that were just never implemented. These days a lot of websites just return “200 OK” for everything, even 404s, which drives me freaking nuts. (And, yes, I’m sure I’ve done it, so don’t go looking too hard through my portfolio…)

(A new company called Words API (it’s an API…for words) made me jump for joy when I saw they are using actual, intelligent HTTP status codes on their responses, even their errors. If you go over your usage limit, for example, you get a “429 Too Many Requests ” back. Good for them.)

Do you know why your FORM tag has an attribute called “method”? Because you’re calling a method on a web server, like a method on an object in OOP. Did you know there are other methods besides GET and POST? There’s HEAD and OPTIONS and PUT and DELETE. And you can write your own. So if you’re passing data back and forth between your app/site and your web server, you’re welcome to name custom methods in the leading line of the header.

And, technically, you’re supposed to make sure GET requests are idempotent, meaning they can be repeated with no changes to a resource. So you should be able to hit Refresh all day on a GET request without causing any data change (beyond perhaps analytics). If you’re changing data on a server, that should always be a POST request (or PUT or DELETE, if anyone ever used them as intended).

I could go on and on. Don’t even get me started about URL parameters. No, not querystrings – there was originally a specification where you could do something like “/key1:value1/key2:value2/” to pass data into a request. And what about the series of “UA-*” headers that existed to tell the web server information about the rendering capabilities of the user agent? (And dare I wander off into metadata-related ranting…two words people, Dublin Core!)

My point is that a lot of web developers today are completely ignorant of the protocol that is the basis for their job. A core understanding of HTTP should be a base requirement for working in this business. To not do that is to ignore a massive part of digital history (which we’re also very good at).

I’m currently working through HTTP: The Definitive Guide by O’Reilly. The book was written in 2002, but HTTP hasn’t changed much since then. It’s fascinating to read all the features built into HTTP that no one uses because they were never adopted or no one bothered to do some research before they re-solved a problem. There’s a lot of stuff in there that solves problems we’ve since programmed our way around. The designers of the spec were probably smarter than you, it turns out.

(HTTP/2 is currently proposed, but it doesn’t change much of the high level stuff. The changes are mostly low-level data transport hacks, based on Google’s experience with SPDY.)

At risk of sounding like a crabby old man (I’m 43 and have been developing for the web since 1996), this is one small symptom of a larger problem – developers tend to think they can solve every problem, and they’re pretty sure that nothing good happened before they arrived on the scene. Anyone working in this space 20 years ago couldn’t possibly have known of their problems so every problem deserves a new solution.

Developers often don’t know what they don’t know (that link goes to my personal confession of this exact thing), and they feel no need to study the history of their technology to gain some context about it. Hell, we all need to sit and read The Innovators together.

Narcissism runs rampant in this industry, and our willingness to throw away and ignore some of the core philosophies of HTTP is just one manifestation of this. Rant over.

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2015

IT IS 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.” Despite some modestly positive developments in the climate change arena, current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia have embarked on massive programs to modernize their nuclear triads—thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties. “The clock ticks now at just three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

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“Because the GRM1 protein is also found in breast and prostate cancers, pre-treatment with riluzole before radiation for these particular cancers might also result in the same outcomes,”

http://www.dddmag.com/news/2015/01/scientists-find-new-benefit-lou-gehrigs-drug?et_cid=4374968&et_rid=633376228&location=top

A drug used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) makes radiation more effective when treating melanoma that has metastasized to the brain, according to new research on laboratory models at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers.

Melanoma – the deadliest of skin cancers – is often resistant to radiation therapy, creating a risk of neurotoxicity when large doses need to be administered to the whole brain in order to treat the disease. The new study, published in the current print edition of Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research (doi: 10.1111pcmr.12327), examines radiation treatment when combined with the drug riluzole and its impact on melanoma that has spread to the brain.

Riluzole targets a protein known as GRM1 that is often abnormally produced by melanoma cells and increases growth and spread of the disease. Riluzole has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration and is being used to to block activation of the GRM1 protein in the treatment of ALS, a disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.

In the new Rutgers research, investigators found that treating the melanoma daily, over a 37 day period, with riluzole and a weekly dose of radiation, led to a decrease in tumor cell growth.

“What this indicates is that riluzole sensitizes GRM1, helping these proteins act like a beacon for radiation so that only melanoma cells with the GRM1 protein will be targeted, sparing the rest of the brain and preserving the brain’s functionality,” notes senior author, Suzie Chen, Cancer Institute member and professor of chemical biology at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy.

“With approximately 50 percent of patients with melanoma developing brain metastasis and fewer than 13 percent of those patients surviving one year or more, identifying new therapies for this population is paramount,” said James S. Goydos, director of the Melanoma and Soft Tissue Oncology Program at the Cancer Institute and professor of surgery at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, who is another author on the study. He also notes their findings could have even broader implications. “Because the GRM1 protein is also found in breast and prostate cancers, pre-treatment with riluzole before radiation for these particular cancers might also result in the same outcomes,” he said.

Source: Rutgers University

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black ice on the Jersey turnpike a couple of days ago…
put the f-in’ trains back on the tracks n get ’em off the highways…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ApxVyskuI#t=35

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