End of the Kodachrome Era

I guess Paul Simon is disappointed, because they finally did take his Kodachrome away, it having fallen victim to digital photography and the highly exacting and difficult chemistry required to process Kodachrome film. It’s a shame, though, because Kodachrome film has a high degree of color stability over time, and really does give “nice bright colors,” which is why it was often sought out by professional photographers. Some of the most famous pictures were taken with Kodachrome film, like this one, and this one.

Now there’s a gallery making its way around the blogosphere that shows some amazing Kodachrome photos from the Black and White era [Link removed because the Denver Post works with the scum of the earth], the late 30s, early 40s. These would be Kodachrome photos because that process having been introduced in 1935, and the color hues look like the film. You can see the rich color, and note that even after all this time, they still look very good; a tribute to the film’s stability. Ektachrome, the cheaper, easier to process color film technology, wasn’t introduced until 1942, and as any kid who grew up in the 70s can attest if they look at their kid pictures today, it’s not all that stable; the pictures lose their color trueness over time.

But nothing is as stable as digital photos. Assuming we don’t have a collapse of civilization, and lose digital technology, kids 5000 years from now will be looking at pictures from this era that look exactly the same then as they do now. Kodak discontinued Kodachrome in 2009, citing lack of demand. There’s still one lab in the country who can process the film, and they will cease processing at the end of 2010. The last Kodachrome photograph has yet to be processed, but that will soon happen. It’ll be the end of an era when it is.

UPDATE: You can see here that different types of films can be simulated digitally.

From the Road

Doing a post while driving back from my dad’s. The reason we went out there was because I planned to swing by the Apple Store in King of Prussia to get myself an iPad before Bitter and I head out to Hawaii. I have no intention of taking a laptop, but I don’t want to be totally off the grid for two weeks. The iPad is a nice compromise between a laptop and a phone. So far, I find the keyboard to be only slightly more awkward than a Netbook. I can go at a much higher rate than on an iPhone. Most the problem so far is the moving car. But hey… 10 hours of battery life. There a lot of places I go where I don’t want to take a laptop, but don’t really want to spend all my time viewing the Internets through a teeny tiny iPhone screen.

We’ll see how this works for me out in Hawaii.

Clearly They Have Not Learned from Stevens Media

SayUncle is reporting that Knox News had some of their content stolen by an Examiner.com writer. I’m sure Righthaven would be happy to sue the writer and Examiner.com if given half the chance, without warning or attempt at resolution. Clearly Knox news has not adopted the new business model of the failing old media. But Jack McElroy notes:

Apparently, search engine optimization is more important than basic beat reporting, these days. That’s not only sad; it’s scary.

Yes. That is the basic truth. Examiner.com’s business model is really based entirely on bringing traffic to their site, regardless of whether that traffic represents people getting value out of the content, or just arriving on a search term. That’s one of the reasons Examiner.com exercises very little editorial oversight over their content producers — if they did it would actually be a detriment to their business model. Their strategy is to put as much content out there as possible related to specific topics, and then dominate the search rankings for those terms. The quality of the writing, or the value of the content have little bearing on bringing search engine traffic.

Google is going to necessarily have a profound impact on reporting and news gathering, and groups like Stevens Media, and the reporter here, obviously don’t get there’s a benefit, search engine wise, to having one of your stories widely linked, even if the linker quotes a little from it. But the legal implications of the Examiner.com model are interesting. The fair use doctrine uses a four factor test in trying to determine whether a use of copyright works is fair. One of those factors includes “whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” Examiner.com directly makes money off advertising, of which it shares a portion of with, on a per-page-view basis, with its content producers. This would be a factor that would weight against a fair use ruling in Court.

But Examiner.com itself would not be an attractive target for a shakedown in the manner of Righthaven’s suits, because they presumably have the money to hire lawyers, and would be more interested in protecting their overall business model than they would be in a quick settlement. It would be very interesting to find out, also, whether Examiner.com would be able to claim immunity under the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. I would tend to doubt it, but the line between service and content providers is getting increasingly less clear.

Not Running Out to Get iPhone 4

I’m not an early adopter, and the problems with the iPhone 4 are part of that reason. I’m sticking with my 3G for now, at least until the revised versions are out. Les Jones points out Apple’s changing positions on the antenna problem, and wonders whether Apple is right that all phones have the problem, after trying the trick with his blackberry and receiving signal degradation.

They are correct, but it depends on a lot of factors. The main problem is that in order to get more bandwidth, cell providers are moving higher and higher into the microwave range to accomplish communication between the cell phone and tower. This also benefits battery life. The problem with microwaves, however, is that the higher you go in frequency, the less they penetrate barriers. The iPhone uses GSM 1900, which operates from 1850 to 1910MHz. Your microwave oven operates at 2450 MHz, so you can see we’re not that far off from the ideal frequency for reheating leftovers. Microwaves are poor penetrators of materials, and they don’t penetrate metals at all, otherwise RADAR would have no theoretical basis. So yes, all phones are subject to signal attenuation depending on how you hold them, where you are, and how strong your signal is.

The problem with the iPhone is that they put the antenna on the outside where it can be touched, which changes the impedance of the antenna, causing more of the energy generated by the iPhone’s radio transceiver to end up in you rather than being radiated off to the local cell tower. This is why adding a bumper fixes the problem. It would seem it should be relatively easy to put a transparent, non-conductive coating on the exterior metal of the phone that would attenuate the problem. That way people’s grubby hands get kept off the antenna, and Steve can still feel good about his slick design. Antenna experts say FCC rules limit where they can locate it, because the FCC limits how much radiation can get pumped into your skull. Apparently bottom antennas are not all that uncommon. But how many vendors have them openly exposed?

Boeing 787 Dreamers in Virtual Service

That past few weeks, the officially licensed version of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner has become available for X-Plane. They won’t go into actual service for a few more months yet, but you can fly them in X-Plane. I bought it almost as soon as I got the e-mail, but this weekend I finally got to try it out on a cross country flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. I’m really surprised by much of the detailed 3D modeling artistry that goes into making these planes, so I’m happy to highlight the work. I have one shot that shows the wing-flex model. The Dreamliner is actually kind of scary in that regard. The wingtips will be well over the fuselage during flight. Most of the buttons and dials you see in the cockpit you can actuate with the mouse just like you would in the real version. Here are some of the shots from the trip. Takeoff from a muggy day in Philly, ascent to cruising altitude over Virginia, Sunset over New Mexico, twilight descent and finally landing in Los Angeles at night. Gives some idea of the detail that went into the model, as well as the X-Plane experience.

I wanted to do one with sound, because I think the model designers did a really nice job of incorporating sound into their model. The radio is just random X-Plane radio chatter, which I normally leave off, though you can actually fly with live air traffic control on VATSIM. The depths of loserdom you can descend into with flight simulators these days is astounding. I think this is all part of a plot by the military to train the next generation for the future UAV wars with the Chinese. But let me say, as long as I’m listening to flying instructions from some thirteen year old Canadian kid, there’s no way we’re losing that fight. The Chinese are barely discovering flight while our kids are piloting intercontinental airliners through the virtual skies. I know which side I’m betting on in that fight.

I do all my own flying in these, which you can probably tell by some of the over-controlling and various other issues, but it’s been a long time since I killed any virtual passengers :)

Physics News

If you’re a site that dedicates itself to physics news, you’d better be careful about problems like this:

The team cooled down antiprotons to temperatures colder than the surface of Pluto, as low as -443 degrees F (9.26 kelvin) — just 17 degrees above absolute zero. Physicists studying cold  hope to ultimately glean insights into why the universe is made of matter rather than antimatter.

I think we need to know the definition of absolute zero before we can have warp drive.

UPDATE: Someone in the comments notes the degrees is correct, since it’s degrees F above Absolute Zero. They did not re-note the scale. That would make sense. It’s not technically correct to refer to Kelvin as degrees, so that temperature isn’t 9.2 degrees Kelvin but 9.2 Kelvin. The use of degrees make restating the scale redundant.

Friday Fun Fly: MiG-21 Fishbed

I was inspired by this story of an aviator who had his wings clipped by the FAA for buzzing a beach, so low it took out a few fishing rods. One of the great things about X-Plane is being able to do things that the FAA would normally frown on, such as buzzing a beach, or, I don’t know, flying supersonic under the Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston with a MiG-21 Fishbed:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wiZJNmmJ1Y[/youtube]

It took me a few tries to get it under. The nearby bridges make it difficult. But I managed to do it without crashing the plane. If you want to see a non-pixelated version, download the m4v here. This particular model is painted up in the colors of the Croation Air Force, which is still an operator of the Fishbed. The MiG-21 is one ugly plane, but it’s easy to fly for a fighter. It’ll take quite a bit of abuse, and it takes some work to push it over the envelope. In contrast, every time I try to fly the F-22 in X-Plane I push it too far and it undergoes catastrophic failure. The MiG is a lot more fun to fly. X-Plane is a really great product with a large community of people contributing to it. You can even join a virtual airline and fly regularly scheduled flights in the VATSIM world if you’re up to it. I’m still working my way up to flying in the VATSIM world with the X-Plane version of the Boeing 737. Let me tell you, we’ve come a long way from this.

And no, FTC, I’m not promoting X-Plane for any other reason than the fact that it’s a lot of fun and a great community. For those of us who are aviation enthusiasts who spend too much money on guns an ammunition to be able to afford a plane, it’s a fun, cheap hobby. Well, for most of us anyway.

Drug Discovery Model Horribly Broken

I know this deviates from our usual topics, but if any of you have ailments out there that don’t yet have good treatments for, or have loved ones that do, this affects you. It affects me because I work in this field. Glenn Reynolds links to an excellent article in the xconomy.com about why the Drug Discovery model is horribly broken. Based on my knowledge of this business, it’s pretty spot on. Let me quote from it a bit:

Inexperience can play a major role when it comes to these failures, and the biotechnology industry, by virtue of being comprised of so many small, new companies, is especially vulnerable to that. One 2008 analysispublished in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery found that 95% of the industry’s Phase III failures in 2006 and 2007 were products originating from biotechnology companies. During the period analyzed in the article, 65 drugs seeking approval experienced regulatory setbacks and 16 of those had 3-month delays. The vast majority of products with delays came from biotech companies. The authors ventured that “many of these delays may have resulted from poor quality NDA submissions, rather than from flaws in the drugs themselves.”

Sounds like a harsh assessment, but it appears as though it’s fairly accurate, at least based on a conversation I recently had with Greg Dombal, managing partner at Halloran Consulting Group, which helps life sciences companies with regulatory and quality assurance issues. I met Dombal last week, at the dinner to kick-off Xconomy’s XSITE summit, and some of the things he said were truly surprising. He says, for example, that about three quarters of the life sciences companies his group sees “have some fundamental gaps in competence.” In a “solid” 30-40 percent, he says, some of the issues can be found at the “C level”—meaning the chief executive, chief operating officer, and other top executives.

This reflects what I’ve seen in this business as well. The root of the problem is that the management culture in Big Pharma discovery organizations is hopelessly broken. As the industry is shedding research capacity, a lot of these managers are finding themselves looking for new opportunity, or out of work altogether. If a few people get together and get an idea for starting a biotech company, the venture capitalists, many of whom don’t seem to really understand this business, are typically going to insist that experienced industry people be brought in to run the company. It’s the old “Wow, you have a good idea. Now here’s a bunch of money and a new CEO to help you run things.” approach. This is a recipe for disaster, because these are largely the same people who are destroying the research arms of the large pharmaceutical companies. Dysfunctional people seem to always have dysfunctional friends, and they will bring those friends on board.

There’s also, concurrently, been a trend in Big Pharma to push as much risk onto biotech and small pharma firms as possible. For most of the last decade, if you didn’t have a compound in phase II clinical trials, none of the Big Pharmas wanted to talk to you. The big problem with clinical trials is that, even if you lucked out and got a reasonably competent management team, and your idea panned out (itself a not insignificant risk), the regulatory hurdles are substantial. Most people coming from the research and discovery parts of Big Pharma have little to no experience dealing with the FDA, creating and filing IND applications, running clinical trials, or filing NDA’s. Having been through this process up to the end of phase I with the company I work for, it was an unmitigated disaster, with problems nearly every step of the way, largely because of inexperience and misstep.

The solution for the pharmaceutical industry is letting biotech and small pharmaceutical companies drive the discovery engine, with Big Pharma exploiting their core expertise in regulatory compliance and marketing. We can get a compound to the pre-clinical stage, but I agree with this article that generally it’s been a disaster to let these smaller, inexperienced companies to take the compounds into the clinic. Venture capitalists also need to get it out of their heads they need people with pharma management experience running these companies. If these people were any good at what they did, Big Pharma would still have productive research organizations. Yes, there are good people in this bunch, but there are a lot of bad apples. If the people bringing fourth ideas to be funded have a good idea, the requisite background in the field and industry, they don’t need someone with a big pharma management background to lead them. They need someone who’s been successful and getting small enterprises up and running, and leading them to success. I would argue some of the more successful technology CEOs are better suited to run these types of biotech and small discovery operations than many Big Pharma types.

A More Apt Comparison

In the comments yesterday, someone suggested I was comparing apples to oranges comparing the new iPhone to Bitter’s Droid. Engadget has a more fair comparison, but I think the new iPhone still looks pretty good, depending on what features are important to you.

I have one more tech post for today, but no fear, we will not turn into a tech blog. Just not much going on in the gunnie world right now. Expect that to change when McDonald is released not too long from now.