The New York Times reported with a straight face that Pfizer has given up testing Viagra on women, having discovered after eight years that, quote:

1. men and women have a fundamentally different relationship between arousal and desire
2. arousal and desire are often disconnected in women
3. with women, things depend on a myriad of factors
4. the brain is the crucial sexual organ in women

Umm, gee, duh, wonder what gender of people they had running those labs.

Drs. Hwang and Moon, the Korean researchers who recently succeeded in cloning human stemcells, said that their success was due partly to the “Zen-like” ability Easterners have to sit perfectly still for 10 hours in one spot while manipulating the eggs, almost like a meditation.

Of course, Dr. Hwang also attributed part of their success to the fact that Korean fingers are so dextrous due to use of slippery metal chopsticks since childhood.

Cory Doctorow gave a speech at an O’Reilly conference on Emerging Technologies called Ebooks: Neither E, nor Books.

But I don’t think he’s got it figured out quite yet. He says, “The distinctive value of ebooks…revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text.” But that’s not the disinctive value. The distinctive value is that the experience of reading them on the computer can be richer, more engaging, more educational, more impactful, and more fun. Assuming you have the right technology to do so, such as Infowalker.

Trevor F. Smith has put up a speed reader version of Cory Doctorow’s new on-line novel Eastern Standard Tribe. This is an ultra-cool technology based on some Xerox PARC research, which flashes the book, one word at a time, in large type, up on the screen. I just wish there was a pause button…

The Treo, of course, is Palm One’s little PDA phone. The latest version, the 600, is smaller and cuter than previous versions.

We won’t be buying any Treo’s though. Sakiko bought the very first one when it came out two years ago, the model with a flip cover (the second version, the 270, had this flip lid, too). It wasn’t a bad device, although a bit bulky. Unfortunately, one side of where the flip cover was connected broke about two months ago. But the brain-damaged design is that you have to unflip the cover in order to have a phone call. There’s a little wire going through the plastic connection that broke, so it’s still connected, like someone’s hand where the wrist bone got cut off but is still hanging on by the tendons. The phone is essentially now unusable.

What idiot designed a product with inferior materials at such an obvious point of failure? There’s no way to fix it, except to pay Palm hundreds of dollars, more than it would cost to buy a new phone. I find it absolutely irresponsible that Palm would not cover the cost of fixing a problem like this which was so obviously a result of its own design mistakes.

I made the mistake of downloading a couple of albums from MusicMatch, which of course come in WMA format. Then I bought my fabulous new Squeezebox home media integration server, which only knows how to play MP3s (actually, it can handle AAC and some other formats as well). So I needed to convert the files—but how? I discovered the hard way what a lot of computer music aficionados certainly already knew.

I had to burn audio CDs of the WMAs I had downloaded. Then I had to re-rip those into MP3. That worked. But what’s the point of making users jump through these hoops? And who knows what happened to the quality of the CDs during the burning and re-ripping process?

My translation of Dogen’s “Bendowa” uses lots of footnotes, so I put it up in MS Word .doc format, but that’s not very friendly. So I thought I’d put it up in PDF. Adobe has a 30-day free trial for Acrobat Professional so I wouldn’t have to fork out the $300 price of the product just for my little experiment.

But the download is 200MB! That might be the largest thing I’ve ever downloaded in my life. Took at least 20 minutes.

Acrobat did a good job of PDF’ing my document. But it took a good 10 minutes to do a little 40-page document. This seems way too slow if Adobe hopes for PDF to become a widely-used distribution format. And although Adobe made my footnote numbers “hot” so they jumped to the footnote text, why can’t do they do the same for index entries? And the Japanese text, although it came through OK, is all sort of grayed-out looking; why is that? (The PDF is here.)

I’ve heard that Adobe wants to push PDF as a means for archiving entire web sites, and in fact the verison I downloaded apparently can do this, although I didn’t give it a try. But that seems like a weird attempt at positioning the product. In terms of people today trying to display a web site, any computer that can run Acrobat can run a competent web browser, so there’s no reason to Acrobatize web sites for people today; the idea must be to do it for people in the future. Aside from the fact that that seems like a very narrow niche to be aiming at (“Preserve your web pages for the ages with Acrobat!”), my guess is that fifty years from now someone will have at least as good a chance of viewing a website saved as its original HTML/CSS/JS files as they would trying to view a version frozen five decades ago in time by Adobe Acrobat 2004 version.

I think Adobe is in complete, if understandable, denial about the fact that the weird FORTH-like language called Postscript invented 30 years ago by John Warnock that ran on a 10cps teletype, which was not a very good language to start with, even for laser printing applications, is not and cannot and will not ever be, no matter how gussied up or repositioned into a workflow tool or secure document environment or collaboration system or forms product or whatever else, the lingua franca of computer-readable information in the 21st Century. We already have one, and it’s called HTML and related W3C standards.

Come to think of it, it also seems weird that a company whose mission in life is bridging the worlds of printed documents and computing would not have figured out that we need better ways for computers to help us read on-screen documents. Here’s a quote from a 1994 Warnock interview:

Q. Will people in fact learn to read onscreen the way that they read books today? A. I think that the more personal computer displays become like lightweight books, the more people are going to feel comfortable reading from them. A PC that you can open up and physically handle easily, that has the right kind of battery and display, will give the same visual impression as a page.

The only thing he can think of to make the on-line reading experience more rewarding is the form factor. That’s pretty limited.

We just bought the most useful piece of home electronics gear ever—Slim Devices Squeezebox, which lets you play all your ripped MP3s on your home stereo system.

I guarantee this box will change your music life. You’ll listen to lots more music because it’s so painless. You’ll listen to more different kinds of music. You’ll have more fun listening to music.

I love this product. It works perfectly. It keeps surprising me with cool things it does. Like yesterday I found out it can stream Internet radio stations to the stereo.

Here’s the basic way it works. There’s a small box which you attach to your stereo. It talks via WiFi to a piece of software called SlimServer, which runs on any computer you’d like. Which it can do more easily since its interface is through a web browser—a brilliant, if obvous design approach which means you can control the player from any device that has a browser, including your Palm. The server scans your music collection and provides a competent juke-box like interface.

I especially like the feature that multiple people can access the server and all add their own favorites to the current playlist!

This ultra-clean architecture also allows the server to communicate with multiple Squeezeboxes. So you can play one song in the bedroom and another in the living room off the same MP3 collection. And since you can hook a Squeezebox up to powered speakers directly, you can put a full-fledged jukebox stereo system in your bedroom for the price of the speakers and the Squeezebox.

Some vendors say they try to make their devices look like the other black boxes in your stack of stereo equipment; not SlimDevices, whose product is a little rounded unit with a nice display showing the current tune. You can also control it with a handy remote control device, which provides surprisingly rich functionality including the ability to search your entire music library.

The installation took about three minutes; the only minor glitch was figuring out that the wireless network name was case-sensitive. Beware—WMA is not supported, no great loss there. Don’t worry Scott, it does support AAC, through server-side transcoding.

I’d love to see what other products this company is going to come out with to really make home convergence happen. Picture albums on the TV is an obvious one that they could do easily.

I did some research on MP3 players in preparation for making a special request to Santa. It seems the MP3 market has bifurcated into low-end memory-based devices running around $100 and high-end disk-based devices running around $300-400. The low-end products are really small now, but almost all support only the slower USB 1.0 spec, meaning you spend several minutes downloading a single album. I guess the thinking is (1) the low price point doesn’t support the extra cost of USB 2.0 and (2) with such small capacities—like 128MB—there’s no real point in faster downloading. But spending five minutes downloading an album is never any fun if you’re on your way to the gym, even if it’s only one album.

The disk-based high-end products, of which the new Dell device is the prominent example, have capacities of 5 or 10 or 20 or 40 GB and they all support USB 2.0, but they’re also HEAVY, and not entirely robust in an environment where you’re moving around like the gym.

What’s needed is a memory-based device with larger capacity and USB 2.0 support—and I found it: the Creative Nomad MuVo^2. With a capacity of 512MB, it holds a dozen or more albums at a time. Santa heard my prayers and brought me this nice toy. But I do have some minor quibbles.

1. The LCD display is too small and hard to read. It should fill the entire front of the device.

2. The controls are hard to manipulate in a gym environment. Too often, the device confuses a press on the right edge of the main control knob with a click on its middle.

3. The player looks like a mountable disk and you copy music to it by just dragging and dropping; but files downloaded from MusicMatch don’t know they are being copied to a portable and end up copy-protected and unplayable. I can copy to the portable from within MusicMatch Jukebox but it doesn’t realize that there’s a USB 2.0 connection and apparently limits itself to USB 1.0 speeds, and doesn’t know how to create new folders on the portable device. There’s a jukebox/library manager that comes with the device that can copy files fast and deals correctly with the copy-protection problem but the last thing I need is another music manager right now. But it’s the only way to create playlists choosing from among all the music on the device. MusicMatch Jukebox creates playlists in the right format (M3U) and in theory I could copy those to the device but they all contain absolute paths to the MP3 files as stored on my music server. Sigh.

Other than that, this is a cool device—the MP3 player I look foward to having as my second-generation music companion in the gym for the next couple of years. The first generation I had was the Nike PSA I bought a couple of years ago for $300; it held 64MB, served me well, and finally died a noble death a month or two ago. What will the third generation bring?

The new on-line music services charge only $9.99 for an entire album—gee, what a bargain, right? Just compare that to prices almost double that in stores.

But wait a minute. Leaving aside the fact that the music companies have no production or retailing costs other than the cost of running their on-line store, has anyone considered the fact that the average consumer holds on to a physical CD for 10 years or more, but will have to buy the album they bought on-line all over again the minute their hard disk crashes, they forgot where they put the music, or they toss their computer without remembering to salvage the music from it?

Combine this with the fact that all the services selling on-line albums for $9.99 continue to put various types of copy restrictions on them—for instance, MusicMatch, the service which I’ve started to use, allows you to play music you bought there on only three PCs at any given time. You can burn the albums to physical CDs but are people really going to do that?

Given all that, isn’t the sweet spot for on-line album prices $4.99 instead of $9.99? And by extension, 49cents a track instead of 99cents?