Retailing, retail news, Times Online:

“HarperCollins will hire a technology company to help to digitise its current titles — it releases about 3,500 to 5,000 books a year worldwide — plus a further 20,000 to 30,000 backlist titles. The books would then be made available to search engines to index.”

“Brian Murray, the group president, said: “Google has been requesting physical copies of our books to make available for search. Amazon has followed and now both MSN and Yahoo! want to join in. That means there would be four sets of files out there — when it’s something the publisher should control.”

My guess: even though this makes logical sense, search engines will not use it. Why? Engineering culture. Simply put, this is not what Google is building.

If book search engines have to point at dozens or hundreds or thousands of publisher search engines, so much for performance and so much for economies of scale.

Dr. Fred Gage or genetically enhanced mouse? You be the judge.

Mice Created With Human Brain Cells - Yahoo! News:

Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos.

Bad idea.

News - George R.R. Martin’s Official Website: “he feast has finally been served, and the crows have taken flight… higher than anyone (including me) would ever have dared dream.
cover The American hardcover of A FEAST FOR CROWS was released on November 8, and immediately shot to the top of all the lists, making its debut at #1 on the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list for hardcover fiction. That shriek you heard coming out of the west a few days back was me in San Francisco, roaring with delight as I got the news from Bantam. The highest I had ever reached on the TIMES list previously was #12, for A STORM OF SWORDS.
A FEAST FOR CROWS also hit #1 on the WALL STREET JOURNAL and PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY bestseller lists, and #2 on the USA LIST (which combines fiction and non-fiction). Amazon, Border’s, and Barnes & Noble also had FEAST ranked as #1 in hardcover fiction.
cover Meanwhile the British edition, released by HarperCollins Voyager on October 17, broke in at #10 on the TIMES OF LONDON bestseller list for hardcover fiction, and edged up to #9 for its second week on sale.
Every writer dreams of making these lists, and to hit #1… to know your book is the bestselling novel in all of America… well, I still wake up pinching myself.
It is not something I could have achieved alone, however. Thanks are due to all the good folks at Bantam and HarperCollins for their faith in the series and their patience with the author, to the legions of booksellers who pushed the books on all those unsuspecting customers, and most of all to my readers. If there was ever a series that has grown through word of mouth, it is this one… so thanks to all of you who ever recommended A GAME OF THRONES to friends, kins, and coworkers. If the crows are flying high, it’s only because all of you helped them take wing. “

Technorati Tags: GRRM, AFFC, George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

The Citadel: Images - Maps: “y popular request we’ve added scans of some of the maps (namely, the most recent versions published for each area). Each link below opens in a new window with just the map for faster loading since we’ve opted for keeping them quite large. Currently, we have a scan of the map of King’s Landing from the US hardcover from A Clash of Kings. This map is Copyright � 2000-2005 James Sinclair, Random House and George R.R. Martin. We also have a scan of the Lands of the Summer Sea available in the UK hardcover of A Storm of Swords. This map is Copyright � 2000-2005 Richard Geiger, Voyager Books and George R.R. Martin. We present our own map, up-to-date through A Feast for Crows, of Westeros, which replaces the previous maps of the North, the South, and the Land beyond the Wall. This map is based upon the maps of James Sinclair, Richard Geiger, and Keith Curtis. Finally, we have a copy of a fan’s attempt at piecing together a world map from the maps we so far have seen published.

We have added a scale to some of these maps, based on the 100 league length of the Wall as stated several times in the books, to each of the maps (apart from the King’s Landing map) but we are not absolutely certain that the map of the Lands of the Summer Sea is to the same scale as the maps of the North and the South. GRRM has disavowed the accuracy of the maps in term of scale, but we take this to mean that the maps aren’t strictly accurate in terms of the positioning of specific locations rather than that the maps are completely out of scale. We stand by this until such time as internal evidence proves that it is wrong.”

The color map of Westeros is awesome.

Genetic Theory of Harry Potter, The - New York Times:

“This summer, the journal Nature published ‘Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele,’ a letter that argued that J. K. Rowling’s tales of the young wizard Harry Potter offer an opportunity to educate children in modern theories of heredity.

As almost everyone above the age of 3 knows, the Harry Potter novels depict a world divided into people who possess magical powers (wizards and witches) and those who do not (Muggles). Not everyone can be a wizard; indeed, after careful review of the evidence, the authors of the Nature letter concluded that wizards evidently inherit their gifts from their parents as predicted by the theories of the 19th-century geneticist Gregor Mendel.
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Apparently, wizardry (or the lack thereof) is determined by a linked pair of genes, or alleles, that you inherit from your parents, one allele from each parent. The researchers hypothesized that wizardry is a recessive trait, like blue eyes, meaning that an individual who inherits from his parents one wizard allele and one Muggle allele (wM or Mw) will not display wizarding powers. Only individuals with two wizard alleles (ww) will display magical powers. Such individuals - like Harry and his nemesis, Draco Malfoy - are more likely to be born to parents who possess ww genes.

But children born of mixed marriages need not necessarily live a life of Mugglehood: those with a pure-blood wizard father (ww) and a part-Muggle mother (Mw) can inherit the precious ww genes. Children can also inherit the trait when neither parent is a wizard but both carry the wizard gene (Mw). Here the researchers cited Harry’s friend Hermione Granger, the child of two Muggle dentists, as an example of the recessive allele surfacing against the odds.

Case closed? Not a chance: no sooner had the letter appeared than a group of plant scientists at Cambridge fired off a rebuttal: “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Presumption,” in which they claimed that the recessive-allele hypothesis was “deterministic and unsupported by available evidence.”

Given Rowling’s penchant for plot twists, details may yet surface that prove once and for all that wizarding is indeed a recessive trait. Until then, Rowling, whom religious fundamentalists have pilloried for glamorizing witchcraft, may well be preaching a far more subversive message, one that leads young readers to pursue the study of heredity, genes and - inevitably - evolution.

Not likely. But a great image:

Israel readies forces for strike on nuclear Iran - Sunday Times - Times Online:

SRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed.

…
“Israel — and not only Israel — cannot accept a nuclear Iran,” Sharon warned recently. “We have the ability to deal with this and we’re making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation.”

Why does the purportedly reputable Times of London run these overblown stories so often? There is nothing reported here that goes beyond standard contingency planning.

Let’s check back in March. If the Times is right–and they might be–good for them. But if they’re wrong, shouldn’t they be a little embarrassed?