A Wonderfullyrich World

The last major distraction of the smartphone was eliminated nearly as soon as we got to the beach as we went to the number 2 party place in Europe, Ayia Napa, just 15 mins away from the house we are borrowing for the week here in Protaras. Aiya Napa is like Key West, the French Quarter, etc with wacky bars & clubs that seem to have a TV show inspirations (Flintstone’s club, Friend’s bar–where the sitcom is continuously on play, and Starsky’s). We enjoyed ourselves, but had my iPhone pick-pocketed…
Remember my post on disaster striking your data? Well I took heed of myself, and did back-up all the data on the phone (minus some new notes that are replaceable), as well as use a Screen Lock. If they are smart they might get past it, but it won’t let you sync without the code so it’s pretty much an iBrick to them. I filed a report with the police, though it unlikely it’ll turn up. Not to say I’m not pissed and annoyed, but what’s the point of getting mad? It’s the chance I take being so stupid, and I’m in paradise without any further distractions so I should enjoy the sunset from our roof without a ringing phone.
P.S. I still have the sim card for my DC phone number (used a pre-paid when I got here), so don’t delete me quite yet.

Drink frappee, read, and eat

Sorry, it took me a while to get the post via email function setup so now I should be able to keep you all up to date via my iPhone w/ pictures (and maybe video). I guess I can add tinker as a 4th thing to the above, which is something *I* always do (and people probably wish I wouldn’t). I might add this is one way for the moment, I don’t plan on checking into reality for a while…

For those of you who’d like some pictures of my travels, I have been
snapping touristy snaps with my iPhone to Flickr. You an check the
stream at www.flickr.com/wonderfullyrich

We’ve been the busy guest of Stavros and Despo, plus the family and
friends. It Cyprus, but think Greek hospitality; lots of slow meals,
napping, and talking.

Every time I land somewhere I’m reminded of an old line in short circuit “one piece will do” referring to bringing back a newly self aware robot in one piece.

I made I to Cyprus in one piece.  Smooth sailing, other the Dulles security stealing my toothpaste. Felt like all I ate was “English breakfast” as I had two morning flight on British airways.

Nap ready and not sure what time my body thinks it is yet, but I am on vacation time!

Oh I highly recommend the New Yorker conference video podcast.  Much like TED.com, it is continuing education for the layman. This was the other thing I spent most of my time doing on da plane…

Alive and well,

Rich

More like, beach and brain fart here I come…

I leave for Cyprus via London tomorrow in the o’dark thirty hours for a month, yes that’s right a month of doing nothing but what I want to do.  Or well, more of what we want to do, as I meet Angela in Cyprus when I get in.

She’s got a paper to write, but a month to do it in and we have a couple of beaches to go find…

Look for the pictures, thoughts, and random comments

It’s 8:30pm Eastern Standard Time and I’m writing a quick post before I walk out the door for home.  It’s been an amazing time lately and I haven’t said much about what’s going on in my life.

Two big deals today were that I submitted a website I created to the popular blog BoingBoing.net as well as others  order to convince Amazon to stop the DRM maddness on Audible.  DRM for those of you who don’t know is a form of software protection that doesn’t allow you to play/listen/read/watch certain content on anything but approved device and attempts to disallow copying.  It doesn’t work and is crippling the industry that support it. 

In the last 6 hours I’ve gotten several thousand unique visitors on my my call for DRM-free Audible, while getting nearly 500 signatures.  I’ll likely get several hundred more as the night wears on and more importantly, Amazon will get the message that it’s time to stop the DRM. 

The second was a one hour web-chat with the directors of the Harold and Kumar series of movies that we at FCNL just did.  It turn out to be a hoot and good work.  We got interesting and fun questions in for the evening.  The final question from David at Reason Magazine was via a friend of mine and turned out to be the best of the night!

All this and I’m still just barely moved into my new house and although I think feelings are finally settled somewhat there, I’m still running like a hot CPU with lots of projects on my table.  Andrew’s got a new web project that I’m trying to help him build for people in Burundi.  I’m working on a few computers to get to him as well, but I leave in 9 days for Cyprus with Angela.  She’s off in Nambia and I haven’t heard from her since Friday, which is a little worrying (she’s probably fine, just out of cell/internet contact).  I just came back Sunday from NYC, where I spent the weekend trying to clear my head.  It definitely did clear my head and recenter me, but on top of all of this I may have caused another emotional storm with a friend that I’m trying to sort out in my own head.  So….

Life is fun.  My take away is that we can change the world.  The DRM-free advocacy is something I believe in (although its a minor point), but was just as much the personal experiment a thought process I’ve been trying to make happen for a while.  Real webs are cheap and now more flexible then ever, so let’s use them to get information to the people, and the feedback from the people, on an individual and micro-organizational level.  Power to the people.

I just read a passaged that describes how a human body can become the niche that will develop anti-bacterial resistants bacteria.  The book is Mountains beyond Mountains written by Tracy Kidder concerning the life and passion of Dr. Paul Farmer who set about to improve the Haitian condition using anthropology and modern medicine. I highly recommend the book, as it’s a quick read and fascinating to cover such a disaster of foreign policy (Haiti) being changed by a man who is single minded and devoted, but very human and innovative.  I am still considering a post on how the average joe can change Washington, all it takes is patience and time and Kidder unintentionally speaks to it.

I digress however, back to the passage that provoked this:

A person with active TB of the lungs harbors hundreds of millions of bacteria, enough to ensure that a small number will be mutants impervious to anti-TB drugs.  In a patient who gets only one antibiotic or inadequate does of several, or who takes the medicines erratically or for two short a time, the drug-susceptible bacilli may die off while the drug-resistant mutants flourish.  The patient becomes a site of rapid bacterial evolution, with drugs supplying the selective pressure.  In the gravest cases, patients end up infected with bacilli that can’t be killed by teh two most powerful [TB] drugs.  Medical science reserves a special name for tuberculosis of that sort–multdrug-resistant TB, MDR by abbreviation.  It is a scary disease, and a serous problem wherever it appears, but worst, of course in the places with the fewest resources to deal with it.

So kids, take your antibiotics in full and regularly.  We don’t want you to be the host of a superbug.

And wash your hands, but not with anti-microbial soap.

I was revisiting the topic of soap today as I was thinking about the continuing discussion that i’ve had where people argue hand sanitizer are as bad for the Environment as anti-microbial soap and decide that it was worth continuing (and perhaps ending) this conversation.

Many of you have likely heard about the superbug or a anti-bacterial resistant bacteria which cannot be killed with current drugs, and one aspect of this is the anti-microbial soap. I don’t want to go over everything on how it works (Here’s a good article on how soap, anti-microbiocial soap, and waterless agents work to clean, in addition to my post.) The key point though is this, antibiotic resistance is fostered by residual effects of washing with anti-microbial soap AFTER you’ve washed it down the drain. Anti-microbial soap is a mechanical and chemical reaction which lifts and kills then drains the dead bacteria, soap, and anti-microbials into the watershed. A report on how we still see anti-microbial products from 50+ years ago in groundwater. Waterless washing, aka hand sanitizers like Purell, with alcohol that is above %60 will kill of the bacterial because it’s a solvent. Which means it able to breaks through the bacteria’s cell wall effectively disintegrating the bacteria from the inside, but after a few mins it will then evaporate, giving the bacteria no time to settle in the water and evolve a resistance. I modified this graphic on wikipedia’s entry on antibiotic resistance to illustrate the point.

I think what confuses people about this is how evolution works. This is a scale issue, as one a small scale, i.e. your hands the number of bacteria that are likely to have randomly evolved an immunity to anti-microbial soap is infinitesimal, however once you introduce it into the ground water you’ve increase the scale and pool of candidates and therefore the likelihood you’ll eventually produce a bacteria that is resistant to the anti-microbial and renders it ineffective. More over by continuously introducing anti-microbial solutions into the ground water, you’ve created an environmental niche where anti-microbial resistant bacteria are the only ones who will thrive and there for are likely to spread.

Waterless agents are disconnected from this evolutionary problem given that once they’ve killed that small scale area, i.e. your hands, then it evaporates into the air, where it becomes another gaseous molecules. (Air does have bacteria floating around in it, but the density difference between gas and liquid dramatically reduces probabilities of such evolutionary niches being built–from say 1 in 100 to 1 in a billion, or a similar magnitude.) Waterless agents don’t leak into the groundwater environment and therefore give the bacteria on the larger scale less chance to evolve resistance.

Of course this not to say that waterless agent resistant bacteria won’t evolve, they can and might become resistant to the solvent powers of alcohol, (actually many are, however they are harmful to humans or cannot live in humans) but their resistance would have to come about in a more random fashion then by flourishing because it’s the most fit.

Hopefully this clears up the reason to use hand sanitizers and evaporative based cleaners rather then anti-microbial soaps of any sort.

We are now inhabiting our new residence 3 blocks away from our old residence. It was another fairly long weekend, with Saturday running from 8am till 11:30pm and making it out of the house with 30 mins to spare. I must say it was a clean house too.

The new house is in total disarray right now, but at least we are secure and have a real lease.

18 days before I am in Cyprus and lots of stuff to catch up on. Andrew’s got a web project that we can work on, I’ve got a project to finish at FCNL, a house to settle, and of course blogs to polish… You’ll be getting a double wammy today.

4 truck loads of stuff later and lots of physical soreness and 1019 furniture mostly moved to our new house 3 blocks away.  (It’s a small moving truck and some tight alleys.) That’s what I call a long weekend.  Now we scrub, patch, paint, and de-bedbug the boxes, kitchen things, and sundries before it heads to the new house.  We’ll switch over to the new house on the 1st of the month and hopefully furniture and arrangement’s will be settled by then.

In other news, right now my brother’s blog is on the home page of his alma mater in the blog section.  Not sure why, but hey I love that he’s getting good press from all sorts of sources. Yea!