Pure Apple tainted by a poison

It could be said that the famous Apple logo is a symbol of the current manufacturing dilemma facing this mighty company, the world's biggest by market capitalisation as at March 2012 (over $500 billion).

You know how the Apple logo came about don't you? The partly eaten apple represents the way Alan Mathison Turing is said to have committed suicide by biting on an apple that had been injected with cyanide. Turing, an English scientist, is considered to have been "the father of computer science".  Also the idea of 'biting' fits nicely with computer language - the word 'byte'. This is one reason, perhaps the main reason, why Apple's founders decided on this logo.

It is said that Apple components are manufactured in China and that the manufacturing process is poisoning the local environment so profoundly that the river runs black and people are dying of unexplained cancer.

There is a nice symmetry in the current situation with the origins of the Apple logo. Both entail poisoning. Things have come full circle.

The village that so unhappily finds itself on the doorstep of mass manufacturing using heavy metals and other toxins is Tongxin. It is near the east coast, quite near Shanghai we are told (note: my research shows that there is another town of the same name that is in central China).

Apple have admitted that one of its major suppliers is Pegatron a Taiwanese company. A Chinese subsidiary of Pegatron is a company called Kaedar Electronics.  Zhu Guifen, a 64 year old resident (and shop owner) of Tongxin, points to the Kaedar Electronics factory when she explains why too many people in Tongxin are dying of cancer. She herself suffers from stomach and liver tumours. She is convinced that the high levels of cancer in the village have been caused by pollution from the factories.  At one time she used the local river (the Lou Xia Bang) to wash the rice.  Children swam in it.

In March 2012, the river is dead and the people are dying.

Apple presents a squeaky clean image inline with their sheer products. They say they care about all the workers in their enormous supply chain. They say that they insist that their suppliers use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes. Can we really believe that? And should this story change our perception of Apple?

Apple products are such good value considering the quality and features. Is this because China does not regulate manufacturing sufficiently to protect the environment and its people? We hear lots of stories of discontent of the common man in China who is walked over by unregulated big business and corrupt officials. The Chinese government say they are entitled to pollute the environment for the sake of commercial expediency because they have to catch up with the West and in any case the West polluted and still pollute to keep prices down.

Source: Times Newspaper March 8th 2012 page 32.

Facebook, the fragile pot of gold

Facebook is worth about $100 billion. It must be one of the most valuable businesses in the world. For example Apple is valued at $500 billion but Apple is truly an exception being worth more than Poland!

When you think that Facebook exists in the ether, in the form of electrons or whatever you call them it makes you think. Facebook is not tangible. The equipment that stores the website is tangible but Facebook in not tangible in the same way that the stock and equipment at Apple is or the manufacturing base at Apple is.

The entirety of the core assets of Facebook are invisible. Without the website there would be no Facebook. All the staff would have to be laid off. The company would have near zero value.

As we gradually evolve from hard information on paper to digital information worldwide we are in danger of losing a lot more, a lot more quickly if things go wrong.

Apparently there have been complaints about the integrity of Facebook's API. "API" stands for 'application programming interface', whatever that means! Let's just say that the hour or so of downtime yesterday 7th March 2012 was due to faulty programming. The engineers were forced to turn off the Facebook website in order to fix the problem. That was a drastic and dramatic step to take and the worst position that Facebook has been in for four years.

It must be a kind of a nightmare keeping all the balls in the air at Facebook as it has expanded so rapidly. The hardware involved must be massive. Apparently they have thousands of engineers.

The point is that never has so much money be tied up in so little in the way of actual tangible asset. I wonder if the recent downtime has brought that home to the people who value internet businesses?

Analysing the Egyptian Mau

The Egyptian Mau is one of the ancient cat breeds it is thought. The history is interesting and it spans the four thousand years or so from the time when Egyptians first domesticated the wildcat to the present day in the feral Egyptian Maus wandering the streets of Egypt. How pure are the feral Egyptian Maus and are they similar to the ancient Maus?

An interesting concept is that the feral Egyptian Mau in Egypt today are more purebred that the finest purebred Egyptian Maus in the United States and Europe.

Moataz Ahmed Abd Elghaffar is a young Egyptian scientist who has a keen interest in answering some fundamental questions about the Egyptian Mau. In a proposed study his objectives are to:

• Prove that native Maus in modern Egypt are similar to the ancient Maus;
• Prove that Maus in Egypt are purer than overseas Maus and to
• Establish the differences and similarities between native Maus and overseas Maus.

The good thing is that he lives and works in Egypt. He has first hand experience of relating to the modern Egyptian Mau living in Egypt.

He intends to analyze:

• The overseas Mau in Texas, USA 
• Native Mau in Cairo, Egypt and the 
• Mummified Cats of Ancient Egypt.

Moataz's proedure will be to take two check swabs of living Maus and a hair sample of a mummified Egyptian cat. The first sample one will be taken from a native Mau, the second will be taken from American Maus and the third sample will be taken from a mummified Egyptian Mau. Then DNA will be extracted from the swabs followed by a test on the DNA.

In outline the procedure for testing the hair of a mummified Eyptian Mau is as follows:

• Cut 10- 15 hair roots about 0.5 cm into a 1.5ml eppendorf tube.
• Use 50 ul of the following lysis buffer: 10mM Tris pH 8.3, 50mM KCL, 0.5% Tween
• Also add 10ul of 20ug/ml solution of Proteinase K in 10mM Tris-HCL (pH 7.5)
• Vortex for 30 seconds. 
• Ultracentrifuge at 13000 rpmfor 1 second.
• Incubate overnight in a 56 - 60oC waterbath.
• Incubate for 10 minutes at 94oC ( to denature the proteinase K  I presume)
• Cool down to room temperature.
• Ultracentrifuge at 13000 rpm for 1 second.
• Ready DNA for your PCR

Cheek swabs will be taken of the feral and USA Maus.

I look forward to hearing about the results. It is said that there is no trace of the original Persian cat in the modern Persian cat. It is likely that there is no trace of the original British cats in the modern British Shorthair and American Shorthair. Selective breeding has seen to that.  I wonder how original any of the modern cat breeds are.

Is Facebook Vulnerable To Terrorism?

Today 7th March 2012 at around 7 am GMT Facebook (FB) was down for about 30 minutes or more. I have no idea why. There are only a few possibilities: maintenance, accident, sabotage, terrorism.

The first reason will nearly always be the reason. But what if it was the last reason: terrorism? Sounds extraordinary, I know. And I am not saying that this FB downtime was due to terrorism.

All I am saying is that it must be worth considering whether FB is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

How secure are their servers (servers are computers serving large numbers of people)? Are there guards and such-like outside the building? Where are their servers? The location must be an important factor in terms of security. I am talking about physical security. Terrorism could take several forms, hacking or physically damaging the FB computers are the two obvious possibilities.

I don't know whether FB has considered the possibility of a terrorist attack on their servers. But it seems to me that the FB servers make a nice target for terrorists.

To extremists, FB might represent all that is decadent in Western society. Endless chat about nothing. FB is the physical world in the ether of the internet. And FB was created by an American. It is an American product. The extremists in Asia won't like it although I am sure millions of them use it!

The thing is this, if a terrorist brought down Facebook it would be a successful attack at the heart of the Western way of life. Isn't that what Islamic terrorists want?

There is also the matter of all the personal information stored on the FB servers. This information is worth billions of dollars and is probably valuable to terrorists. Terrorist hacking of FB would seem to be a possibility.

FB has become a bit of a monster. It has become too big and too important. It has become more than just a social media website. This is bad for the world.

Facebook Down March 7th at 7 am GMT?!

Is the Facebook website down at this time? Seems that way to me. The Facebook button stopped working so I checked the Facebook website where you get the button code and could not access the site. So I tried the main website and could not access that either. It is not a browser problem my end as everything else works. The time is about 7 am on 7th March 2012 (London, UK).

Update: 8:02 am - FB is back up! LOL

This is probably just a maintenance session but it is strange that the whole site cannot be accessed. 

You would have thought that they could maintain the site piecemeal without interrupting service to 800 million people!

Maybe it is available in different countries or different places. I don't know. So many people rely on Facebook that if it is down for even a short time, people will become upset.

It is a kind of a monster, actually. Think what would happen if Twitter shut down for a day. There would be rioting in the streets! LOL.

The only other reason why it is down is sabotage or terrorism. I have always thought that a very good target for terrorists would be the servers at Facebook or Twitter. If the computers were blown up it would have a very big impact on Western life. That would please the Islamist terrorists as they see the Western lifestyle as decadent.

Is the FB website back up and running yet? Nope. Just checked. Chaos....Personally, I am sort of pleased because FB has become as I said a kind of monster. I don't think it actually benefits society anymore. It takes people away from living in the real world and people need to live in the real world to put it right.

You can't fix fundamental problems in the ether of the internet. All you can do is talk about them. We have too much chatter and not enough action.