[extropy-chat] List member blogs

[Hal Finney]

I recently ran across the blog of former list member Nick Szabo,
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/.  I've been a big fan of Nick's for
years, from back when he started the libtech list, pioneering a bunch
of innovative ideas for cryptography and anonymity.  Kind of like Robin
Hanson, Nick got bored with what he was doing and decided to go off to
law school.

Nick has an amazing blog entry today called "Patent goo: self-replicating Paxil",
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/11/patent-goo-self-replicating-paxil.html :

> In his novel Cat's Cradle, science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut postulated
> "Ice-9." Ice-9 was a form of water that was frozen at room temperature and
> catalyzed any normal water it came in contact with into more crystals of
> Ice-9. Once released into the environment, it froze all water, including
> us. Eric Drexler in the 1980s raised the specter of nano-robots that made
> copies of themselves and ate everything in their path: "gray goo." A
> wide variety of similar hypothetical disasters have since been given
> referred to as some sort of "goo."
>
> Self-replicating chemicals are not merely hypothetical: since Cat's
> Cradle, scientists have discovered some real-world example of crystals
> that seed the environment, converting other forms (polymorphs) of
> the crystal into their own. The population of the original polymorph
> diminishes as it is converted into the new form: it is a "disappearing
> polymorph." In 1996 Abbott Labs began manufacturing the new anti-AIDS
> drug ritonavir. In 1998 a more stable polymorph appeared in the American
> manufacturing plant. It converted the old form of the drug into a new
> polymorph, Form 2, that did not fight AIDS nearly as well. Abbott's
> plant was contaminated, and it could no longer manufacture effective
> rintonavir. Abbott continued to successfully manufacture the drug in
> its Italian plant. Then American scientists visited, and that plant too
> was contaminated was contaminated and could henceforth only produce the
> ineffective Form 2. Apparently the scientists had carried some Form 2
> crystals into the plant on their clothing.

Nick goes on to discuss how the same phenomenon occured with the
anti-depressant Paxil and led to an unusual patent case.  I thought it
was incredible that a whole factory could be more or less permanently
shut down once it is "infected" by the wrong shape of crystal.

One person I wish would start a blog is Robin Hanson.  Years ago I
remember he came up with a concept that would work somewhat like a
blog: imagine if you could subscribe to a mailing list which captured
all of the email messages sent by a given person, to all the different
forums and mesage groups he might participate in.  The effect would be
blog-like in terms of keeping you up to date with the ideas and writings
of that person.

I'd be interested in hearing about other blogs maintained by current
and former list members.  Maybe we could make a list.

Hal