Angry Robot

Cure for Cancer, Flying Cars

Remember Dr. Evangelos Michelakis and the Albertan cure for cancer? Y just sent me the following from 2007-ish:

So the generic drug dichloroacetate, or DCA, cures cancer in mice, but no pharmaceutical company will fund clinical trials because they can’t patent it and thereby make the kind of money off it they are accustomed to.

What’s happening now? This article wonders that, and concludes the drug is

Stalled, due to lack of interest, according to Dr. Michelakis. “We have not initiated another clinical trial with DCA in cancer,” he told me in an email this week, “It was my hope that other centres, independent of us, will be inspired to do similar trials, but I have not seen any signs that this is the case.”

However, commenter FlyingSnow points out there is an “ongoing” trial at the UofA (I fear this is the same study that the Albertan town funded – it has been ongoing since 2007), and another ongoing trial in Florida. Not being familiar with clinical trials, drug testing, or anything medical at all really, I’m not in a position to judge whether this means the drug is any more likely a) to ever be released or b) to actually work.

But man, it’s like hearing they had developed flying cars but weren’t going to make them because Detroit wasn’t interested. YOU BASTARDS!!! Oh, wait.

The flying car is being tested, and should be ready in 2013 at a cost of $279,000.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the cure for cancer happened in our lifetimes – that seems like a perfectly normal thing to think, and it would be. But then, there is no “We beat AIDS” day. It may not be cured exactly, but it is a hell of a lot better than in the 80s, and we only barely register it.

Let’s try and remember to be excited about these things when they happen, even if the flying car is way overpriced, and even if the cure only kinda works on most but not all cancers. Let’s be amazed at the future, especially when it becomes the present.

A sad announcement from Tiny Speck

Glitch is closing.

  <blockquote>        <p>We are grateful to have had the opportunity to play with you. The game was absolutely preposterous. And yet, we kind of liked it.</p>    </blockquote>

War for TV: inside the fight for the living room

series of posts on The Verge about cable alternatives & the future of TV that is right up my alley. The Boxee interview is good, as is the piece on remotes, and the profiles of the ecosystems are fascinating too.

I’m going to write up some thoughts about the cord-cutting experience soon, as we canceled our cable a couple months ago.

via – “I wonder if Mickey is mousercised”

Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks

“Windows 95 would like to install itself inside of you.”

Google vs. Samsung

Samsung makes much more profit from Android than Google does

Stanley Kubrick's daughter Katharina Kubrick, and grandson Joe, interviewed on Reddit

via

Canada sees risk in U.S. oil boom

“America’s rising oil output is ‘nothing short of spectacular’ and will exceed that of Saudi Arabia or Russia by 2020”

The new BSG series is a web series? Anyway more posting this as a way to test some back-end stuff rather than to recommend it – haven’t watched it yet.

The new BSG series is a web series? Anyway more posting this as a way to test some back-end stuff rather than to recommend it – haven’t watched it yet.

Jarvis St. bike lane removal called off for the day after sit-in protest

good on these cats. Whenever I think about how we live in a city that is removing bike lanes, I just get sad and defeated and don’t want the think about it. But these people did something about it.

Michael Moore's “Star Wars Episode VII” Audition Tape

“this is a picture of an abandoned lightsaber plant”

American Horror Story

This is no top-ten-listmaking best-show-of-the-ages type show, but it’s a hell of a lot of pulpy, batshit-insane fun.

Run by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the writers who brought you Glee and Nip & Tuck, the first season followed a down-on-their luck yuppie family as they moved into a haunted house and suffered the consequences. The second season kept a handful of actors (Jessica Lange, Zacchary Quinto, Evan Peters) but threw out everything else, including the setting and period. Now it’s “American Horror Story Asylum”, and is set in a mental asylum in the 60s. Well, I suppose it kept its general pastiche approach. We are four episodes in and already we’ve had: an exorcism, zombies, a sadistic Nazi doctor, an alien abduction, a masked serial killer, and copycat masked serial killers. To mention the number of naked asses and whippings just seems like overkill at this point.

It’s essentially Twin Peaks as directed by Russ Meyer. The editing is furious and fearless, the characters are sex-crazed and violent, and the writing wouldn’t know subtlety if it bit it on the ass. You should be enjoying it.

Star Wars scenes as Gothic devotional paintings

It’s suddenly all Star Wars, all the time around here. Must be the election…? (via)

Smacks And The City – Double Dragon and the changing representation of cities

Today, there’s a good chance that if there’s an amoral green-mohican anarchist causing chaos on the streets, you’re more likely to be controlling them in a game like Saints Row The Third rather than ending their rampage with a well-timed roundhouse. The city has been so successfully tamed that the fun now comes from recreating the chaos we once sought to stop.

Streetcars For Toronto: An Anniversary

Steve Munro on the citizens’ group that saved streetcars in Toronto. Contains lots of examples of failed transit schemes through the ages:

At the same time, the TTC also planned to build a Queen subway (what we now call the Downtown Relief Line), to soak up many of the transit riders on the King, Queen, and Dundas cars. Scheduled completion for that subway: 1980.

Adviser: Romney “shellshocked” by loss

After Ohio went for Mr. Obama, it was over, but senior advisers say no one could process it. “We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory,” said one senior adviser. “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.”

Wordburglar – Drawings with Words

Star Wars: Episode VII May Have Found Its Writer

Thoughts of A Technologist: Apple, Looking Forward

Apple now has “Sir Jony Ive playing the role of Jobs, taking over creative control of the world’s largest company”. No evidence cited, but I suppose if he’s head of hardware and software now, it figures.

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

AOL Keyword “Doomed”: What the former Internet giant portends about the future of cable

Halo 4: This isn’t Bungie’s Halo anymore – it’s better

Disney Deal: George Lucas Will Use $4 Billion to Fund Education

Bill Gates style