High posting volume today. I just find it remarkable that in the last 2 weeks I’ve seen several incredible breakthrough level stories on health and life extension.

Today sees this story on understanding how caloric restriction works which will appear in Nature. We’ve been wondering about this for a while, obviously I’m not the sort of person who would have an easy time following caloric restriction. Some people have wondered if Resveratrol might mimic the actions of CR, but this shows we’re coming to a much deeper understanding of it.

Yesterday I learned that we have misunderstood death and in particular how to revive the recently dead. New research suggests that when the blood stops flowing, the cells go into a hibernation that might last for hours. They don’t die after 4 minutes of ischemia the way people have commonly thought. In fact, this theory suggests, the thing that kills patients we attempt to revive is the sudden inflow of oxygen we provide for revival. It seems to trigger a sort of “bug” in the [[w:mitochondria], triggering apoptosis. As we learn to restore oxygen in a way that doesn’t do this, especially at cool temperatures, it may be possible to revive the “dead” an hour later, which has all sorts of marvelous potential for both emergency care and cryonics.

Last week we were told of an absolutely astounding new drug which treats all sorts of genetic disorders. A pill curing all those things sounds like a miracle. It works by altering the ribosome so that it ignores certain errors in the DNA which normally make it abort, causing complete absence of an important protein. If the errors are minor, the slightly misconstructed protein is still able to do its job. As an analogy, this is like having parity memory and disabling the parity check in a computer. It turns out parity errors are quite rare, so most of the time this works fine. When a parity check fails the whole computer often aborts, which is the right move in the global scale — you don’t want to risk corrupting data or not knowing of problems — but in a human being, aborting the entire person due to a parity check is a bit extreme from the individualistic point of view.

These weren’t even all the big medical stories of the past week. There have been cancer treatments and more, along with a supercomputer approaching the power of a mouse brain.

While I was at Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, I did an interview with an online publication called Web Pro News. I personally prefer written text to video blogging, but for those who like to see video, you can check out:

Video Interview on Privacy and Web 2.0

The video quality is pretty good, if not the lighting.

The main focus was to remind people that as we return to timesharing, which is to say, move our data from desktop applications to web based applications, we must be aware that putting our private data in the hands of 3rd parties gives it less constitutional protection. We’re effectively erasing the 4th Amendment.

I also talk about hints at an essay I am preparing on the evils of user-controlled identity management software. And my usual rant about thinking about how you would design software if you were living in China or Saudi Arabia.

I also was interviewed some time ago about Google and other issues by a French/German channel. That’s a 90 minute long program entitled Faut-il avoir peur de Google ? (Should we fear Google). It’s also available in German. It was up for free when I watched it, but it may now require payment. (I only appear for a few minutes, my voice dubbed over.)

When I was interviewed for this I offered to, with some help, speak in French. I am told I have a pretty decent accent, though I no longer have the vocabulary to speak conversationally in French. I thought it would be interesting if they helped me translate and then I spoke my words in French (perhaps even dubbing myself later if need be.) They were not interested since they also had to do German.

Another video interview by a young French documentarian producing a show called Mix-Age Beta can be found here. The lighting isn’t good, but this time it’s in English. It’s done under the palm tree in my back yard.

I wasn’t going to make any special commemoration, but it seems a whole ton of other blogs are linking today to my articles on the history of Spam, so I should blog them as well.

Many years ago I got interested in the origins of the term “spam” to mean net abuse. I mean I had lived through most of its origin and seen most of the early spams myself, but it wasn’t clear why people took the name of the meat product and applied it to junk mail. I knew it came from USENET, so I used the USENET search engines to trace the origins.

This resulted in my article on the origins of word spam to mean net abuse.

In doing the research, I was pointed to what was probably the earliest internet spam, though it far predates the term.

I documented that in Reactions to the first spam.

4 years ago, on the 25th anniversary of that spam, I was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered and write an article reflecting on the history. For that article I dug out Gary Thuerk, the sender of that first spam, and interviewed him for more details.

You can read that in Reflections on the 25th anniversary of Spam.

Of course, you can find all these and many more in my collection of articles on Spam. Many years ago I wrote a wide variety of essays on the spam problem. Not simply about solutions, but analysis of why the fight was so nasty, and concern over the rights people were willing to give up in the name of fighting spam.

I will probably update them, and do some more research for the 30th anniversary, next year.