So, umm, what happened here? How can I access my other-timeline post from your universe?Marek Edelman, Commander in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dies at 90 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
Marek Edelman, a cardiologist who was the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Germans, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 90...HIs God is not particularly benign.
... Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans.
He was 20 when the Germans overran Poland in 1939, and in the months that followed he watched as they turned his Warsaw neighborhood into a ghetto, cutting it off from the rest of the city with brick walls, barbed wire and armed sentries. By early 1942, as many as 500,000 Jews had been herded into the area...
... Then, starting on July 22, 1942, the ghetto population began to shrink ominously. Each day, armed Germans and the Ukrainians serving with them prodded and wedged 5,000 to 6,000 Jews into long trains, which departed from the Umschlagplatz, a square at the southern end of the ghetto. At times they lured people onto the trains with loaves of brown bread...
... On Sept. 8, when according to German records 310,322 Jews had been put on the trains and sent to the death camps and 5,961 more had been murdered inside the ghetto, the liquidation was suspended. There were some 60,000 Jews still in the ghetto. The leaders of the Jewish Combat Organization were certain that the Germans would try to finish the liquidation, and for the next six months the organization planned for armed resistance.
At 4 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1943, as German soldiers and their Ukrainian, Latvian and Polish henchmen marched through the ghetto to round up people, they came, for the first time, under sustained fire. By midafternoon they were forced to withdraw without having taken a single person.
The fighting continued for three weeks. On one side were 220 ghetto fighters, hungry and relatively untrained youths deployed in 22 units. Each unit had a pistol, five grenades and five homemade bottle bombs. They also had two mines and one submachine gun.
Ranged against them, on a daily average, were 36 German officers and 2,054 others with an arsenal that included 82 machine guns, 135 submachine guns and 1,358 rifles along with armored vehicles, artillery and air power used to set the ghetto ablaze.
Dr. Edelman buried his fallen comrades and used his knowledge of the neighborhood, where he had grown up, to find escape routes for units that were pinned down. Many years later he would say that no one ever established how many Germans they had killed: “Some say 200, some say 30. Does it make a difference?”
“After three weeks,” he recalled, “most of us were dead.”
At the end he found a way out of an encircled position, leading 50 others with him.
Eventually, he took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, when for 63 days Poles fought valorously but unsuccessfully to liberate their capital from the Germans.
Once the war ended, he threw himself into his medical studies and became a doctor in Lodz. For 30 years he kept his memories and thoughts about what happened to himself, concentrating on his medical work and becoming one of Poland’s leading heart specialists and the author of a much-used textbook on the treatment of heart attacks.
Even after Poland’s anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, when he was demoted at the hospital and most of the remaining Jews in Poland, including his wife and two children, emigrated, Dr. Edelman stayed. He was unwilling, and perhaps unable, to tear himself away from the place where East European Jewry had once thrived and then perished as he watched...
... Marek Edelman was born on Sept. 19, 1919, the only son of a family that spoke Yiddish at home and Polish at work. His father died when he was very young; his mother, who worked as a secretary at a hospital, died when he was 14. While going to high school he was looked after by his mother’s friends from the hospital...
... Dr. Edelman’s wife, Alina Margolis-Edelman, a pediatrician, died last year in Paris. She had worked as a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto. He is survived by their two children, Aleksander, a biophysicist, and Ania, a chemist, both of Paris, as well as two grandchildren.
The Polish title of the book Mrs. Krall wrote about Dr. Edelman could be translated as “To Finish Before God,” with the implicit idea being one of racing with God. But when the English translation was published by Henry Holt and Company, it was called “Shielding the Flame,” a reference to a passage in which Dr. Edelman explained his philosophy both in the ghetto and later as a doctor.
“God is trying to blow out the candle, and I’m quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention,” he said. “To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than he would wish.”
Secrets of the Cell - Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life - Carl Zimmer - NYTimes.comAs best I can remember, this is all new since I did med school in the early 80s. Anything that can clear huntingtin is exciting all by itself, no matter how preliminary the research.
...lysosomes are versatile garbage disposals. In addition to taking in shrouded material, they can also pull in individual proteins through special portals on their surface. Lysosomes can even extend a mouthlike projection from their membrane and chew off pieces of a cell.
The shredded debris that streams out of the lysosomes is not useless waste. A cell uses the material to build new molecules, gradually recreating itself from old parts. “Every three days, you basically have a new heart,” said Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, a molecular biologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine...
...The protection humans get from lysosomes is essential not just during famines. It is also vital just after birth. When babies emerge from their mothers, they need huge amounts of energy so that they can start to run their bodies on their own. But this demand comes at precisely the moment that babies stop getting food through their umbilical cord. Japanese scientists have found that lysosomes in mice kick into high gear as soon as they are born. After a day or two, as they start to nurse, the rate of autophagy drops back to normal.
When the scientists engineered mice so they could not use their lysosomes at birth, the newborn mice almost immediately died of starvation...
... It has long been known, for example, that animals that are put on a strict low-calorie diet can live much longer than animals that eat all they can. Recent research has shown that caloric restriction raises autophagy in animals and keeps it high. The animals seem to be responding to their low-calorie diet by feeding on their own cells, as they do during famines. In the process, their cells may also be clearing away more defective molecules, so that the animals age more slowly...
... Andrea Ballabio, the scientific director of Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine in Naples, Italy, and his colleagues have found another way to raise autophagy. By studying the activity of genes that build lysosomes, they discovered that at least 68 of the genes are switched on by a single master protein, known as TFEB.
When Dr. Ballabio and his colleagues engineered cells to make extra TFEB, the cells made more lysosomes. And each of those lysosomes became more efficient. The scientists injected the cells with huntingtin, a protein that clumps to cause the fatal brain disorder Huntington’s disease. The cells did a much better job of destroying the huntingtin than normal cells...
Gordon's Tech: Can't select Jabber or Google Talk for iChat? Here's one reason.Definitely not new. Apple's messed up on Parental Controls and Simple Finder since the day they were first added to OS X.
...If you enable parental controls, even if all you're doing is protecting the Dock from changes, then iChat can't use Google Talk...
Michael Vick Fails To Inspire Team With 'Great' Dogfighting Story | The Onion
..."The only reason the Chiefs scored in the second half was because I was still thinking about what Mike said during halftime about 'trunking,'" said linebacker Omar Gaither, referring to the practice of putting two pit bulls in a car trunk, closing the door, and allowing them to fight for 15 minutes until one is dead. "Why is this freak on my team? Why are people cheering for him? Seriously, answer my questions. Why?
... some enterprising phone companies, aided by local regulators, have taken to encouraging entrepreneurs to set up businesses that attract lots of inbound calls. Those include the free conference calling services, free fax lines and telephone pornography. The phone companies rebate some of the high call termination fees they receive to the companies running these services...So revenues generated from gaming the interconnect system can be used to subsidize phone porn to attract incoming calls and generate interconnect fees.
Now that we’re well past 3.0 it’s time to update my prior personal iPhone wish list.
Some of my past wishes have been met, but other items have been on my personal wish list for years (ex. “old”). This time around I’m excluding issues that are clearly AT&T problems (ex. tethering). So this is a wish list for Apple.
They’re in rough order of declining priority …
#4 is a novel entry since it doesn’t require any software development. Apple has blocked an App from use with the iPhone because it interferes with Apple’s current revenue (SMS, long distance) and because Apple fears Google.
I’m mildly hopeful about 1, 3 and 7.
Unfortunately 2, 4, and 5 all threaten Apple’s revenue plans, so, in the absence of regulatory pressure, Apple won’t help us.
I can’t guess why Apple won’t do #6.
Campaign Finance Reform: The publicly owned politicianI'd buy a share of Franken.
... Campaigns need money. Powerful people need good things. Both needs can be satisfied by transforming politicians into publicly owned corporations. After meeting standard accounting requirements, a politician would be sold through an IPO. The usual futures and options markets would develop. Standard reporting and accounting regulations and SEC enforcement would apply. Cheaters would be delisted, and thus be effectively removed from future campaigns.
There are several advantages to this approach:
1. There are no constitutional issues.
2. It's very simple.
3. It's honest and transparent.
4. It would bring in so much money that other forms of funding and bribery would become irrelevant. Federal, and some state and city politicians, would be all multi-millionaires.
5. We would not need public financing of elections. Politics would no longer be limited to the wealthy.
6. The market would demonstrate a politicians' commitment to his/her owners through the share price. This would be visible for all to see.
7. At election time voters would know what a politician stood for, by knowing who the major shareholders were.
8. Politicians would no longer need salaries or pensions.
9. Politicians would not need to spend all their time raising money -- bending laws, and selling their souls in order to get elected. They would be available to govern.
10. Corporations and wealthy individuals would be able to buy and sell politicians more efficiently. Efficiency is good for the economy.
11. Powerful individuals and corporations would have their necessary control of the political process.
My son’s 5/6th grade camping outing was about done, so I offered to do a class picture. They lined up well, and I zipped off about 15 shots with my fancy Canon lens and dSLR.
Then all the kids ran forward, asking for pictures to be put on their camera. I know the teacher wanted to get going, so I declined. After all, it would be easy to share my fancy picture.
I knew as I said it that I was wrong, but I didn’t know I was twice wrong.
Firstly, I was wrong because I’ve had lots of personal experience that photo sharing doesn’t work – with the one exception of Facebook. I’ve put thousands of photos on Picasa, SmugMug and my own servers, but I think the vast majority have been neglected. Very few, if any, have ever been downloaded for personal storage.
There are too many hurdles for traditional image sharing to work. Only geeks like me can manage downloading images and storing them in photo libraries. Beyond the software issues, a surprising number of families have barely functional computers (XP virus infested typically) and either no net service or one that’s effectively out of order. Lastly, there’s a personal element to acquiring an image – a sense of ownership and obligation that a shared image lacks.
Facebook is different – images I share there are viewed – but only by Facebook users. Very few of the parents or teachers of our 5th and 6th graders do Facebook.
I knew that much, but it wasn’t until the bus ride home that I learned there was another dimension of incomprehension.
I watched a 5th/6th grade girl share her pictures. She held up her camera for all to view. Not surprising, except these weren’t pictures from the camping trip. She had what seemed like years of pictures on her camera. She flipped through her camera album as though she was playing the piano, effortlessly zooming, panning, and navigating a large image collection.
For her, her camera was the photo library and the camera back was her display. She can’t do anything with a shared digital image – except perhaps take a picture of the screen displaying it.
I wonder what she does when she finally hits image 2,000 or so, and fills her 4GB SD card? Probably deletes those she’s less interested in, gradually evolving a set of 2,000 very high value images.
No backups of course, but this generation seems comfortable with ephemera.
Next time, I won’t pretend anyone else will be able to use my picture.
* They seem nothing like 5th grade boys. “Mainstreaming” special needs children is relatively straightforward compared to educating boys and girls together.
iPhone and Google Maps: Go to here -- just drop the freakin' pin ...We need product documentation like "Power User tips and things longtime users tend to miss"..... Today, when I was switching from Map to List view, the "Drop Pin" button caught my eye. I'd ignored it for a while. What the heck did it do, anyway?
Riiiggght. It drops a pin on the map. It seems to leave it there, after the first time I did this the button changed to "Replace Pin". I didn't see a way to "Undrop Pin" -- maybe once you put it on any map it's bound to a map forever.
You can move the Pin around, bookmark it, get directions to it, etc...
