The hope is that e-cig use wouldn’t be more harmful than downing a few espressos, but the research to confirm that absolutely needs to be done. In the meantime, we should allow adult smokers to try them. Taking them off the market would be ironic and cruel to today’s smokers and their families, who are absolutely certain that their–now FDA approved–smoking habit is leading them to an early grave.

We should also carefully regulate e-cigs, answering some hard questions. Should we restrict use to places where smoking is allowed? I’m not so sure that’s wise. An e-cig user is obviously taking an expensive step to reduce the harm to herself and others; should we punish her and force her to be around smoke, or use tolerance of e-cigs to encourage other smokers to also switch?

If a bit of vaporized nicotine turns out to be completely benign to bystanders, the public should concede that e-cig use just isn’t smoking (and we should rename it). We coffee and soda addicts enjoy the privilege (burden) of being able to catch our fix nearly anywhere, so we should consider being more accommodating for the sake of public health. We’re often talking about our parents and relatives.

Now it looks like Philip Morris may buy exclusive rights to e-cigs in the U.S. If their intent is to kill e-cigs, it would be consistent with their evil. On the other hand, PM would likely have the resources to get e-cigs through FDA approval, so literally the lives of many nicotine addicts could be saved if we allow PM to use its marketing muscle to turn smokers into e-cig users. Do we hate Philip Morris more than we care for the well-being of smokers?

Update: Great info on this topic at TobaccoHarmReduction.org, run by Dr. Carl Phillips, Associate Professor in the University of Alberta Department of Public Health Sciences.

Groups that are truly anti-smoking should embrace any alternative, but those that are more interested in making life difficult for smokers or nicotine users do not like these products because they could make nicotine users more comfortable.

One of the site’s headings: “Smokers have more choices than just quitting or dying.” Can’t agree more.

1. Start with a high-resolution image. E.g. 2000 x 1000.
2. Save a version with dimensions that fit well in your printed layout when placed in an IMG element. E.g. 300 x 150.
3. In your print CSS, fix the size of the IMG element in pixels to match the dimensions in (2).
4. Using the original image, recreate the image file in (2) with significantly larger dimensions (identical width/height ratio). E.g. 600 x 300.

The Good News: The printed page will have an identical layout as in (2), but with a higher quality image. This is because–according to my testing–even browsers that use blocky “nearest neighbor” image scaling for screen will scale nicely for print.

The Bad News:Due to browser bugs and inefficiencies (IE, FF and Opera at least), there’s no way to prevent the large image from downloading. E.g. even if you set the IMG to display:none in your screen CSS, IE and FF will still download it. Opera will not download it at all, even when it should print it. You can still position the image off screen, or if you have a “print” button on the page, you can trigger for the print IMG to be inserted with its onload kicking off window.print(). You just have to be aware of the limitations these methods.

To see the difference in quality, here are the two sizes of images, first at native size, second scaled to the size of the first.

We’re still awaiting word from DHS about troop deployment to Overland Park.

The War on Malaria seems more worthy of resources, or we could just keep the money for silly things like food and health coverage for the unemployed.

StackOverflow was designed by a few programmers to scratch an itch within the community, and the model they came up with made it the most effective question/answer site I’ve ever used. Got a really, really tough programming question? You can probably get a half dozen answers in 5 or 10 minutes, and if you wait a day, you can see them ranked by quality by several programmers within your field.

As medical professionals contributed answers, comments, and votes in their spare time, a medical version of SO would quickly turn into an amazing resource for public health.

It might require some tweaking. SO users are generally in the same community, though sometimes different specialties. This makes it easier to design behavior-reinforcing tricks to keep user contributing. Every time I get a question answered I almost always end up taking a few minutes to provided input to other questions, and I earn points and “badges” for contributing (what other users deem as) good info.

On a medical Q&A site the advice takers and givers are mostly exclusive communities, but I think professionals would still contribute, and we could create ways to encourage them. Medical schools could require students to earn points on the site; we could reward consistently good contributors financially or with real awards.

1. Forensic science is already shaky and, if DNA can be fabricated, it’s about to get even shakier.
2. The public defender system is poorly funded and in shambles.
3. Poor, mentally ill youths generally end up dumped in jail
4. Florida sends a lot of teens to prison for life
5. Our prisons are no longer rehabilitative, often torturous, and we send tons of people to them.

In the age of Glenn Beck, the town hall meeting paradigm is just the anonymous web forum with no moderator. The people interested in genuine discussion won’t go near it, and “socialist!” is the new “yr gay”. To this extent the tea party folks have certainly been successful at churning out viral YouTube clips, but for better or for worse, no one should get the impression that public meeting attendees are necessarily representative of a constituency.

I see a lot of conservative bloggers and commenters making the mistake of watching these clips and pronouncing that it’s evidence of a silent majority that will surely stand up and “throw the bums out” in 2010. HotAirPundit highlighted a Houston area meeting featuring an obnoxious birther and an angry crowd awaiting outside and concludes, “Something tells me he will get voted out.” Gene Green, the Democrat representative, took office with almost 75% of the vote, but I guess he could always wind up in some scandal and be replaced (probably with another Democrat).

This isn’t to say I’m necessarily behind the proposed reforms; reading McArdle hasn’t given me a lot of confidence in us being able to cut costs using similar actions at the state level, but I feel some brand of insurance reform is inevitable at this point and hope there are people behind this acting in good faith. Democrats are basically putting themselves on the chopping block with this so they may have more persuasive information than I have access to.

The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or their account was deleted from inactivity. Mark Pilgrim wrote about the challenge of long-term data preservation without open formats and source code:

Data readable by only one application is a big risk factor, because the application won’t be around forever. If that application only runs on one operating system, that’s even worse, because the operating system won’t be around forever either. If that operating system only runs on one hardware platform, that’s even worse still. No hardware lasts forever, and you may eventually need to resort to emulating the hardware in software. Emulation is the ultimate fallback. But if any or all of those layers are closed, emulation may be costly or even impossible. And if any of the layers are DRM-encumbered, emulating them may be illegal.

Most social network users don’t keep a copy of their data in any format, so how can we expect to preserve it? Will MySpace be around for 5 years? 20 years? People have already declared Friendster dead; all your testimonials and contacts of old friends could be gone any month now.

The next killer social networking application shouldn’t be another Friendster or MySpace, but rather an open standard allowing us to create and manage our own social data. And it is “our” data. Points of contact with old friends we’ve managed to track down, new friends made from shared interests, anecdotes and testimonials we’ve written for friends and loved ones, snapshots of our interests and personalities. Only by keeping this information in an open format, available for us to backup, can we expect for it to survive.

Let’s say that MySpace suddenly had an export feature. How much would it need to include to be meaningful in 50 years? Obviously you’d want your profile, pics, videos, and blog posts; your inbox and sent mail; probably comments you’ve made on friends’ profiles and blog posts. How much of your friends’ data would you want?

October 2009: We’re still not there. Google Wave will vastly improve the situation (at least having a permanent record for IM), but the real goal here is something trivially easy to install, letting users host their own personal and networking data. Big web providers could still carve out a business by caching copies of user data (to save bandwidth, or for backup) and concentrating on indexing, searching, and providing apps like those for Facebook.

When Opera released Unite (basically a webserver in the browser), I wasn’t sure what they’d get out of it, or what the use case was, but actually this the perfect platform on which to build a distributed social network app. The default storage location of all your data would be on your computer, easily backed up at any time.

Next best thing: SocialSafe, a Facebook backup tool. For three bucks you could be able to show your kids how their parents met, and what they were like then.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title></title>
<p>

HTML5

<!DOCTYPE html>

Smallest “useful” HTML5 document

<!DOCTYPE html>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="site.css">
<script src="site.js"></script>
<title>Page Title</title>
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>Content...</p>

Check em if you want. To avoid problems in IE you might want an opening body tag, but you don’t need a closing one!

Over the break Kathleen and I watched a bunch of movies, but season 1 of The Wire delivered beyond the hype it got from friends. It gives a crash course on the frustration and futility of local cops fighting drug gangs on the street level in West Baltimore. The police jump through major hoops to get an idea of the shape of the organization, and use civilians who risk their lives informing on the gangs, but there’s zero day to day effort made to actually keep drugs out of the hands of people.

The police would do more good just walking up and slapping drugs out of the hands of dealers directly all day. What you have instead is the slow methodical building of cases designed to put away upper level gang members. This takes a lot of time, and in the meantime people suffer from addiction and the added pressure applied to the gangs results in increased violence. In the end a few people designated to take the fall (or with the least information to barter with) get sent away, and the addicts remain potential customers, ensuring the business continues to attract new members.The officers have good intentions–they’re after justice for local murders–but what they fail to realize is that they’re spinning wheels. Gang members put away today will be replaced tomorrow, and these new recruits will kill, abuse, and take advantage of people as well as the last.

It’s no wonder that children growing up in this environment–with absent, addicted, incarcerated, or dead parents–find the drug gangs to be the only source of social structure and promotion in their lives. They can wait until they’re 15 to make min. wage (if they’re lucky enough to find work), or make more today without leaving the neighborhood or wearing a crappy uniform and while gaining the “respect” of older peers they work beneath (at least until they’re deemed a liability).

(Thoughts from October…) It’s clear the writers were trying to outline the futility of the “Drug War”, but mostly they just demonstrated why bust-the-kingpins drug policing is far less effective or humane than many might perceive it to be. Unless you can disrupt a business, jailing a CEO doesn’t really accomplish much. It seems fairer to “go after” the guy-in-charge, but the harm he causes is probably low; he’s just the latest to climb the rank of a business that would exist whether or not he did.

The Wire characters we follow day to day are kind of painted to be better cops than the stat-counters (who just clock in, bust some low-level dealers, and go home), but this isn’t necessarily true. Really none of the policing shown is very effective compared to methods that are out there, but the high stats busters at least keep more drugs away from addicts and provide more visibility of police officers, which is far better for a community than visible drug markets.