Could we get a single clear weekend in the 60s or 70s? Please?

Busy doing clean-up for our seder meal this Wednesday. Found a treasure trove of electronics crap which may have been useful five years ago but I see no point in keeping (various chargers for Thinkpads long gone by, a couple of chargers and related cables for Sony Clies, since cancelled and replaced by a Blackberry, cables which even I can't figure out what they were used to connect, and a dusty set of Nintendo gameboy peripherals). I'm amazed at how much cruft we manage to accumulate even with an eagle eye out for throwing stuff away. We recycle weekly yet have piles of magazines that mysteriously appear and then slither off into a corner. I found several WSJs still wrapped with a rubber band from some time in 2004 (which means they managed to hide during last year's seder clean-a-thon).

Frisket is not at all happy with the weather. First it snowed this week, but didn't accumulate so she didn't get to frolic in the snow. She got very little snow frolicking this winter. Now it's raining, and her people just really don't enjoy hanging out in the rain.

There's an interesting article in today's (or tomorrow's, it gets confusing) NY Times about the failed drug test in the UK several weeks back (perhaps February?). The backstory is that a company wanted to get its new leukemia drug tested. It is apparently easier (bell) to get testing done and approved in the UK than in the US, so the company hired a US company to perform the testing in the UK. All of the standard protocols were followed, even though this is apparently quite a non-standard drug (bell). Within minutes of injecting the first patient, he started showing a sever reaction which the people conducting the test assumed was a normal reaction to monoclonal antibodies, but it wasn't. Instead of slowing down and spacing the testing out, they injected the remaining subjects with the drug. The result was all six male test subjects ended up in the ICU and left today without an immune system.

The article is here: British Rethinking Rules After Ill-Fated Drug Trial. What interests me is the failure to grasp that the various underlying assumptions about the test were applied to what, in retrospect, is clearly a different scenario than past testing regimens. You see this happen in the technology world frequently...a test run will be done with some software to validate it, and then it is put into production in a slightly different configuration or environment, and then boom it crashes (well, software doesn't really make a sound when it crashes).