Now Blogging Back to the Futurama: From 1939 to 2009 and back

My good friend Jeremy Dean is now blogging his wild and crazy Back to the Futurama art project.

I have written about this project elsewhere (Jeremy Dean’s Back to the Futurama: A moving art project rolls from Hummers to horse carts). Now, as the car industry is putting on its annual show in Detroit, Jeremy would like to show the world another side of automotive reality. As a documentary filmmaker, Jeremy has spent a lot of time uncovering images of the past. When he encountered rare footage of Hoovercarts--horse drawn cars that people created during the Great Depression--he couldn't shake the image and its potent symbolism.

These things were called Hoovercarts as a play on Hoovercrats, people in America who had supported the election of Herbert Hoover, the President who presided over much of the Great Depression. Folks in Canada also made horse-drawn automobiles but called them Bennett Buggies after the Canadian PM of the time.

Why Back to the Futurama? The world of today is clearly very different from the world of the 1930s, but pulling a car with a horse is still a potent reminder that we have been pursuing and promoting a materialistic life-style that the world may not be able to sustain. Fossil-fuel dependence, global warming, and "the-end-of-oil," all stand in stark contrast to our seemingly endless infatuation with lavish vehicles that are more about status than transportation, an infatuation which Detroit has funded, over the decades, to the tune of many billions of dollars. Consider the 1939 New York World's Fair. For this event General Motors created a lavish 36,000 square foot facility which the company described as:

"a thought-provoking exhibit of the developments ahead of us, the greater and better world of tomorrow that we in America are building today, a vivid tribute to the American scheme of living."

The name of that exhibit, which was full of cars and models of multi-lane highways? The Futurama. (You can see clips from the original newsreel here.) Detroit spent many decades selling the world on a bright future full of luxury vehicles, with no apparent thought as to the environmental, economic, and political side-effects. So Jeremy has dubbed this project Back to the Futurama. You can see more of his models here.

And you can help Jeremy create an actual 21st Century Hoovercart, a full-size vehicle which Jeremy plans to drive through New York in March, 2010. That's right, a working horse-drawn cart based on a Hummer or Escalade. So heads up if you own one of these vehicles--Jeremy is accepting donations, and he doesn't mind if the motor is blown. Comment below to make contact or use the contact page on Jeremy's web site.

Where Does The Time Go? Is all this time-saving technology to blame?

My good intentions to research the CFS/ME/XMRV/CDC thing have fallen prey to all kinds of technology. There's the technology I work on marketing at my day job, which requires a part of every day. Then there's the technology that distracts me, like Kindle for the iPhone, whereon I am reading the last book in the Axis of Time trilogy (in which the technology of 2012 collides with 1942). And then there are the "time-saving" gizmos that can be pretty darned time-consuming, like computers.

An embarrassing number of months ago I offered to repair my daughter's Dell notebook. That did not work out so well. So I got her a replacement, an IBM Thinkpad, a lease-return purchased without an operating system. I installed a copy of Windows XP I had purchased on eBay. That did not work out so well. The darned thing was "all used" up, which is the technical term for exceeding the number of installs for an individual Windows OS license.

Then I remembered the many copies of Windows XP that I had purchased while working as a Microsoft vendor. On Saturday, I finally managed to excavate one of those from the barn (my personal homage to the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a place beloved of nobody but my cats, who love to leap from pile to pile of crated "stuff" and feast upon any mice that try to make their home among our stored belongings).

That worked out well. The license number unlocked the XP install. But then I was buried under a digital landslide of accumulated OS updates, application updates, driver updates, and mandatory reboots. However, by late Sunday afternoon, the Thinkpad was as stable as a rock and as up-to-date as an iPhone app.

Speaking of which, there were some positive side effects and salutary sideshows to this techno-marathon. First, I found my Griffin PowerMate, the spacey looking thing pictured, via iPhone, at the top of the page. This is a great gizmo that I have plugged into my Mac Mini to control the volume (and do other cool stuff when editing documents and video). That inspired me to add even more controls to the Mini.

First I tried the Apple app for the iPhone called Remote. This is supposed to provide remote control from an iPhone to a Mac. It may do that for some people, but not for me, not in any meaningful way (and like so many Apple-derived software it suffers from that really aggravating techno-snob, minimalist-style documentation).

So then I tried the Air Mouse app. Much better. That's what you're looking at on the left, a screen on the iPhone that allows you to mouse around your Mac and even type on it, at considerable distance. Great for doing your big screen web surfing from across the room.

I'm still learning all of the things Air Mouse can do, but it should be good for controlling iTunes when I get the multi-room speaker feed installed. Of course, that's got to wait for another tech weekend. Other techno-bits I worked on while updating the Thinkpad include installing Woopra to monitor a couple of web sites in real-time (it's pretty cool to watch someone land on your blog from New Zealand and then start flipping pages).

I also upgraded Paintshop Pro on my Sony Vaio to the latest version. I also did a bunch of writing in OpenOffice.org Writer, which I now prefer over Word by a considerable margin (not that I was ever a fan of Word--indeed, I was quite happy writing with Ami Pro until Microsoft killed it off).

And I started laying the groundwork to move this blog to my own [virtual] server. I noticed the blog was down for a while this morning [for which, my apologies] and I think the move will be good for reliability as well as saving me some money. Whether it will save me any time is hard to say. I'm going to try and turn things off for the rest of the day.

XMRV, ME, CFS, CDC: Thanks for the input

I just wanted to thank everyone who has commented on the previous post about XMRV, CFS/ME and hemochromatosis. I have learned a lot from you all and am still reading through the references and blog links you provided. I hope to post my thoughts this weekend.

Stephen
(D2EXAZ7XW96R)

XMRV Hits #55 in the Top 100 for 2009: But what the heck is it?

XMRV! Is it a band? Is it a car? Is it a hot new computer game or a cool new radio station for fans of recreational vehicles? No, XMRV is a virus, a retrovirus that is at the heart of one of the top scientific discoveries of 2009, recently listed as number 55 on the Discover Magazine Top 100 scientific stories of 2009.

And for millions of people around the world who now suffer, or are about to suffer, from a range of debilitating illnesses, what we have learned about XMRV in 2009 could prove to be the most important discovery of the decade.

So what is XMRV? It's short for Xenotropic Murine leukemia-Related Virus, and it could be a very bad thing. Just read the ominous title of the 2006 research paper that first brought XMRV to light: "Identification of a novel Gammaretrovirus in prostate tumors of patients homozygous for R462Q RNASEL variant" (Urisman A, Molinaro RJ, Fischer N, et al. March 2006, PLoS Pathog). Even the pictures are scary. The one on the left was labeled "XMRV proteins are expressed in cancer cells, as seen in this section from a human prostate cancer. Cells showing brown, granular staining are malignant prostate cells that express viral proteins."

(When I first started to read about XMRV some lines from Sympathy for the Devil, the Rolling Stones classic, came to mind: "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name; but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.")

The nature of the XMRV game is exactly what scientists have been trying to figure out since 2006, and in 2009 they established a strong connection between XMRV and two serious diseases: prostate cancer and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS (a.k.a. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or ME).

CFS is a debilitating condition that makes daily life miserable for some 17 million people worldwide. Sadly, the physical misery of CFS is compounded by lingering prejudices that lead otherwise sensible people to dismiss all CFS sufferers as malingerers, attention seekers, mentally disturbed or just plain lazy (often reflected in sentiments like these: "Hey, we all get tired, just suck it up!").

We will return to CFS in a moment, after considering these latest XMRV findings. Here's what Discover Magazine says of the connection between CFS and XMRV:

XMRV is one of only three known human retroviruses, infectious agents that slip into our genome and become a permanent part of our DNA. Cancer biologist Robert Silverman of the Cleveland Clinic isolated XMRV three years ago in men suffering from prostate cancer. The men had an immune defect that allowed the virus to proliferate, much like a defect documented in patients with chronic fatigue. Seizing upon that clue, cell biologist Judy Mikovits of the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, tested 101 chronic fatigue patients. In October she reported that 67 percent of them had the virus, as opposed to only 3.7 percent of healthy people. Tests on another 200 patients revealed that more than 95 percent of people with chronic fatigue carry antibody to the virus. (Read more from the original report...)

So why is Cobb's Blog interested in XMRV? You may remember that the blog got very medical about 15 months ago. That's when my wife found out she suffers from hereditary hemochromatosis (that's haemochromatosis for listeners in the British Isles, a.k.a. Celtic Curse, iron overload, and bronze diabetes).

Whatever you call it, this is a nasty condition that causes iron to build up in soft tissue where it eventually does serious and potentially fatal damage to important bits of your body like the liver, heart, kidneys, and so on. But nasty as this condition is, Thanksgiving 2008 found us giving thanks to the doctor who figured out the hemochromatosis diagnosis.

Why? Because hemochromatosis is easily treatable (for a certain value of "easy"). Once you convince the doctors to bleed you a few times a month the iron concentrations come down and you can keep them at bay with regular bloodletting. What we didn't realize is that before it was treated the hemochromatosis had done some serious damage to my wife's endocrine system.

As a result, she spent all of 2009 in a fairly constant state of pain, fatigue, sleep deprivation, and hyper-sweat. (That last term is not a medical one, but we have yet to find a term to describe this phenomenon--it is to hot flashes as hurricanes are to a misty morning; or put it this way, one of these sweat events can turn a t-shirt into a very damp rag in about 10 seconds, and that can happen several times in an hour.)

2009 was also the year of the supplements: cortisol tables to offset adrenal insufficiency, thyroid tables for thyroid deficiency, and HGH for--you guessed it--human growth hormone deficiency. Yet as the year wore on and the blood lettings continued and iron levels decreased, the levels of these other substances started returning to normal or even excess. Last month the doctors said to taper off all supplements. But at no point during all of this has my wife felt any better. She spent most of the year laid out on the sofa in the living room, unable to handle stairs, unable to manage even basic household chores.

Then, just before Thanksgiving 2009, the doctor settled on a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. If you've ever been handed this diagnosis you know it's a classic case of good news / bad news. The good news: there's finally an explanation for why, 9.5 days out of 10, you feel like death warmed over. The bad news: there's no cure; treatment is expensive and does not alleviate all the symptoms; many people see no difference between CFS and laziness, so moral support may be hard to find.

Of course, once we heard this diagnosis we started our research. That meant hours of web surfing and the creation of a bunch of new Google alerts (that's when you tell Google to send you an email if there is any news about a particular subject). And that's how we learned about XMRV and the link to CFS. Although CFS was not on our radar when the XMRV connection was first reported back in October, Google noticed the year-end coverage in Discover Magazine and alerted us (thanks Google!).

So where does that leave us? Many people suffering from CFS/ME are hoping their condition is now validated as caused by an outside agent and they can get beyond the "all in your head" syndrome. Obviously, there is fresh hope for new, more effective treatments for CFS/ME. There could also be improvements in the treatment of related conditions like MS, and fibromyalgia, not to mention prostate cancer, which kills 25,000 men a year in America alone. (See this link for more on XMRV and prostate cancer.)

Realistically, there are still way more questions about XMRV than answers. The widespread existence of a previously unknown retrovirus has a whole bunch of worrying implications for the entire population (there are very few retroviruses but the best known is HIV). Scientists are rushing to answer questions like: Is XMRV contagious? How is it transmitted? Is it present in the nation's blood supply? Does it cause CFS and prostate cancer or do those conditions allow it to be contracted?

I will post some more links on these topics when I get organized. I just wanted to put this stuff out there while I had some extra time this New Year's weekend. And to thank those scientists who have been working on expanding our knowledge of this beast named XMRV. Their work in 2009 gives us hope that 2010 will be a better year.

Jeremy Dean Goes Back to Futurama: Art you can ride, even if the oil dries up

I loved my father dearly but there was one question guaranteed to get us arguing:

What is art?

One of the great blessings of my life is that my father and I arrived at an understanding on that question before he died; not exactly an agreement, but an understanding. It went something like this: Art is not art unless there is some skill involved.

For my father, that definition excluded a lot of "modern art" unless I could show him where the artist's skill came into play. Some 35 years have flown by since then, but I think he would agree with me that the latest works by my friend and colleague Jeremy Dean qualify as art. That's because Jeremy is creating art that cannot be realized without skill as well as perception, objects that have the power to make people ask questions and question assumptions, even as they impress with their physical accomplishment. I'm talking about the Hummer-Escalade-Hoovercart, the object at the heart of the Back to the Futurama project. (There are more pictures here.)

I actually wrote a piece about this on my "On the Road" blog because it relates to cars and travel and life's journey. Starting next month, Jeremy is going to take a GMC Hummer or Cadillac Escalade and turn it into a horse drawn vehicle (the image above is just one of many models Jeremy has made to visualize the concept).

Making cars into carts is what people did back in The Great Depression and in the States they called them Hoovercarts as a play on Hoovercrats, a term coined for supporters of Herbert Hoover, the president who presided over the worst of the Depression. In Canada they were called Bennett Buggies, after the prime minister at the time. They arose from a surplus of cars relative to a shortage of affordable fuel. Folks fould that one horse or mule could pull a Model T Ford quite easily if you took out the engine. And there was grass and hay to be had even when money for gasoline dried up.

This project is going to take a lot of energy and expertise. Over the more than five years I have known him, Jeremy has proved to be an endless source of energy (the making and distributing of Dare Not Walk Alone being the most obvious proof). But now he could use some help on the expertise side. Not that Jeremy is a stranger to hands-on-artisan work. I have seen numerous examples of his home remodelling and he is a skilled craftsman, a practical maker of things built to last.

So, if you know of someone who has the skills to chop a car, hitch a horse, or fit out the inside of a vehicle with kick-ass sounds and video systems, why not use the Contact link on Jeremy's home page and let him know. You can also pledge your support of the project (that page features a great video about the project as well as cool gifts you can get in return for your pledge).

When March rolls around Jeremy will ride this creation into a major art event in New York. I'm pretty sure the TV news cameras will be rolling when this happening happens. How many people will "get" what this creation says about the world today, cultural values, lifestyle choices, sustainability and human frailty? I don't know. But this engineered weirdness will get a lot of people thinking. And that's art.
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Balls On Fire, Rolling Down the Road

Hopefully Dylan will forgive the play on Wheels on Fire but I just wanted to do one last post of the year and put two sites on your New Year's Eve list:

The Biggar Bonfire: We attended this event several times when we lived in Scotland and it is well worth braving the cold. The pipes, the bars, the flames, the smiling faces. What's not to love about this Hogmanay event.

The Balls of Fire: We never made it to this one, but again you have the pipes, the crowds, and flames. Only this time they are swirling balls of fire, proceeding down the main road and into the harbor. There's a webcam and more on the site.

So let's hope these and all the other end-of-year festivities around the world usher in a New Year that is brighter than the one that is ending. Here's to a great 2010 for all!

Back to the Future of Cars? Test Driving Jeremy Dean's Futurama

And now for something completely different, on the road.

Back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the only economic crisis in the last 100 years that was worse than the one we're enduring today, a strange new form of road vehicle emerged for the first time: the horse-drawn automobile. In America they were dubbed Hoover carts or Hoover wagons, after Herbert Hoover, who was president when the depression hit and was widely criticized for not doing more to prevent or alleviate the suffering it brought. In Canada these vehicles were called Bennett Buggies after that country's Prime Minister Bennett who was in power from 1930 to 1935 (and of whom it has been said "his own wealth (often openly displayed) and impersonal style alienated many struggling Canadians").

A collision of two phenomena conspired to put these strange hybrid contraptions on the road: a. the rapid growth of automobile ownership in the 1920s, notably the Ford Model T, and b. the rapid drop in the affordability of gasoline during a time of mass unemployment and asset devaluation. The result? A sizable population of people who owned cars--having bought them with cash--but were unable to afford the fuel to run them. Because the bottom had fallen out of the market for used cars, some people figured why not take out the engine, add some poles, and harness up a horse? The hardware, wetware, and skill-set required for this conversion were readily available, particularly in more rural areas. (And pretty much all of North America was, at that time, more rural than it is today.)

Now imagine being shot forward in time from 1930 to 2010 and the first thing you see is a cart horse shackled to a Cadillac Escalade or GMC Hummer. Would you be surprised? Probably not.

Such is the thinking behind the recent conceptual works of contemporary artist Jeremy Dean. Few automobiles capture the excesses of the first decade of the 21st century better than the Hummer and the Escalade. They are both the apotheosis of consumerism and the antithesis of sustainability. And the juice that keeps them going--petroleum--is liable to such violent price swings that we live our lives just one act of terrorism away from prices that most people could not afford.

As an artist, Jeremy has always sought new ways to bring our reality into perspective. As a documentary filmmaker, Jeremy has spent a lot of time uncovering and studying images of the past. So when he encountered Hoover carts during research on a documentary, Jeremy couldn't shake the image and its potent symbolism. And while the world of today is clearly very different from the world of the 1930s, the realization that we have been pursuing a life-style we cannot afford to sustain is even more pressing today than it was 80 years ago. Jeremy has dubbed this project The Futurama of Cars.

You can see more examples of the works here. And you can help Jeremy realize the Futurama of Cars: an actual 21st Century Hoover Cart that Jeremy plans to drive through New York in March, 2010. That's right, a working horse-drawn vehicle based on a Hummer or Escalade. So heads up if you own one of these vehicles--Jeremy is accepting donations, and he doesn't mind if the motor is blown. And heads up any chop shops who want some free publicity for helping make this dramatic horsepower conversion.

Indeed, anyone can help move this project forward by visiting the KickStarter web site. Check out the wild project video and consider making a pledge. There are all sorts of weird and wonderful rewards on offer for pledging, including Warranties, Registration, and Titles.

As works of art, these 21st century Hoover carts take our minds on the road, on a journey through concepts like wealth and poverty, excess and indulgence, environmentalism and sustainability, waste and frugality, form and function, practicality and absurdity, art and atifice, design and desire. Why not come along for the ride

Opera to the Rescue? Definitely worth a listen

I just spent my evening at the Opera. Not the fat lady sings kind of opera, more of a browser with wings kind of thing that just happens to go by the name Opera. And I am really impressed (even though I'm tone deaf and can't tell a libretti from a Lambretta).

I have checked out the Opera browser several times in the past and each time was impressed at the way successive versions added new features, often ahead of IE (not hard to do) and Firefox (quite a bit harder but Opera has been doing it). However, I did not feel compelled to make it my default browser. When Google Chrome came along, seemingly faster than Firefox and with good stability, I made it my default browser. The recent emergence of the Mac version of Chrome into beta meant I could run it on both of my work boxes (one a PC, the other a Mac--yes, when it comes to tech--I go both ways).

But the latest Opera, version 10.10, has really impressed me and may become my new default. I was particularly interested in a combination of three capabilities that might be unique to me, but could make a difference to many other users.

First capability: An integrated email application that can read Eudora files. (For the younger generation, Eudora was a very popular email application last century and I still use it today because it's reliable and easily searchable. Unfortunately, the makers of Eudora abandoned it many years ago and it's starting to show its age.) I've been looking for a Eudora replacement and Opera might be it. I had been reluctant to give up Eudora's trusty filter/folder system of message management but Opera replicates it while using a more flexible system of "views."

Second, there is a Turbo feature that speeds up browsing on slow connections. Regular readers of this blog will know that my home office connection to the Internet is via satellite, specifically HughesNet, which can be very slow at times. Tada! Opera Turbo helps me cope with that.

Third, regular readers of this blog know that HughesNet makes it hard to access my own blog. (Something so weird I made a video about it.) But guess what, Opera sees my blog even when Firefox and Safari and Chrome and IE7/8 do not! Yes, it sounds crazy, but it is verifiable (a video of this phenomenon in action is coming). So there is no other way to put it: Opera works when the others don't. (And no prizes for figuring out with which browser I am writing this.)

There's a bunch more cool stuff in Opera 10.10 that I have not fully explored yet, including file and photo sharing and audio streaming (the audio thing was the source of the "worth a listen pun" in the blog post title). Even though Opera does not have a large share of the notebook and desktop browser market, the company is clearly pushing ahead with innovations and picking up enthusiastic users in the process. The company is also well established in the mobile and embedded browser market (check out the browser in your Nintendo Wii).

Over the next week or so I will be checking out more features and, if this whole HughesNet workaround capability pans out, I will be posting my impressions here.

The Cost of Windows 7

I just wanted to highlight a good blog post I read today in Information Week about the way Microsoft prices Windows upgrades.

Under the clever headline "Microsoft's Non-Family Values" blogger Dave Methvin lays out the logic behind charging $120 to upgrade a single Windows XP or Windows Vista machine to Windows 7. After all, Apple only charges about $25 for an OS upgrade (and offers attractive "family" pricing for multiple licenses). Not surprisingly the answer to "Why does Microsoft charge so much?" boils down to "Because it wants to and it can." The reason Microsoft wants to is the alliance--some would say "unholy alliance"--between hardware makers and Microsoft.

Basically, if it costs $120 and a bunch of hassles to get your old notebook running Windows 7, and a new notebook can be had for $400 with Windows 7 installed, there's a good chance you will opt to buy the new notebook, which helps the hardware makers--keeps the production lines moving and the cash flow coming--and helps Microsoft justify the huge fees it charges the many different computer makers who need the rights to install Windows 7. Of course, that $400 notebook is usually an under-powered teaser model and the PC makers hope you will go for the $1,000 models once they get you in a buying mood.

A good example is my own Sony VAIO that I bought new with XP installed about 4 years ago. No way is Sony going to support Windows 7 on that machine. Sony wants me to buy a new machine. Period. (And if the refusal to support Windows 7 is not incentive enough, Sony apparently has a backup plan that consists of making the fan get so loud and annoying I am forced to retire the thing or lose my sanity.)

Unfortunately, unholy alliances being what they are, Microsoft can't offer a $20 per PC upgrade deal even if it wanted to. The hardware makers would scream foul. They would lose out on sales of new hardware AND face demands for drivers and support and all the related hassles that hardware makers hate to deal with (mainly because they are expensive).

How ironic that I have a reliable 4 year-old computer that delivers entirely adequate performance under Windows XP or 7 yet is a dissappointment to the company that made it. Reminds me of the car industry.

FCC chairman wants USF to apply to broadband

This is a positive development: FCC chairman wants USF to apply to broadband - FierceBroadbandWireless.