Allen Brain Atlas

This could be interesting. Paul Allen has invested $100 million for a three-year project to map the map each of the 20,000 genes related to the human brain, in an effort to help understand the workings of the mind and clues to causes of disease.

Here's an article about the project from the Jan 2004 issue of IEEE Spectrum. (The whole issue is worth reading, and is online).

iClips

Someone on The WELL was mentioning there was an interesting editorial by Paul Krugman in the December 26th issue of the New York Times. Unfortunately, as per NYT policy, that article is no longer available through the nytimes.com website --- unless you pay.

Thing is, if you call up the link to the article from this Krugman page on the NYT site, you find that what the NYT wants you to pay is $2.95. Which, besides being too much, is more than the cost of that day's entire newspaper. Something ain't right.

I sure wish there were an iTunes Music Store-like service, a "Lexis/Nexis for the rest of us," hey, we could call it iClips, where you could search for archived articles from thousands of publishers (including, why not, bloggers!), and pay some simple fee, certainly less than 99 cents for a 700-some-odd-word-article, and get in return a PDF of the article.

A win-win-win for everyone: much bigger market gets access to a large library of archived material; writers can sell their material to more people; publishers make more money at $.10 at volume than they do selling a few copies at $2.95.

Funny thing is, this is not a new idea. It's been batted around forever. Remember AMIX? Take iTunes ease of use, attach it to a fully-realized AMIX implementation, and you got iClips.

I'd probably use this more than iTunes --- considering I've yet to buy any music through iTunes (although I love using the app to manage my 50gb of music), that wouldn't be hard!