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Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Reading List: Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox
- Verne, Jules. Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox. Seattle: CreateSpace, [1874] 2017. ISBN 978-1-5470-6408-3.
-
After reading and reviewing
Jules Verne's
Hector Servadac last
year, I stumbled upon a phenomenal bargain: a Kindle edition of the
complete works of Jules Verne—160 titles, with
5400 illustrations—for US$ 2.51 at this writing, published
by Arvensa. This is not a cheap public domain knock-off, but
a thoroughly professional publication with very few errors.
For less than the price of a paperback book, you get just about
everything Jules Verne ever wrote in Kindle format which, if you
download the free Kindle French dictionary, allows you to
quickly look up the obscure terms and jargon of which Verne is
so fond without flipping through the
Little Bob. That's
how I read this work, although I have cited a print edition
in the header for those who prefer such.
The strange story of Doctor Ox would be considered a
novella in
modern publishing terms, coming in at 19,240 words. It is
divided into 17 chapters and is written in much the same
style as the author's
Voyages
extraordinaires, with his customary huge
vocabulary, fondness for lengthy enumerations, and witty
parody of the national character of foreigners.
Here, the foreigners in question are the Flemish, speakers
of dialects of the Dutch language who live in the northern
part of Belgium. The Flemish are known for being phlegmatic,
and nowhere is this more in evidence than the small city of
Quiquendone. Its 2,393 residents and their ancestors have
lived there since the city was founded in 1197, and very
little has happened to disturb their placid lives; they like
it that way. Its major industries are the manufacture of
whipped cream and barley sugar. Its inhabitants are taciturn
and, when they speak, do so slowly. For centuries, what
little government they require has been provided by generations
of the van Tricasse family, son succeeding father as burgomaster.
There is little for the burgomaster to do, and one of
the few items on his agenda, inherited from his father
twenty years ago, is whether the city should dispense with
the services of its sole policeman, who hasn't had anything
to do for decades.
Burgomaster van Tricasse exemplifies the moderation in all
things of the residents of his city. I cannot resist quoting
this quintessentially Jules Verne description in full.
Le bourgmestre était un personnage de cinquante ans, ni gras ni maigre, ni petit ni grand, ni vieux ni jeune, ni coloré ni pâle, ni gai ni triste, ni content ni ennuyé, ni énergique ni mou, ni fier ni humble, ni bon ni méchant, ni généreux ni avare, ni brave ni poltron, ni trop ni trop peu, — ne quid nimis, — un homme modéré en tout ; mais à la lenteur invariable de ses mouvements, à sa mâchoire inférieure un peu pendante, à sa paupière supérieure immuablement relevée, à son front uni comme une plaque de cuivre jaune et sans une ride, à ses muscles peu salliants, un physionomiste eût sans peine reconnu que le bourgomestre van Tricasse était le flegme personnifié.
Imagine how startled this paragon of moderation and peace must have been when the city's policeman—he whose job has been at risk for decades—pounds on the door and, when admitted, reports that the city's doctor and lawyer, visiting the house of scientist Doctor Ox, had gotten into an argument. They had been talking politics! Such a thing had not happened in Quiquendone in over a century. Words were exchanged that might lead to a duel! Who is this Doctor Ox? A recent arrival in Quiquendone, he is a celebrated scientist, considered a leader in the field of physiology. He stands out against the other inhabitants of the city. Of no well-defined nationality, he is a genuine eccentric, self-confident, ambitious, and known even to smile in public. He and his laboratory assistant Gédéon Ygène work on their experiments and never speak of them to others. Shortly after arriving in Quiquendone, Dr Ox approached the burgomaster and city council with a proposal: to illuminate the city and its buildings, not with the new-fangled electric lights which other cities were adopting, but with a new invention of his own, oxy-hydric gas. Using powerful electric batteries he invented, water would be decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen gas, stored separately, then delivered in parallel pipes to individual taps where they would be combined and burned, producing a light much brighter and pure than electric lights, not to mention conventional gaslights burning natural or manufactured gas. In storage and distribution, hydrogen and oxygen would be strictly segregated, as any mixing prior to the point of use ran the risk of an explosion. Dr Ox offered to pay all of the expenses of building the gas production plant, storage facilities, and installation of the underground pipes and light fixtures in public buildings and private residences. After a demonstration of oxy-hydric lighting, city fathers gave the go-ahead for the installation, presuming Dr Ox was willing to assume all the costs in order to demonstrate his invention to other potential customers. Over succeeding days and weeks, things before unimagined, indeed, unimaginable begin to occur. On a visit to Dr Ox, the burgomaster himself and his best friend city council president Niklausse find themselves in—dare it be said—a political argument. At the opera house, where musicians and singers usually so moderate the tempo that works are performed over multiple days, one act per night, a performance of Meyerbeer's Les Hugenots becomes frenetic and incites the audience to what can only be described as a riot. A ball at the house of the banker becomes a whirlwind of sound and motion. And yet, each time, after people go home, they return to normal and find it difficult to believe what they did the night before. Over time, the phenomenon, at first only seen in large public gatherings, begins to spread into individual homes and private lives. You would think the placid Flemish had been transformed into the hotter tempered denizens of countries to the south. Twenty newspapers spring up, each advocating its own radical agenda. Even plants start growing to enormous size, and cats and dogs, previously as reserved as their masters, begin to bare fangs and claws. Finally, a mass movement rises to avenge the honour of Quiquendone for an injury committed in the year 1185 by a cow from the neighbouring town of Virgamen. What was happening? Whence the madness? What would be the result when the citizens of Quiquendone, armed with everything they could lay their hands on, marched upon their neighbours? This is a classic “puzzle story”, seasoned with a mad scientist of whom the author allows us occasional candid glimpses as the story unfolds. You'll probably solve the puzzle yourself long before the big reveal at the end. Jules Verne, always anticipating the future, foresaw this: the penultimate chapter is titled (my translation), “Where the intelligent reader sees that he guessed correctly, despite every precaution by the author”. The enjoyment here is not so much the puzzle but rather Verne's language and delicious description of characters and events, which are up to the standard of his better-known works. This is “minor Verne”, written originally for a public reading and then published in a newspaper in Amiens, his adopted home. Many believed that in Quiquendone he was satirising Amiens and his placid neighbours. Doctor Ox would reappear in the work of Jules Verne in his 1882 play Voyage à travers l'impossible (Journey Through the Impossible), a work which, after 97 performances in Paris, was believed lost until a single handwritten manuscript was found in 1978. Dr Ox reprises his role as mad scientist, joining other characters from Verne's novels on their own extraordinary voyages. After that work, Doctor Ox disappears from the world. But when I regard the frenzied serial madness loose today, from “bathroom equality”, tearing down Civil War monuments, masked “Antifa” blackshirts beating up people in the streets, the “refugee” racket, and Russians under every bed, I sometimes wonder if he's taken up residence in today's United States. An English translation is available. Verne's reputation has often suffered due to poor English translations of his work; I have not read this edition and don't know how good it is. Warning: the description of this book at Amazon contains a huge spoiler for the central puzzle of the story.
Posted at
21:12
Sunday, July 22, 2018
Reading List: Sanity
- Neovictorian [pseud.] and Neal Van Wahr. Sanity. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, [2017] 2018. ISBN 978-1-9808-2095-6.
- Have you sometimes felt, since an early age, that you were an alien, somehow placed on Earth and observing the antics of humans as if they were a different species? Why do they believe such stupid things? Why do they do such dumb things? Any why do they keep doing them over and over again seemingly incapable of learning from the bad outcomes of all the previous attempts? That is how Cal Adler felt since childhood and, like most people with such feelings, kept them quiet and bottled up while trying to get ahead in a game whose rules often seemed absurd. In his senior year in high school, he encounters a substitute guidance counsellor who tells him, without any preliminary conversation, precisely how he feels. He's assured he is not alone, and that over time he will meet others. He is given an enigmatic contact in case of emergency. He is advised, as any alien in a strange land, to blend in while observing and developing his own talents. And that's the last he sees of the counsellor. Cal's subsequent life is punctuated by singular events: a terrorist incident in which he spontaneously rises to the occasion, encountering extraordinary people, and being initiated into skills he never imagined he'd possess. He begins to put together a picture of a shadowy…something…of which he may or may not be a part, whose goals are unclear, but whose people are extraordinary. Meanwhile, a pop religion called ReHumanism, founded by a science fiction writer, is gaining adherents among prominent figures in business, entertainment, and technology. Its “scriptures” advocate escape from the tragic cycle of progress and collapse which has characterised the human experience by turning away from the artificial environment in which we have immersed ourselves and rediscovering our inherent human nature which may, to many in the modern world, seem alien. Is there a connection between ReHumanism (which seems like a flaky scam to Cal) and the mysterious people he is encountering? All of these threads begin to come together when Cal, working as a private investigator in Reno, Nevada, is retained by the daughter of a recently-deceased billionaire industrialist to find her mother, who has disappeared during a tourist visit to Alaska. The mother is revealed have become a convert to and supporter of ReHumanism. Are they involved? And how did the daughter find Cal, who, after previous events, has achieved a level of low observability stealth aircraft designers can only dream of? An adventure begins in which nothing is as it seems and all of Cal's formidable talents are tested to their limits. This is an engaging and provocative mystery/thriller which will resonate with those who identify with the kind of heroic, independent, and inner-directed characters that populate the fiction of Robert A. Heinlein and other writers of the golden age of science fiction. It speaks directly to those sworn to chart their own course through life regardless of what others may think or say. I'm not sure the shadowy organisation we glimpse here actually exists, but I wish it did…and I wish they'd contacted me. There are many tips of the hat here to works and authors of fiction with similar themes, and I'm sure many more I missed. This is an example of the efflorescence of independent science fiction which the obsolescence of the traditional gatekeeper publishers has engendered. With the advent of low-cost, high-margin self-publishing and customer reviews and ratings to evaluate quality, an entire new cohort of authors whose work would never before have seen the light of day is now enriching the genre and the lives of their enthusiastic readers. The work is not free of typographical and grammatical errors, but I've read books from major science fiction publishers with more. The Kindle edition is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Posted at
22:10
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Twitterbot is a Bad, Bad Boy
After I migrated the WordPress/BuddyPress site I administer, ratburger.org, to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Linux 2 operating system platform on 2018-07-08, I observed intermittent errors in the system log reporting “php-fpm[21865]: [WARNING] [pool www] seems busy (you may need to increase pm.start_servers, or pm.min/max_spare_servers), spawning 8 children, there are 3 idle, and 27 total children” or some such. After correlating these with the HTTPD access_log, I found that they were due to the PHP-fpm mechanism (which is new in Linux 2) running out of worker processes or, even worse, launching so many of them it exhausts system memory and causes worker processes to crash. (And don't tell me to configure a swap file; that will only turn process crashes into system-wide thrashing oblivion.) And why were all of these PHP processes running around? After all, this is a discussion site with fewer than 120 members and modest traffic. Looking at the log pointed the finger at Twitterbot, a Web crawler operated by the Californian socialist network called Twitter, which claims it's accessing sites to see if they provide “Twitter cards” for URLs posted on its system. Well, it's awfully frenetic in doing so. In the first incident I investigated, it hit my site from four different IP addresses (199.16.157.180-183) a total of 16 times within one second, all requesting the same page. You may call this a Web crawler. To me it looks like a denial of service attack. These requests will all spawn PHP-fpm worker processes and may blow away system memory, and for no reason. We do not support Twitter cards, and there is no conceivable reason for Twitter to make more than one request to determine we don't. Enough is enough. I decided to tell Twitter to buzz (or flippy-flap) off. I added:
User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow: /
to robots.txt and sat back to to see what would happen. Result? Essentially nothing: it continued to hit the site as before. All right, time to up the ante. I decided to consign Twitterbot to Stalag 403 with the following in .htaccess:
# Block rogue user agents
BrowserMatchNoCase 'Twitterbot' evilbots
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from ALL
Deny from env=evilbots
so that any access from Twitterbot will receive a 403 and be informed that its access is forbidden and should not be retried. That ought to fix it, right?
Wrong.
In the last 24 hours there have been three request storms, all for /index.php, with 16 requests the first time and 18 on the second and third. All of these requests were sent within a period of one second, from four different IP addresses: 199.16.157.180-183. The second and third storms were 19 seconds apart, for a total of 36 hits within a period of less than 20 seconds.
For any site running PHP-fpm, this amounts to a denial of service attack: it will blow up the number of worker processes and possibly exhaust memory or start page thrashing and, in any case, delay legitimate user requests. Second, it isn't like the bot is crawling the site: it's making repeated requests for the same page over and over again, from four different IP addresses. Finally, it's violating HTTP protocol. A 403 status means the client has been forbidden access from the server, and the HTTP standard reads, “Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.” (capitals in the original). And yet in the third storm a single IP address hammered in 8 requests for the same page after having received a 403 on the first one. This is either exceptionally stupid or malicious, and I'm beginning to suspect the latter. I'm getting closer and closer to firewalling this IP range. This may break our anouncement of posts on Twitter, but at this point I'm not so sure that would be such a bad thing. The IP range is 199.16.157.180/30. Twitter's published outbound IP ranges are much larger: 199.16.156.0/22 and 199.59.148.0/22, but so far I've only seen Twitterbot coming from the four addresses in the first block.
I guess we shouldn't expect too much from a “social network” headquartered in a city now known for human feces and used addict needles on its sidewalks. (Hayek noted that any word in the English language is reduced in value by preceding it with “social”.) But once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action (Ian Fleming). Thirty-six times in twenty seconds? Welcome to my firewall.
(And note that these requests came from IPv4 address ranges which Twitter acknowledges are their own and were confirmed by WHOIS. So it's not somebody impersonating Twitterbot.)
By the way, if you're interested in intelligent, civil, and wide-ranging conversation, check out Ratburger,org. It's free; there are no advertisements, and no intrusive tracking. All members can post, comment, create and participate in interest groups, and join our weekly audio meet-up.
Posted at
23:27
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Hebrew Bible Updated to Unicode, XHTML Strict
The Web edition of the Hebrew Bible has been available at Fourmilab since 1998. It originally required a browser extension to support downloadable fonts. When this became obsolete, a second edition was released in 2002 which used the ISO 8859-8 character set, which includes the ASCII Latin character set and Hebrew letters (but no vowel signs). Most Web browsers at the time supported this character set, although some required the installation of a "language pack" or font in order to display it.
At the time, I remarked that when Unicode became widely adopted, all of the complexity of special character sets for each language would evaporate, as we'd have a single character encoding which could handle all commonly-used languages (and many obscure ones, as well). Now, in 2018, we have made our landfall on that happy shore. The vast majority of widely-used operating systems and Web browsers support Unicode and provide at least one font with characters for the major languages.
I have just released a third edition of the Fourmilab Hebrew Bible, in which all documents use Unicode for all text, using the UTF-8 representation which now accounts for more than 90% of traffic on the Web. Any browser which supports Unicode and includes a font providing the Hebrew character set will be able to display these documents without any special configuration required—it should just work.
I have also updated all documents to the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard. I prefer this standard to HTML5 for documents which do not require features of the latter standard (such as embedded audio and video or the canvas element) since, being well-formed XML, XHTML documents can easily be parsed by computer programs which wish to process their content.
You can cite a chapter within a book of the Bible with a URL like:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/hebrew/Bible/?Exodus.html#c10or an individual verse with:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/hebrew/Bible/?Exodus.html#v5:7
Previous editions of the Hebrew Bible did not require the “c” or “v” before the chapter or chapter:verse; this is a requirement of XHTML, in which the “id=” attribute must not start with a digit. For compatibility with existing citations, the “c” or “v” may be omitted, but in direct URLs citing the book document itself, they must be supplied.
This edition of the Hebrew Bible, like its predecessors, does not rely upon the so-called “Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm”. Instead, characters appear in the source HTML documents in the order they are presented in the page, with Hebrew text being explicitly reversed in order to read from right to left. In my experience, getting involved with automatic bidirectional text handling is the royal road to madness, and programmers who wish to keep what little hair that remains after half a century unscrewing the inscrutable trust their instinct about things to avoid. Hebrew text, which would otherwise automatically be rendered right-to-left by the browser, is explicitly surrounded by HTML tags:
<bdo dir="ltr">ת ישארב</bdo>
to override the default direction based upon the characters, in the example, the first word of Genesis. (You can also override the directionality of text by prefixing the Unicode LRO [‭] or RLO [‮] character and appending a PDF [‬] to the string. I chose to use the XHTML override tag since it makes the intent clearer when processing the document with a program.)
To fully appreciate the insanity that Unicode bidirectional mode can induce in the minds of authors of multilingual documents, consider the following simplified HTML code for a sentence from the Hebrew Bible help file.
One writes: 100 as ק, 101 as אק, 110 as יק, and 111 as איק.
Want to guess how the browser renders this? Go ahead, guess. What you get is:
One writes: 100 as ק, 101 as אק, 110 as יק, and 111 as איק.
What? Why?? This way leads to the asylum. If you wrap the Hebrew with:
One writes: 100 as <bdo dir="ltr">ק</bdo>, 101 as <bdo dir="ltr">אק</bdo>, 110 as <bdo dir="ltr">יק</bdo>, and 111 as <bdo dir="ltr">איק</bdo>.
you get the desired:
One writes: 100 as ק, 101 as אק, 110 as יק, and 111 as איק.
In these examples, I have used HTML text entities (such as “א”) in the interest of comprehensibility. If you use actual Unicode characters and edit with a text editor such as Geany which infers text direction from the characters adjacent to the cursor, things get even more bewildering. The Hebrew Bible files contain Unicode characters, not text entities, but I only process them with custom Perl programs, never with a text editor.
In case somebody needs it, the ISO 8859-8 edition remains available.
Posted at
13:53
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Recipes: Steak with Roquefort Mushroom Sauce
Here is a meal you can make yourself from all natural ingredients in minimal time with little to clean up afterward. It never fails and requires very little of your time. I use one low-tech gizmo to save time and ensure success, but you can use alternative means at the cost of a bit more fussiness and time.
Start with:
- A good cut of steak, 250 to 350 grams per person
- Roquefort cheese, 100 g
- Sliced mushrooms, 200 g before draining
- Garlic purée, around a tablespoon (15 ml)
- Cooking oil (olive, etc.)
We're going to cook the steak in a Tefal Actifry. This device is colloquially called an “air fryer”, but that is misleading: it actually cooks by blowing very hot air onto the food. This creates much the same effect as deep frying, but without a bath of hot oil or tendency to make the food greasy. What I discovered when developing this recipe is that, delightfully, when used on meat, the process triggers the Maillard reaction which makes flame-seared steaks so attractive in appearance and delicious.
Start by drizzling a little oil (about a teaspoon or two, 5–10 ml) in the back part of the Actifry pan, below the hot air input. Now drag the steak through the oil, coating both sides and the edges with a thin film of oil. Ideally, when you're done, there will be hardly any oil left over in the pan. The Actifry stirrer should be removed; the steak will be stationary beneath the air vent (visible at the top of the picture). Close the lid, set the timer for 8 minutes, and press the start button. (There is no temperature setting on the Actifry.)
While the steak is cooking, place the Roquefort cheese, sliced mushrooms (drained), and a squirt of garlic purée in a small saucepan and put on very low heat. You can break the cheese up into chunks with a stirring spoon if you like, but if you don't it will still work fine. As the cheese melts, stir all the ingredients together. Once the cheese is melted and everything is mixed, turn the heat down to the lowest level or off and cover. You don't want to overheat the cheese, which will denature it and make a mess.
When the Actifry beeps at the end of the 8 minutes, open it and turn over the steak, keeping it at the back under the air input. Set the timer for 7 minutes and restart. When it beeps again, the steak is ready. Take it out of the Actifry pan and put it in a bowl. Pour the juice from the pan into the sauce pan and stir it into the sauce, then pour the sauce on top of the steak. You're ready to eat!
While you're enjoying the steak, let's get the Actifry busy making a companion: chips or French fries. Install the stirrer in the pan, and add your desired quantity of store-bought frozen chips. Try to get the kind intended to be prepared by deep-frying, not those made to be cooked in the oven. The latter will work, but may come out oily and less than ideal. Drizzle a very small amount of oil on top of the frozen chips, close the lid, set the timer for 15 minutes and press start. Don't bother cleaning the pan; the remaining juices from the steak will add flavour to the chips
.
When next you hear the beep, dump the chips into a bowl, give them a few sprays of Balsamic vinegar, season with salt and pepper, and bring to the table. Catsup? Catsup! What do you take me for, an American?
After dinner, cleaning up amounts to loading the Actifry pan, stirrer, and filter, the saucepan, and the bowls and silverware into the dishwasher. There's no grill to scrub, charcoal to extinguish and dispose of, frying oil to filter and eventually recycle, or other detritus.
The cooking times given result in a medium rare (à point) steak. If you prefer a different degree of doneness, adjust the time accordingly. This recipe and the Roquefort sauce also work well with boneless chicken breasts. When cooking chicken, you may have to increase the cooking time slightly so the cooked meat isn't pink in the centre—chicken should always be cooked well done to eliminate the risk of Salmonella. The core temperature of cooked chicken should always be at least 75° C.
This recipe is sized for one person. For two, simply double the quantities. Place the two steaks side by side in the back of the Actifry. The cooking times do not change. I have not tried cooking more than two steaks at once in the Actifry; since additional steaks would be farther from the air input, they may not cook as well—you'll have to experiment if you want to do this.
If you consider the sauce a Continental desecration of red meat, don't make it! The steak will be just fine by itself. If you prefer to use fresh mushrooms rather than store-bought prepared ones, start with around 250 g of brown or white mushrooms, cut off and discard the bottoms of the stalks, cut into slices and place in the Actifry pan with the stirrer installed. Drizzle a teaspoon or two of oil on the top and cook for 10 minutes. You can cook the mushrooms first and set aside to add to the sauce while the steak is cooking.
Posted at
20:42
Sunday, July 8, 2018
Reading List: Bad Blood
- Carreyrou, John. Bad Blood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. ISBN 978-1-9848-3363-1.
-
The drawing of blood for laboratory tests is one of my least
favourite parts of a routine visit to the doctor's office. Now,
I have no fear of needles and hardly notice the stick, but
frequently the doctor's assistant who draws the blood (whom I've
nicknamed Vampira) has difficulty finding the vein to get a good
flow and has to try several times. On one occasion she made an
internal puncture which resulted in a huge, ugly bruise that
looked like I'd slammed a car door on my arm. I wondered why
they need so much blood, and why draw it into so many
different containers? (Eventually, I researched this, having
been intrigued by the issue during the O. J. Simpson trial; if
you're curious,
here
is the information.) Then, after the blood is drawn, it
has to be sent off to the laboratory, which sends back
the results days later. If something pops up in the test
results, you have to go back for a second visit with
the doctor to discuss it.
Wouldn't it be great if they could just
stick
a fingertip and draw a drop or two of blood, as is
done by diabetics to test blood sugar, then run all the tests on
it? Further, imagine if, after taking the drop of blood, it
could be put into a desktop machine right in the doctor's office
which would, in a matter of minutes, produce test results you
could discuss immediately with the doctor. And if such a
technology existed and followed the history of decline in price
with increase in volume which has characterised other high
technology products since the 1970s, it might be possible to
deploy the machines into the homes of patients being treated
with medications so their effects could be monitored and relayed
directly to their physicians in case an anomaly was detected.
It wouldn't quite be a Star Trek medical
tricorder,
but it would be one step closer. With the cost of medical care
rising steeply, automating diagnostic blood tests and bringing
them to the mass market seemed an excellent candidate as the
“next big thing” for Silicon Valley to
revolutionise.
This was the vision that came to 19 year old Elizabeth
Holmes after completing a summer internship at the Genome
Institute of Singapore after her freshman year as a
chemical engineering major at Stanford. Holmes had
decided on a career in entrepreneurship from an early
age and, after her first semester told her father,
“No, Dad, I'm, not interested in getting a Ph.D.
I want to make money.” And Stanford, in the heart
of Silicon Valley, was surrounded by companies started
by professors and graduates who had turned inventions
into vast fortunes. With only one year of college behind
her, she was sure she'd found her opportunity. She showed
the patent application she'd drafted for an arm patch
that would diagnose medical conditions to Channing
Robertson, professor of chemical engineering at
Stanford, and Shaunak Roy, the Ph.D. student in whose lab
she had worked as an assistant during her freshman
year. Robertson was enthusiastic, and when Holmes said
she intended to leave Stanford and start a company to
commercialise the idea, he encouraged her. When the company
was incorporated in 2004, Roy, then a newly-minted Ph.D.,
became its first employee and Robertson joined the board.
From the outset, the company was funded by other people's
money. Holmes persuaded a family friend, Tim Draper, a
second-generation venture capitalist who had backed, among other
companies, Hotmail, to invest US$ 1 million in first round
funding. Draper was soon joined by Victor Palmieri, a corporate
turnaround artist and friend of Holmes' father. The company was
named Theranos, from “therapy” and
“diagnosis”. Elizabeth, unlike this scribbler, had
a lifelong aversion to needles, and the invention she described
in the business plan pitched to investors was informed by this.
A skin patch would draw tiny quantities of blood without pain by
means of “micro-needles”, the blood would be
analysed by micro-miniaturised sensors in the patch and, if
needed, medication could be injected. A wireless data link
would send results to the doctor.
This concept, and Elizabeth's enthusiasm and high-energy pitch
allowed her to recruit additional investors, raising almost US$
6 million in 2004. But there were some who failed to be
persuaded: MedVentures Associates, a firm that specialised in
medical technology, turned her down after discovering she had no
answers for the technical questions raised in a meeting with the
partners, who had in-depth experience with diagnostic
technology. This would be a harbinger of the company's
fund-raising in the future: in its entire history, not a single
venture fund or investor with experience in medical or
diagnostic technology would put money into the company.
Shaunak Roy, who, unlike Holmes, actually knew something about
chemistry, quickly realised that Elizabeth's concept, while
appealing to the uninformed, was science fiction, not science,
and no amount of arm-waving about nanotechnology, microfluidics,
or laboratories on a chip would suffice to build something which
was far beyond the state of the art. This led to a
“de-scoping” of the company's ambition—the
first of many which would happen over succeeding years. Instead
of Elizabeth's magical patch, a small quantity of blood would be
drawn from a finger stick and placed into a cartridge around the
size of a credit card. The disposable cartridge would then be
placed into a desktop “reader” machine, which would,
using the blood and reagents stored in the cartridge, perform a
series of analyses and report the results. This was originally
called Theranos 1.0, but after a series of painful redesigns,
was dubbed the “Edison”. This was the prototype
Theranos ultimately showed to potential customers and
prospective investors.
This was a far cry from the original ambitious concept.
The hundreds of laboratory tests doctors can order
are divided into four major categories: immunoassays,
general chemistry, hæmatology, and DNA amplification.
In immunoassay tests, blood plasma is exposed to
an antibody that detects the presence of a substance
in the plasma. The antibody contains a marker which
can be detected by its effect on light passed through
the sample. Immunoassays are used in a number of common
blood tests, such the
25(OH)D
assay used to test for vitamin D deficiency, but cannot perform
other frequently ordered tests such as blood sugar and red and
white blood cell counts. Edison could only perform what is
called “chemiluminescent immunoassays”, and thus
could only perform a fraction of the tests regularly ordered.
The rationale for installing an Edison in the doctor's office
was dramatically reduced if it could only do some tests but
still required a venous blood draw be sent off to the laboratory
for the balance.
This didn't deter Elizabeth, who combined her formidable
salesmanship with arm-waving about the capabilities of the
company's products. She was working on a deal to sell four
hundred Edisons to the Mexican government to cope with an
outbreak of swine flu, which would generate immediate revenue.
Money was much on the minds of Theranos' senior management. By
the end of 2009, the company had burned through the US$ 47
million raised in its first three rounds of funding and, without
a viable product or prospects for sales, would have difficulty
keeping the lights on.
But the real bonanza loomed on the horizon in 2010. Drugstore
giant Walgreens was interested in expanding their retail
business into the “wellness market”: providing
in-store health services to their mass market clientèle.
Theranos pitched them on offering in-store blood testing.
Doctors could send their patients to the local Walgreens to have
their blood tested from a simple finger stick and eliminate the
need to draw blood in the office or deal with laboratories.
With more than 8,000 locations in the U.S., if each were to be
equipped with one Edison, the revenue to Theranos (including the
single-use testing cartridges) would put them on the map as
another Silicon Valley disruptor that went from zero to hundreds
of millions in revenue overnight. But here, as well, the
Elizabeth effect was in evidence. Of the 192 tests she told
Walgreens Theranos could perform, fewer than half were
immunoassays the Edisons could run. The rest could be done only
on conventional laboratory equipment, and certainly not on a
while-you-wait basis.
Walgreens wasn't the only potential saviour on the horizon.
Grocery godzilla Safeway, struggling with sales and earnings
which seemed to have reached a peak, saw in-store blood testing
with Theranos machines as a high-margin profit centre. They
loaned Theranos US$ 30 million and began to plan for
installation of blood testing clinics in their stores.
But there was a problem, and as the months wore on, this became
increasingly apparent to people at both Walgreens and Safeway,
although dismissed by those in senior management under the spell
of Elizabeth's reality distortion field. Deadlines were missed.
Simple requests, such as A/B comparison tests run on the
Theranos hardware and at conventional labs were first refused,
then postponed, then run but results not disclosed. The list of
tests which could be run, how blood for them would be drawn, and
how they would be processed seemed to dissolve into fog whenever
specific requests were made for this information, which was
essential for planning the in-store clinics.
There was, indeed, a problem, and it was pretty severe,
especially for a start-up which had burned through US$ 50
million and sold nothing. The product didn't work.
Not only could the Edison only run a fraction of the tests its
prospective customers had been led by Theranos to believe it
could, for those it did run the results were wildly unreliable.
The small quantity of blood used in the test introduced random
errors due to dilution of the sample; the small tubes in the
cartridge were prone to clogging; and capillary blood collected
from a finger stick was prone to errors due to
“hemolysis”, the rupture of red blood cells, which
is minimal in a venous blood draw but so prevalent in finger
stick blood it could lead to some tests producing values which
indicated the patient was dead.
Meanwhile, people who came to work at Theranos quickly became
aware that it was not a normal company, even by the eccentric
standards of Silicon Valley. There was an obsession with
security, with doors opened by badge readers; logging of
employee movement; information restricted to narrow silos
prohibiting collaboration between, say, engineering and
marketing which is the norm in technological start-ups;
monitoring of employee Internet access, E-mail, and social media
presence; a security detail of menacing-looking people in black
suits and earpieces (which eventually reached a total of
twenty); a propensity of people, even senior executives, to
“vanish”, Stalin-era purge-like, overnight; and a
climate of fear that anybody, employee or former employee, who
spoke about the company or its products to an outsider,
especially the media, would be pursued, harassed, and bankrupted
by lawsuits. There aren't many start-ups whose senior
scientists are summarily demoted and subsequently commit
suicide. That happened at Theranos. The company held no
memorial for him.
Throughout all of this, a curious presence in the company was
Ramesh (“Sunny”) Balwani, a Pakistani-born software
engineer who had made a fortune of more than US$ 40 million in
the dot-com boom and cashed out before the bust. He joined
Theranos in late 2009 as Elizabeth's second in command and
rapidly became known as a hatchet man, domineering boss, and
clueless when it came to the company's key technologies (on one
occasion, an engineer mentioned a robotic arm's “end
effector”, after which Sunny would frequently speak of its
“endofactor”). Unbeknownst to employees and
investors, Elizabeth and Sunny had been living together since
2005. Such an arrangement would be a major scandal in a public
company, but even in a private firm, concealing such information
from the board and investors is a serious breach of trust.
Let's talk about the board, shall we? Elizabeth was not only
persuasive, but well-connected. She would parley one connection
into another, and before long had recruited many prominent
figures including:
- George Schultz (former U.S. Secretary of State)
- Henry Kissinger (former U.S. Secretary of State)
- Bill Frist (former U.S. Senator and medical doctor)
- James Mattis (General, U.S. Marine Corps)
- Riley Bechtel (Chairman and former CEO, Bechtel Group)
- Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator)
- Richard Kobacevich (former Wells Fargo chairman and CEO)
Posted at
21:32
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
UNUM 3.0: Updated to Unicode 11
Version 3.0 of UNUM is now available for downloading. Version 3.0 incorporates the Unicode 11.0.0 standard, released on June 5th, 2018. The update to Unicode adds support for seven scripts for languages, additional CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) symbols, 66 new emoji, and assorted symbols such as half-stars for rating systems. There are a total of 137,374 characters in 11.0.0, of which 684 are new since 10.0.0. (UNUM also supports an additional 65 ASCII control characters, which are not assigned graphic code points in the Unicode database.) This is an incremental update to Unicode. There are no structural changes in how characters are defined in the databases, and other than the presence of the new characters, the operation of UNUM is unchanged. UNUM also contains a database of HTML named character references (the sequences like “<” you use in HTML source code when you need to represent a character which has a syntactic meaning in HTML or which can't be directly included in a file with the character encoding you're using to write it). There have been no changes to this standard since UNUM 2.2 was released in September 2017, so UNUM 3.0 will behave identically when querying these references except, of course, that numerical references to the new Unicode characters will be interpreted correctly. (Is your browser totally with it? See what it does with “🦹” in an HTML document! And here we go…“🦹”.) UNUM Documentation and Download PagePosted at
20:00