Whipped Cream Difficulties

Fernando Valenzuela. ESPN. NYT (archived).

As I’ve noted before, I am not a baseball fan, and I hate the Dodgers. But I remember Fernandomania. And I get the impression he was a class act.

Bruce Ames.

The so-called Ames Test, developed in the 1970s, is still used by drug manufacturers and pesticide companies to check the safety of their products. It involves exposing chemicals to a mutant strain of salmonella bacteria that Dr. Ames created; how the bacteria responds to a chemical makes it possible to determine whether that chemical caused DNA damage and therefore might lead to cancer in humans.

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He stumbled on one of his most publicized discoveries accidentally, when he asked his undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, to bring in a chemical of their choosing to undergo testing. All of the chemicals tested negative, except for one: contained in a bottle of hair dye a student had borrowed from his girlfriend.
Dr. Ames sent a lab technician, Edith Yamasaki, to buy out every type of hair dye at a local drugstore, and after extensive testing concluded that the dyes — used by more than 20 million Americans at the time — were very likely linked to cancer and birth defects.

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A year later, his work made headlines again when he discovered that a chemical called Tris, used to make children’s pajamas flame-retardant, caused genetic mutations. By some estimates, 45 million children were wearing Tris-treated pajamas. The chemical was later banned from garment manufacturing.

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Later in his career, as Dr. Ames’s opinions about the dangers of man-made chemicals began to shift, his legacy in the environmental movement became more complicated.
He felt that some activists were overstating the risks of these chemicals and targeting chemical companies unfairly. He often said that he thought there was too much focus on substances that were technically mutagenic but that were no more likely to cause DNA damage than the “natural” chemicals found in fruits and vegetables.
“I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t real problems with some synthetic chemicals, but the environmentalists are wildly exaggerating the risks,” he told The Times in 1994. “If our resources are diverted from important things to unimportant things, this doesn’t serve the public.”

I’ve known about this one for a few days, but was waiting for something I was comfortable linking to: Ward Christensen, early computer BBS pioneer.

Then, on Jan. 16, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago, covering the city in 40 inches of snow and stranding Mr. Christensen at his home in the suburbs. He phoned Mr. Suess, suggesting that they use the time to start building their messaging system. He wondered if they should get help from other club members, but Mr. Suess argued that involving more people would slow the project down.
“Forget the club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Suess said, as Mr. Christensen recalled their conversation to The New York Times in 2009. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”

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In 1977, he developed a protocol, called XMODEM, for sending computer files across phone lines; it was later used on C.B.B.S.

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The next fall, Mr. Christensen described their creation in an article he wrote for Byte, a magazine for computer hobbyists. When they retired their system less than a decade later, its phone line had received more than a half-million calls.

By way of Greg Ellifritz: Ed Lovette, trainer and gun guy. I have a copy of The Snubby Revolver, and would recommend picking it up if you find it used.

I also wanted to link this because Mr. Ellifritz’s post contains an excellent list of other books you should have in your gun library. I will say I have many, but not all, of them: some of them I am still trying to find. (And someone should get the rights to reprint that old Paladin Press stuff, like the Lovette and Cirillo books.)

As a side note, I haven’t forgotten about gun books. I’ve just been busy, and my dealer of choice has taken some time off. I do want to try to get up a post this week, but it is probably going to be shorter than usual. The books I plan to post about are all new books, available from Amazon (with one exception). And one of those books is also going to be an entry in the “Leadership Secrets” series, too.

Keep watching the skies.