CNN has a story this morning about a man who had a new jaw grown within muscle tissue in his back from stem cells. Doctors implanted a titanium cage along with the stem cells, and the new jaw grew within it. They then removed it and put it where it ought to be, in his head. Shortly afterward the man had his first meal in 9 years, a bratwurst sandwich. Within a year they expect to be able to remove the cage and implant teeth into the jaw.

The writer of WhyNotResist noticed this article as well, and her reaction to it was calling it gross. Understandable, since it is a pretty bizarre and foreign concept to us still, but my perspective of it is that a man who had suffered for 9 years with no lower jaw due to a cancerous tumor is now able to eat a normal meal again.

Even better is that this is not a transplant, nothing was harvested from anyone but the guy, and even then it was just a small amount of tissue. His new jaw will be an exact duplicate of his old one, and probably function every bit as well. This is nothing short of miraculous and revolutionary medical advancement, and I think that cases like his are more than enough reason to re-open the books on stem cell therapies here in the U.S.

Doron has written an excellent Firefox extension for notifying users of new Gmail and enabling them to check it with a single click. It is extremely low rent resource-wise, and simply does what it should do, no surprises or annoying side effects.

There have been rumors of Google penalizing people for using it, some by shutting their access down for 24 hours, but I personally have never experienced anything of the sort. Google has now released a beta version of their own Gmail Helper which resides in the Windows system tray, and pops up a little box when you receive mail. It works just like it should, but uses almost 10 megs of ram. Thats a pretty big chunk for such a small app.

Since it is still in beta, it is unfair to judge it as though it were a product heaved at the masses, however, I genuinely hope that Google either allows third-party extensions to work smoothly with their service or tones up their official version so that anal retentive people like myself will be willing to use it.

Reuters reports today that a 29 year old Iraqi by the name of Sarmad Shamael has opened what is Iraq’s only tattoo parlor in a basement studio in downtown Baghdad. Traditional designs like skulls, dragons and pinup girls are apparently the most popular of the 100 or so designs the young artist has laid down so far.

To complement all the do-gooding going on in various rebuilding and re-culturization projects in Iraq nowadays, most of which are spearheaded by Americans, I think someone wicked like Paul Booth ought to head over to the fertile crescent and lay some world-class ink down on Iraqi metalheads pro-bono. Thoughts?

i can’t muster the energy to write a post around here for 4 months, but I can manage enough for a 6 hour redesign bender. maybe it will help motivate me to post an entry occasionally. gmail invites still available, btw. see below.

i’ve been trying to give these away all morning without even an iota of success, so just as an expirement let’s see how this sits with the search engines. 6 gmail invites up for grabs. leave a comment, if nothing you type rubs me the wrong way i’ll send you one. forgetting to leave your email in the first comment = definitely wont get one. (edit) scratch that, these things are going so slowly that even if you offend me i’ll send one. i just want that little red link gone from my inbox. (/edit)