Chem Lab: Heath Ledger Is Fodder for Macabre Science Blogs
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Heath Ledger's death engenders blog threads trying to determine the science behind his apparent drug overdose.
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Chris Suellentrop, better known as The New York Times' Opinionator, steps out from behind the Times firewall this week to liveblog the TED conference in Monterey. Can a conference cynic find something to love at the big nerd love-in? It's already scared the crap out of him. In Epicenter.
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Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion stumbled across Technorati WTF (currently down), which lists the most popular blog stories of the day in a Digg or Techmeme type hieracral system.  It&#8217;s nice to see more niche search engines using the Digg model for gauging popularity via user voting, and this form of social media is slowly growing [...]
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The latest in molecular-research technology shows the nerdy glamor of nitty-gritty lab life.
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The sudden death of film star Heath Ledger stunned fans and family from Hollywood to Australia on Wednesday as New York City's medical examiner conducted an autopsy that proved inconclusive.
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Heath Ledger died accidentally from the abuse of  prescription medications â specifically, six kinds of painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs.
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Before heading over to the Web 2.0 conference at the Palace Hotel in SF this morning, I couldn't resist doing some more digging into alternate user interfaces for news reading based on the NY Times keywords.  One thing I learned the hard way is that when you access the Times site from a script (not through a browser) if you try to read an article that's too old (not sure what the time limit is) it tries to redirect you to a login page (which is pretty pointless considering that there's no human being around to log in). I hit this problem yesterday, and then hit it again this morning, but couldn't remember what the problem was. So by writing it up this time I hope to remember.  No doubt some debunked hack journalist posing as a tech industry mogul will slander me for this, but the asshat asshole has no idea how blogging works, and who the fuck cares what he thinks anyway. "cheesecake"
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By David Sterritt | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor. It&#39;s a double whammy, and almost nobody but Steven Soderbergh could have pulled it off.
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Actor Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medicines, the New York City medical examiner said Wednesday.
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As long as I've been involved in the tech industry there's been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales reps sell space, they focused the attention on areas the industry was investing money, in hopes of being there when lightning strikes, when wealth is created, as it often is in the tech industry. Sometimes the "year of" prognostications are right, more often they're wrong.  In that sense, there's no doubt that 2007 is the year of the social network in Silicon Valley. This may not be the year when huge wealth is created, but I don't doubt that the area is fertile, and I don't say that lightly, because I'm often a contrarian when it comes to self-induced Silicon Valley euphoria. There are a couple of ideas I've been getting ready to write about, I'm not quite ready yet, but here they are anyway. 1. When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences, they may group into large subsets of the users, and they may not. Some food for thought. On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product. Note that when reporters cover Twitter, before they've become users, they probably write about the home page at Twitter, where complete strangers report on the kind of spaghetti sauce they like. That may be why so many articles dismiss Twitter as useless.  2. Integration is so tempting, but elusive. The other day a friend on Twitter wrote about a movie he liked. I looked it up on the NY Times movie review site (a newly revealed location now that their archive is open and a very valuable one, another topic I plan to cover, the wealth of the NY Times archive). I would have then liked to have clicked over to Netflix to order it. And even better, I'd have liked to have looked at what other movies he likes. Now we're very close to having this, we just need a way to co-relate two identity systems, Twitter's and Netflix's. And think of the value in integrating Amazon with Twitter. The mind explodes at the possibilities. This is what I meant when I said earlier "they&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes." This issue is now coming to a head, as the users can see the next step clearly. How to integrate the systems is known technology, but it's not a solved problem economically and politically. We need to get clear on the opportunities, and feel free to dream when the barriers between the networks come down.
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Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt." Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here. I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits. Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"  Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)
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NEW YORK  -Australian actor Heath Ledger's death was an accident caused by the abuse of prescription drugs, six of which were found in his body, the New York City medical examiner's office said on Wednesday.
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If you want people to think you're way cooler than you actually are, why not claim to be a guest blogger at one of the revered weblogs in the blogosphere? Here's a handy guide to crafting your horrible lies. Commentary by Lore SjÃ¶berg.
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The lead author on a paper outlining a way to derive embryonic stem cells without damaging embryos responds to the piling-on of enemies as well as people he thought were friends. In Bodyhack.
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Six different types of prescription drugs were found in Heath Ledger's apartment Â including anti-anxiety medications and sleeping pills Â though the cause of his death won't be known for several days after a preliminary autopsy Wednesday was inconclusive, authorities said.
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Heath Ledger passed away only Tuesday, but his transformation is already under way, from acclaimed actor to most-searched Internet term, from film star to cultural touchstone.
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Some scientists finger prions, but other researchers remain unconvinced. In Wired Science.