Hi Rob,

The “stuff video” made a strong point about toxins in plastic etc. I thought that you would be pleased to know that your support of the Obama team is being felt in the world of food and drug containers. According to our consultants who do testing for the device and pharmaceutics industry, testing requirements for toxins in polymers have been strengthened in a major way. Under the Bush administration, for polymers with a history such as silicone rubber or titanium, we would put the material under the skin of a rabbit for 90 days and look for inflammation and redness. For plastics that had never been used before in the body, there are a comprehensive list of chronic toxicology and carcinogenicity tests conducted with cells or with living subjects. However, there was no required analytical chemistry component in any of these regulations.

However with the Obama administration we are now required to supplement the biology testing with very sensitive chemical analytical methods. There is an FDA mandated process for leaching all potential “extractable” materials out of the plastic (things like unreacted monomer, additives for mold flow) and then studying each of these extractables for toxic effects. The combination of biologic and chemical analytical methods is a much better way to assure that plastics do not carry toxic chemicals into the body.

Just wanted you to know that your very active support of the current administration has had a practical (albeit expensive) effect. We just came out of a meeting discussing our corporate position on this requirement and we are embracing it. It is the right thing to do.

Maybe there is hope,
[name]

Tremendous.

She replied, “Oh, the interpretive dance of typing.”

“Exactly”, I said, loving her more.

To the Editor:

By means of two legal fictions, that corporations are people and money is speech, the Roberts court has turned America from a democracy to a plutocracy.

Norman N. Holland
Gainesville, Fla., Jan. 22, 2010

And the runner-up:

To the Editor:

The justices have affirmed a core principle of Republican government: one dollar, one vote.

Stephen Bowles
Santa Barbara, Calif., Jan. 22, 2010

The effect of doing so underscores the iTablet’s disruptive educational innovation, bringing Wikipedia and Web to the fingertips of tiny hands, and creates a moral imperative to overlook the cost premium by consumers vis-a-vis substitutes.

The Tablet isn’t (thankfully) a computer or a phone; the Tablet is the bridge across the digital divide that is as much generational as economic. Apple would be well served to market it as such.

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Best line:

“One of the hot topics today is Twitter, but when we first went into the field and began interviewing, Twitter didn’t exist,” Ms. Rideout said.

via NYT

First priority is Harper Sue, who’s now six and a half months old.

I’m on the Board of Directors of Songbird and Xtracycle.

I’ve joined the steering committee of a volunteer community service organization supporting my local city park. We’re called Dolores Park Works. We’re not officially launching until early ‘10, but you may peek at our Web site in development.

And, as usual, I’ve been following + experimenting with developments in Internet digital media. So happy to see Web-scale technical + architectural innovation again. Briefly:

Playdar

Playdar and its ever-expanding family of clients e.g. Playgrub, Playlick, etc. and content resolvers e.g. those in /contrib represent a potential keystone of Internet digital media. Those of you who recall Muse.net (founded by Ian Rogers + me and acquired by Yahoo! in 2003) will be happy to know “location independent digital media” is back with a new tightly scoped focus, adjusting from playing from anywhere to anywhere with any player to simply playing anything referenced in a browser in the browser. Worse is always better for the Web, for better or worse.

Finally, playlist formats xspf and hAudio have resolver complement. But will playdar resolve the (Open) Web’s access problem? Hard to call, but creating consumer demand for legitimate reference to resolution is the most hopeful development in digital media in recent memory.

Silverlight 4

I’m a Microsoft skeptic as much as anyone. Yet, one shouldn’t ignore their platform war fortitude (and concomitant treasure chest) despite the unprecedented and incontrovertible World Web Win. So, let’s look at the facts: XAML is much of what both HTML5 and XHTML want to be when they grow up. While the W3C futzes with XBL2 specifications, Microsoft rolls out VS10 with WYSWIG tooling for XAML templates, an XBLization of CSS.

Microsoft will ship Silverlight 4 in 2010, the fourth major release in approximately two years, as the basis of building apps within the browser (IE, Firefox, Safari or Chrome) or on the desktop (both Windows and OS X) with a panoply of developer requested features. See Miguel de Icaza’s post for details. Be sure to check out the HTML+Flash as a XAML brush rickroll in the PDC video.

Abobe AIR 2

Latest WebKit + JS engine. USM device support. Native code API. Wee!

Browser Wars 2009

Fast Javascript. HTML5 File API. Hardware accelerated 2D. Fullscreen video. Chrome and Safari and Firefox. Oh my!

Upshot: Expect a significant half-life shortening for those developments not geared for these changes. On the flip, expect developments rooted in these developments to exceed currently visible expectations by mid-2010.

Koo. Enough. Put down that pie and get to work people.