Placenta Placenta

Your baby is born. There are a million things to think about, and what happens to the placenta isn’t even on the list. Usually the placenta gets thrown away.

But did you know that you can save your baby’s umbilical cord and “bank” it? The placenta is full of stem cells which could save someone’s life later, or further stem cell research and save millions of lives!

No kidding. You could quite literally help cure cancer.

The National Marrow Donor Program has a FAQ on donating cord cells to make the process easy for you, and if your hospital doesn’t have an existing program, companies like Cryobanks International will take the placenta and make sure it helps save lives.

Or you could just bank the blood for your own personal future use. There is a big company which does this now, the Cord Blood Registry, as well as an entire network of cord blood banks called Alphacord.

Actually, there are so many companies in this effort that Google has an entire category of them in its directory.

There are also people who eat the placenta. In some societies, the afterbirth is routinely eaten by the mother to help replenish protein and iron lost during childbirth.

Here is a recipe for roast placenta, and Mothering Magazine printed an entire list of recipes in their September 1983 issue (Vol. 28, pg 76).

This morning I heard a long session on a morning radio show (Sarah and No Name actually) where they ranted for about an hour about how gross it was, and when someone called in to discuss it, they ridiculed him off the air. No mention of donating the placenta. Hooray for free press!

So, here’s my contribution: if you’re going to write me email about how gross it is to eat the placenta, you can go to f-ing hell. Come see me and I will say it to your xenophobic face, loser.

No one’s forcing you to eat placenta. To you meat-eaters out there (yes I do eat meat), do you slaughter your own meat? I personally doubt that most people could. The inside of any animal is pretty gross too. If you like, I will butcher an animal with you and we will eat it raw while I film it, and I will make you look like a fool on the next network reality show as you cry and throw up all over your Keds. In the background, all my friends will laugh at your lameness. And afterwards, your friends will too.

Bank your baby’s placenta and save lives. Sarah and No Name are morons.

Sherlock Rules

Sherlock for Mac OS X is pretty bad ass.

Sherlock is basically realisation of a lot of the promises of “web services”: completely modular information sources, totally separated from an interface, allows for a totally smooth integration with almost anything, in this case, OS X.

I started toying with it over the weekend, popping up the eBay channel. There is a field where you type your search, and once it is filled, a second panel automatically is filled with matches. When you select one, the item’s description shows up in the content pane, and its photo shows up in a seperate pane. It’s great. Like browsing eBay, but even easier and with a much smoother interface.

Also cool is the Movies channel. When you switch to it, the movies playing around you are automatically populated… select the theater where you want to see it from the list, and show times appear. A description of the movie is automatically shown on the bottom, and the trailer starts playing in the lower right. When you flip from there to the Yellow Pages channel, driving directions to that theater pop up. Wow.

Other really cool channels:

  • Flights (when is the next flight to Narita Airport from SFO?)
  • Translate (what does this Korean recipe say?)
  • Dictionary (how do you spell that? synonyms? Definitions? all automatically!)
  • Calillona, an Amazon channel which can query the catalogs from the US, Japan, the UK, and Germany. I haven’t tried buying something with it yet though!

Using only XQuery and JavaScript, you can make your own channels for Sherlock. A lot of channels have already been created for it by independent developers.

My current favorite 3rd party channel is “Gutenberg” which lets you surf the various free texts from Project Gutenberg. I’m curious about the Lonely Planet channel; I haven’t checked that out yet.

And to all you whiners out there who complain about how the channels don’t do what you want? Here’s an idea, why don’t you make your own? It’s not like you’re writing thousands of lines of code- the codebase for these things is really small!

Ideas for Sherlock channels:

  • A channel devoted to the
    UPS services

    • Package Tracking
    • Signature Tracking
    • Rates + Service
    • [estimated] Time in Transit
    • Address Validation
  • A Bugzilla channel
  • I wish MTV would expose their schedule as a web service- their entries in TV Guide are notoriously inaccurate.
  • For that matter, the radio stations could expose their play lists as a web service. Hmmm….
  • IMDB would be good too

So… a philosophical question: would it be counterrevolutionary to make a XUL application which acts as a container to host Sherlock channels? On one hand, it would be enable a huge functionality on Mozilla on the PC as well as the Mac, and as we can all agree, Mozilla is part of The Movement. An application like this would also leverage the existing Sherlock channels/mindshare.

However, it might be argued that to do so would take away from some of the value-add of switching to Apple, which is less a part of The Movement than Mozilla is, but still a key part of the Revolution.

Hmmmmm.

Julie S Porter

Julie S Porter is basically a genius, but the obscure kind of genius few people will ever know about. She has been online for years with her page about Adelmous Fey, her automaton doll which she built.

Since the late 1990’s I was reading a lot about early computing, specifically Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analysis Engine (Cal has a really nice set of books with all the notes written by Lady Ada!), Ms Porter’s page came up in web crawls a lot.

For future reference, the Babbage books were volumes 2 and 3 of the (11 volume?) set, “The Works of Charles Babbage” edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly in 1989.

I have met her in person once… I think she was in a cloisonne class I took at Palo Alto adult school. She was teaching herself enamel painting in a corner of the room, while the beginning students like myself learned to pack powdered glass into the little metal wires… I believe she was making a music box of some sort.

She also is a costuming enthusiast and is active in the Dickens Fair, and all sorts of other artistic societies… in half of these things I find online, I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about, but here are the acronyms she drops, with their probable translations:

  • MBSI is the “Music Box Society International”
  • NAWCC is the “National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors”
  • BHI may be the “British Horological Institute”

Notice she’s not merely collecting these clockwork things… she’s building them. Like making the little cogs or something. Hard core!

Ms Porter also translated some obscure text on “Jaquet-Droz Automata” which looks to be a type of musical clockworks.

But that’s not all. The same Julie S Porter writes all kinds of crazy, technologically-intense tinkering material, like:

  • SMT Tips” (advice on soldering LCDs?) – look at her working model with the color bars.
  • a postscript font for the Voynich Manuscript, which coincidentally I was interested in as well… only I just bought the D’Imperio monograph off of Amazon, rather than write entire fonts for the thing! Incidentally, mine is the only customer review on that book, even though the review dates back to 1998. Not exactly a best-seller!
  • postings on debugging ghostscript, a postscript viewer on UNIX

Make A Custom Rubber Stamp

Making a custom rubber stamp is pretty easy and relatively cheap- you make the artwork, send it to the factory in a digital format, and cut them a check!

Notice a trend on the names of these sites?

OH! Mikey

It’s a Japanese sitcom about a family of mannequins who decides to live in Japan. Bizarre!

If you’re looking for episodes of OH! Mikey, there is a DVD available at jlist.com.

They also have a DVD of the show OH! Mikey came from, “Vermilion Pleasure Night.”
Web link of note: OH! Mikey
(At http://www.fuccon.com/)

Modern Protest Music pt 2

I looked for protest music a little more seriously, and found some actual results this time,
including that hip-hop record I was looking for a few weeks ago.

Since a lot of these seem to be singles, or a special release that will not be reissued, I think this list is a really good candidate for assembling with iTunes or the new Napster.

Or just listen to more college radio for free!

Notice I don’t even mention downloading these songs and making a Ultra-Cool Modern Protest Music Sampler Box Set, because that would be illegal and therefore I wouldn’t dream of doing that. Not even as holiday gifts for all my friends.

  • A pretty damn good CD is Peace Not War, which has a lot of really famous people on it, including Public Enemy, Ani DiFranco, Chumbawumba, Massive Attack, and Sleater-Kinney. Available at Amazon and most decent record stores, but if you are interested, please buy it from one of the peace groups listed on their site, because more of the proceeds will go towards peace efforts.
  • Another good starting point is The Return of the Protest Song, an article by columnist Jeff Chang in the Boston newspaper Weekly Dig. He lists:
    • Blur‘s We’ve Got A File on You! (pop-rock)
    • Beenie Man (club music) brought us Terrorist
    • Calypso artist Andre Tanker with Food Fight
    • Lenny Kravitz (rock) gets extra points for We Want Peace because it’s a duet with Iraqi artist Kadim Al Sahir. You won’t find this one on Amazon, because it’s only played from the Rock the Vote site… maybe it will be on Kravitz’ new album.
    • Good luck finding “March of Death” from Rage Against the Machine and DJ Shadow (rap metal)… Amazon doesn’t have it, which doesn’t faze me, but neither does Rasputin’s
    • Yo La Tengo (latin alternative) with Nuclear War (a cover of Sun Ra)
  • NOT on the list was Radiohead‘s album Hail to the Thief. Duh!
  • I think the one I was looking for was from Urban Box Office– their album is Raise Your Hands High… Say Not In Our Name and comes in 3 different volumes. Go directly to their site and do a search there, because their database is a little tempermental and won’t let me save links to particular items
  • Supposedly Reverend Run (Run DMC) is doing an all-star record… haven’t found it yet though.
  • This list wouldn’t be complete without The Beastie Boys. Those guys crack me up. They recently released “In A World Gone Mad” but damned if I can find it…
  • Michael Franti and Spearhead did a great song (getting some good airplay on the college stations here) U Can’t Bomb the World to Peace, featuring beatbox artist RadioActive and remixed by Sly and Robbie. The Spearhead site is pretty nice! On a side note, Michael Franti‘s previous group Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy has
    some pretty wild stuff, including an album with William S Burroughs.
  • What’s Next? Operation “Hood” Freedom on Planet Hiphop, written by the slightly wacky Minister Paul Scott of the Messianic Afrikan Nation.
  • …actually the whole site of Planet HipHop is pretty interesting… You’ll note they have an entire online radio feed devoted to “conscious” hip hop, i.e. protest music.
  • Guerilla Funk is the label of “Paris” and is devoted to news as well as his brand of angry progressive hip hop
  • Sub Verse Music Inc. is first and foremost about the tenets of hip-hop culture and a supporter of underground initiatives.” So they say!
  • KRS One published The Hiphop Declaration of Peace
    on the Temple of Hip-Hop site.

  • Davey D’s Hip-Hop Corner has a bunch of news on hip-hop and progressive issues
  • Musicians United to Win Without War is a group of artists against the war- no album from them yet though! I like how the first name on the list is Laurie Anderson. She is a nut.

Viva!