Eideard

Don’t be put off by the middle. Let it play through to the end – it’s worth it.

Thanks, Jägermeister

On December 9, 1968, before a packed Brooks Hall auditorium in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart, the director of Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, took the stage and changed computing forever.

During a 100-minute presentation, Engelbart demonstrated to 1,000 people the work that he and SRI’s chief engineer, Bill English, had been doing, work that is still recognizable in the way that everyone uses computers today.

It’s possible, some have said, that there never had been, nor never would be, another presentation that unveiled as many new paradigm-shifting technologies. They included the world’s first publicly seen mouse, as well as the introduction of hyperlinks and navigable windows. The presentation drew a standing ovation.

And it moved John Markoff, reporter at The New York Times…to write: “There were two things that particularly dazzled the audience on that rainy Monday morning.”

First, computing had made the leap from number crunching to become a communications and information-retrieval tool. Second, the machine was being used interactively with all its resources appearing to be devoted to a single individual. It was the first time that truly personal computing had been seen.

Worth remembering.

A Silicon Valley company has hailed as a major landmark the production of their one billionth computer mouse. Logitech’s description comes at a time when analysts claim the days of the mouse are numbered.

Absurd!

“It’s rare in human history that a billionth of anything has been shipped by one company,” said Logitech’s general manager Rory Dooley. “Look at any other industry and it has never happened. This is a significant milestone,” he told the BBC.

“The fundamental functionality of the mouse has not changed for 40 years and that is one of the keys to its success. We do not envisage unlearning all those years of learning but that doesn’t mean to say there will not be a place for touch interfaces.

“Touch will augment the things you can do today with the mouse and keyboard interface,” he added.

Dooley puts talk of the death of the mouse down to hyperbole. I would not be quite as polite.

Recognizing the limitations of other technologies for input – makes them something less than alternatives, rather supplements.

Healthy mice have been cloned for the first time from dead mice that had been frozen for several years, raising the possibility, scientists say, of “resurrecting” extinct animals such as mammoths from their frozen carcasses.

The clones were produced from dead mice kept at -20C for up to 16 years by a group of scientists in Kobe, Japan. After thawing the mice, researchers collected nuclei from cells in their brain tissue. These were then injected into empty eggs from which the DNA had been removed, to create cloned embryos. A second round of cloning used stem cells from the embryos that grew into four mouse clones…

The scientists, led by Dr Teruhiko Wakayama, wrote: “We have demonstrated here that healthy cloned mice and chimeric clonal mice could be obtained by nuclear transfer using donor nuclei from cells obtained from bodies frozen without cryoprotectants for up to 16 years.”

Other sources of frozen nuclei, such as white blood cells, could be as useful for cloning as brain tissue, said the scientists.

The research raises hopes that the cloning technique could be used to resurrect extinct animals frozen in permafrost, such as the woolly mammoth, Wakayama told New Scientist magazine.

Rock on, Wakayama!

Finding a surrogate won’t be difficult. Modern elephants are close enough genetically to host a mammoth fetus. I wonder where the next steps in the direction of this search will lead us?