However, possibly even more interesting was Wikipedia’s page (linked in the article) on HeLa cells. According to Wikipedia, this is an “immortal cell line (it does not age) used in medical research and a proposed new single cell species [...] derived from cervical cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951.”

HeLa are considered “immortal”: they do not die of old age and can divide an unlimited number of times as long as basic cell survival conditions are met (i.e. being maintained and sustained in a suitable environment). There are many strains of HeLa cells as they continue to evolve by being grown in cell cultures, but all HeLa cells are derived from the same tumour cells removed from Lacks. It has been estimated that the total mass of HeLa cells today far exceeds that of the rest of Henrietta Lacks’ body.

I find simply the ideas and implications of such a biological occurrance really startling. How would you like to be survived by the cancer cells that killed you? This is really food for thought, and while I don’t have much opinion about it at the moment, I’m sure many people could have a field day with all the idealogical, moral, and political ideas involved. Perhaps they already have. Yet, for now, I will simply share something new I learned about today.

Schrodinger’s Comic

I haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while.

Take this app and find your home on Earth, from the completely zoomed out position, using only the imagery as your guide. Can you find it? Try to think of landmarks, find your city, and follow the streets. Pretend you’ve been abducted by aliens and are now trying to show them where to drop you off. Because heavens, you never know when such a skill could come in handy.

Now zoom out again and find the Empire State Building. The Great Pyramids of Egypt. The Eiffel Tower. Your old school.

Isn’t is amazing how we live on a world so big, yet at other times it seems so small? To me it is strangely gratifying to be able to say “This is where I am.” while knowing that I found it for myself. It is a puzzle and a philosophical experiement. In all of human history, this capacity and freedom is unprecedented. We are able to experience and enjoy how big our world is on such a practical level. Even though modern mapping systems make it so easy to locate a point of interest, to me it is profound and so gratifying to zoom in and find myself. Can you?

What piqued my interest was the fact that it was based on the Quake 3 engine, GPL’d, and would run on Linux. After downloading it and
giving it a spin, I must say I was shocked I had never heard of it before. It is possible that this is because the standalone 1.1.0 version was released less than 4 months ago, though with the quality and polish of this game, I would have expected to be seeing and hearing about it all over. The game looks and feels fantastic, and all of the graphics and user interfaces are very professionally designed. I really love the concepts of the buildings and units as well as the creativity shown in the popular maps, with tons of interesting and well-themed nooks and crannies. Tremulous also has a unique fast-paced mixture of Real Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter gameplay, which makes it fun but also strategically interesting.

What more can I say? I am really enjoying this game. Be careful though… try it out, and you too will soon be addicted!

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.
After seeing the last one on Thursday, they lost any last chance of my business. Now I’m just frustrated and appalled. Good riddance.
I suppose I’ll have to be finding a new home page now…

Yesterday I was treated to this lovely deviantART subscription nag screen, which would not retreat from the site until I clicked the little “no thanks” button at the bottom. How very lame. My feeling is, if I wanted to continue using their service I would care enough to notice and renew it. As it stands, their bargain price of 8 cents a day is about twice what I pay for hosting here at NFS. I’ve been on the fence for a while about leaving the website all together, and this is pretty much the end. If I were Fella, I’d be crying at how dissapointing his site has become.

Sorry to those 5.8% (!) who are using IE, things will be looking pretty ugly here from here on out since your browser does not know how to display standards-compliant web pages properly…

For the other 94.2% of you out there, I think your taste in web browsers is damn cool.

http://browsershots.org/website/1152960/

But by far most intriguing to me is Replica, a scarcely explained collection of full articles pertaining to art, design, computers, machine learning, consciousness, philosophy — the good stuff. And boy, is it good. I am amazed by “On artificial creativity”, where computer-generated art, words, artificial intelligence, and the internet meet. This is very interesting stuff, both artistically and conceptually. To me this seems to be the closest thing I’ve seen to a synthesis of modern philosophy, technology, art, and psychology. I am so impressed and inspired.

Oh, why are there such incredible people here on the internet?

http://www.turnofftheinternet.com/

As you might have noticed, one of our profile servers (which your account is on) has been rather slow recently. Affected users are noticing that their charts are taking ages to update, and neighbours are not calculated fast enough. This is due to the changes we’re making in the way profile data is stored and searched. [...]

To sweeten the deal we’re upgrading your account with a free 1 month subscription. (or extending it if you already subscribe). Along with the usual subscriber perks, you’ll have access to the beta test of the new site update (in early June). This will give you a chance to try out the new charts system before everyone else, and tell us what you think before it’s launched.

This is incredible behavior on the behalf of Last.fm Ltd. So their charts were being a little sluggish to a free member for a week or so. I’m not easily swayed by subscriber-ish generousity, but I must say I’m quite impressed by the fact that as a free user (never given them a penny), they gave me a free upgrade to their service simply because they felt it was not updating quickly enough. <3++.

Other online services: take note.