A Freethinker's Paradise

Has Google Jumped The Shark?

According to CNN, Google is prepared to go portal/email service (read basically turn into Yahoo! and MSN.) Not that Yahoo! and MSN are necessarily evil, its just that Google was innovative at one time, and hopefully will remain that way, although once it goes public, its over, so to speak. Once Google has to answer to its shareholders, the time for taking chances is done. They have to deliver value to the Shareholders (Which is part of the problem facing the US today: consumerism.) and as such cannot afford to innovate much, as that could lose money, and losing those pieces of paper with Dead People's faces on them is not part of the game!

Jumping the Shark refers to the old Happy Days episode where Fonzie literally Jumps a Shark. The show is said to have gone down hill after that. There are whole websites devoted to this thing or that thing "Jumping the Shark."

CombiChem Outlook

I thought this article was interesting, because it states that the genomics and proteomics markets have produced good things from it, and each company is working on an internal library of compounds. I'm not sure if I agree with the reliance on combichem, although I dont think its a bad thing. I think plowing ahead without stopping to fully understand the chemistry of the compounds and their relation to efficacy (I'm not quite sure what they do now, but I imagine in industry they just make compounds and the Chemists have an idea but arent sure) is a dumb idea. This is similar to what happened with the internet and related technologies (although that is more the domain of CodeMonkey than of me. But it seems that much of PC tech is built on hack on hack on hack, particularly MS products. Linux is more open-source, and thus the chance to correct some of the mistakes are available. But since Microsoft is the de facto leader of internet tech (for now), its code-writing ability (or lack thereof... no one really knows since they won't release anything.) will monumentally impact the internet.

But back to the CombiChem. Its short for Combinatorial Chemistry, where dozens (or more) compounds are reacted in the same vessel with the same reactant, giving many different derivatives of a single precursor, which is good for mass-production of compounds. But even this is somewhat clumsy, as I suspect many talented scientists can rule out a good percentage of the compounds made from experience. But used in combination (no pun intended) with other methods/techniques, CombiChem will be very valuable.