Month: May 2008

Stupidity of Dignity

And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing.

To understand the source of this topsy-turvy value system, one has to look more deeply at the currents that underlie the Council. Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.

“dignity” in bioethics is thinly veiled religious nonsense.

Area Man edits Wikipedia

Area Man Honored To Be One Who Added Death Date To Heath Ledger's Wikipedia Page. he noted that this recent triumph brought with it a greater level of fame than any of his previous Wikipedia updates, which include the number of attendees at a 2006 Dave Matthews concert and the name of Bruce Willis’s dog.

Commit Policies

Policies implement the intent of the salmon run. By placing unrestrictive policies to the left, I can checkpoint my work frequently. By placing restrictive policies on the right, I can maintain the stability of releases. And by incrementing the restrictiveness of these policies in small steps, I reduce the backlog of code that is “trapped” towards the left. Compare this to a centralized VCS, in which (since there’s no local repository), developers may keep changes out of VCS for hours or days (since the alternative is making a central branch, which is expensive to create and expensive to tear down). Or compare to a DVCS system without an index, where the overhead of either making and tearing down branches, or of pruning temporary commits, can discourage a developer from making a checkpoint every minute or 2. (At least they discourage me, even though these operations are far less expensive than with centralized VCS.)

i like the notion of having chained stores with increasingly higher bars between them. pretty obvious between head and release branch, less so between working dir and head

In vitro meat

Many people have an initial reaction that invitro meat would be yucky and they do not want it. However, people already eat meat slurry in fairly large quantities.

Yuck – invitro meat. But deep fry it and call them improved McNuggets and they eat billions.

2012-02-15: Mark Post at Maastricht University

It looks more like squid than steak and because it lacks the fat and protein found in real cattle, does not taste like traditional beef. So why would anyone eat meat grown in a lab? In-vitro meat may still be years away from our supermarkets, but they will be able to grow a hamburger by the end of this year.

2015-01-01: Overblown title, but still interesting:

Why turn plant proteins into burgers? Why not just eat them as peas? Culture is a lump of flesh wrapped in dough. If you want to save the world, you’d better make it convenient. Sometime in the next 10 years, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. Overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast.

2016-03-23: Limit meat. Vindication!

The Netherlands Nutrition Center is recommending people eat just 2 servings of meat a week, setting an explicit limit on meat consumption for the first time. The recommendations come 5 years after a government panel weighed the ecological impact of the average Dutch person’s diet, concluding last year that eating less meat is better for human and environmental health.

2016-12-12: Beyond Meat

Most people have a vague feeling that factory farms aren’t quite ethical. But few people are willing to give up meat so such feelings are suppressed because acknowledging them would only make one feel guilty not just. Once the costs of giving up meat fall, however, vegetarianism will spread like a prairie wildfire changing eating habits, the use of farmland, and the science and economics of climate change.

as usual, don’t read the dumb comments.
2017-09-04: Memphis Meats

Memphis Meats is announcing their Series A syndicate today, and it is a fascinating group of people coming together to help the world modernize the manufacturing of meat by removing animals from the process. It is identical to the meat we eat, down to the cellular level; it’s just the manufacturing method that radically changes. For full disclosure, DFJ led the $17M Series A, and I’ll be joining the board. It has been hard to contain my excitement as I have been looking for a meat solution for 5 years now. Since signing the term sheet, I have been wearing their t-shirt for a month now, and it is quite an evangelical conversation starter, generating keen interest the likes of which I have rarely seen before (e.g., Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Kimbal Musk joined us). We also got leading research institutions and some of the largest meat industry corporations to join the syndicate.


2018-03-08: Wired piece on Memphis Meats

By January 2016 they had grown up enough for a taste test. At a cost of $1200, it was by far the most expensive meatball either man had ever eaten. The process is now orders of magnitudes more efficient. But there’s still more work to do. Clearing the cost hurdle will be key to cultured meat catching on. Consumers aren’t going to spring for a bioreactor burger if the farm-raised or grass-grazed version is 1000s of times less expensive. Valeti is feeling the pressure. “We need to get this expansion done in a timely fashion so it can actually make an impact while we still have a window. There’s definitely a race on.”

2018-04-06: Lobbyists are being hired

The beef industry has started to quiver, and rightfully so: Flush with untold capital, Impossible Foods has apparently decided to spend some of it on a Washington lobbyist. Back in 2016, people from Memphis Meats, Just (formerly Hampton Creek), and other “clean meat” start-ups banded together to form the Good Food Institute.

2019-04-02: Available in major chain restaurants

Burger King has announced that it is introducing a vegetarian Whopper on its menu. Burger King will test the new meatless option at 59 restaurants in the St. Louis area. If it proves popular, the “Impossible Whopper” will become available in all 7200 United States Burger King branches. Burger King is the latest fast food chain to add a vegetarian burger, following in the footsteps of Carl’s Jr. restaurants that added a vegetarian burger using Beyond Meat, in January and the “Impossible Slider” added by White Castle last year.

2019-06-27: Satanic Meatless burgers

Rick Wiles, host of TruNews, reveals that meatless burgers are “plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products, is part of a satanic plot to alter human DNA so that people can no longer worship God.”

2019-09-30: Longer term, much more will be replaced:

Precision biology will displace, replace or transform agriculture by using designed microorganisms and adapting beer industry fermentation processes to produce food that is identical to milk and meat but without using animals. The first product we are seeing with mass impact is the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat products that are impacting ground meat.


2019-12-11: Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?

Overall, the case for reduced meat consumption is strong. Vegetarianism is cheaper, better for your health (if you can afford a diverse diet and are not an infant), and is less impactful for the environment. It also has a significant moral cost in terms of animal suffering.

2020-01-07: Impossible Pork targeting the chinese market.

that tester agreed that the texture was off but the flavor was there. Lopatto tried a bánh mi sandwich, char siu buns, dan dan noodles, katsu, and sweet, sour, and numbing meatballs all made with Impossible Pork.

2020-03-13: Post-Zoonotic Food

There’s no time to waste in pushing forward solutions for what is likely the underlying cause of this pandemic, and what has been at the root of dozens of prior zoonotic events. We can’t afford not to have the same level of urgency in directing funding, effort, and talent into accelerating the development and deployment of safer, modern meat production methods. It is past time to move away from animal-derived meat altogether.

2020-08-07: CO2 and Methane impact

if every burger eaten in the USA were replaced with an Impossible burger, that would require 90% less land and water while reducing GHG emissions by 90%.

2021-05-14: Artificial Duck

My first taste of their cultivated meat, duck in this case. It was delicious and indistinguishable from duck, because it was duck. It just did not quack like a duck. Future generations will marvel that we thought we had to grow and slaughter a whole animal to get all the yummy meat that we might like to eat.

2021-07-15: Beyond Chicken

Some people do care about eating something that tastes exactly like chicken, so I took Beyond Chicken tenders to the toughest food critic I know: my 87-year-old grandmother. She’s been cooking incredible chicken dishes for decades, and I wanted to see if she’d sniff out the difference if I didn’t tell her that what she was being served was not real chicken. After taking a few bites, she said it tasted “very good.” Then I revealed to her that this was not real chicken; it was made from plants. She stared at me for 1 second. Then she said, “I don’t mind, as long as it tastes like chicken. And it does! It’s a bit heavier, but if you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have noticed.”

But plant-based companies are not yet able to mimic chicken in all its forms. Making a breaded tender is one thing — the breading can act as camouflage. Creating a convincing chicken breast is a whole other dream, and Brown suggested we shouldn’t expect it to come true anytime soon.

2023-03-23: In vitro meat has tons of challenges, the plant alternatives are doing much better.

But while the industry releases increasingly optimistic projections, well-informed commentators remain skeptical. It’s still unclear if cultivated meat can be made affordable or at large-enough scale to compete with conventional animal products. As we approach the decade anniversary of Mark Post’s first burger, many are confused as to when, if ever, cultivated meat will be on their plates.

After spending a few years inside the industry, I’ve come to believe that the true prognosis for cultivated meat is somewhere in the middle, between that exuberant initial hopefulness and more recent cynicism. I agree with the pessimistic commentators that “The Dream” of cultivated meat — full bio-replicas, cost competitive, at scale — is not feasible in the short term. However, comparison to other technologies like solar energy suggests that cultivated meat may take decades and 100s of billions of dollars in investment — but is ultimately possible. If we accept longer time scales, many of the seemingly intractable problems become tractable. In the meantime, companies can justify large venture capital investments by pursuing cheaper products that combine cultivated and plant-based components.

Crippled Windows

Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs. To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes and hard drives, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.

byebye windows margins

Facebook Connect

It will allow users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. Third party websites will be able to implement and offer more features of the Facebook Platform off of Facebook – the same features available to third party applications today on Facebook. To make data portable, Facebook believes it’s about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.

not OAuth therefore fail