Link Banana

Darshak Sanghavi makes an interesting point:

The greatest medical advances depend mostly on small but consistent improvements in the use of old drugs.

In this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell argues that we greatly over-value the genius of inventors. This passage really struck me, because I’ve long thought similarly:

For Ogburn and Thomas, the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place. It should not surprise us, then, that calculus was invented by two people at the same moment in history. Pascal and Descartes had already laid the foundations. The Englishman John Wallis had pushed the state of knowledge still further. Newton’s teacher was Isaac Barrow, who had studied in Italy, and knew the critical work of Torricelli and Cavalieri. Leibniz knew Pascal’s and Descartes’s work from his time in Paris. He was close to a German named Henry Oldenburg, who, now living in London, had taken it upon himself to catalogue the latest findings of the English mathematicians. Leibniz and Newton may never have actually sat down together and shared their work in detail. But they occupied a common intellectual milieu. “All the basic work was done—someone just needed to take the next step and put it together,” Jason Bardi writes in “The Calculus Wars,” a history of the idea’s development. “If Newton and Leibniz had not discovered it, someone else would have.” Calculus was in the air.

I’m not that big a fan of art museums, but I think I’d have to go the new exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MoMA were I anywhere nearby. Two would-be highlights are victimless leather:

“I FELT cruel when I turned it off,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The “it” in question is a tiny coat that has been grown in a test tube using cells around a biodegradable polymer structure. The coat had flourished to such an extent that its “life support” system had to be switched off to stop it getting too big.

And this:

Most entertainingly, however, the exhibition illustrates this theme with a screen-based system that projects silhouettes of visitors and then mutates them into sci-fi monsters. This is hugely popular with children (and journalists) and if nothing else would make a perfect executive toy.

By now we’ve heard a lot about Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons, but this detail from The Economist’s obituary was new to me.

An interest in history lured him into war-gaming, the re-enactment of historical battles with miniature men and a simple rulebook. For several months the members of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (a grand name for a group of friends that met in Mr Gygax’s basement) entertained themselves by re-fighting old battles. One day, to spice things up, Mr Gygax turned a plastic dinosaur into a dragon and mixed in wizards and trolls among the men-at-arms.

His fellow-players loved it. Abandoning a career in insurance and in collaboration with Dave Arneson, a fellow gamer, Mr Gygax refined his ideas. From large groups of combatants he moved to individual characters, cooking up rules for magic spells and creating a menagerie of monsters for his heroes to fight.

Manufacturers, when he approached them, were less keen. There was no board and no way to win—and those weirdly shaped dice looked confusing. So Mr Gygax and his colleagues set up their own firm, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Business was brisk, and D&D became an underground hit on campuses around the world. A moral panic about devil-worship only drove sales higher.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I’d never thought that there was anything wrong with the way innovation is done. The Economist’s Tech.view column begs to differ:

But innovating the way industry does today—where problems go in search of solutions—is putting the cart before the horse. We should be doing it the other way round: finding the problem to which a known solution is an ideal answer. Matching inventions, discoveries and other bright ideas to problems this way would brilliantly streamline the process.

If they’re right — and we can only hope they are — this is great.

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

“It’s not five years away, it’s not 10 years away. It’s affordable, and it’s now,” said Wes Bolsen, the company’s vice president of business development.

Unfortunately, the idea’s at least a year away from producing meaningful quantities.

Larry Brilliant, the director of Google.org, makes an interesting case for informed optimism. Rather than arguing that optimism comes straight from ignorance — a silly but too common notion — he argues that looking at all that we’ve done gives a good guide to all that we’ll eventually do.