A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
The following was deleted from one of my pharma company profiles: “Dapoxetine was rejected by the FDA in 2005, but if its EU filing gets approval this year, another FDA submission could be coming soon.”
The best part is that the company is Johnson & Johnson.
I don’t recall why I never finished reading Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History
Anyway, here’s an article by Prof. Bruegmann about the virtues and decline of sprawl:
But let’s assume for a moment that I’m entirely wrong and that sprawl is terrible. Could we stop it if we wanted to?
The record is not encouraging. The longest-running and best-known experiment was the one undertaken by Britain starting right after World War II. At that time, the British government gave unprecedented powers to planners to remake cities and took the draconian step of nationalizing all development rights to assure that these plans could be implemented. The famous 1944 Greater London plan, for example, envisioned a city bounded by a greenbelt. If there happened to be any excess population that couldn’t be accommodated within the greenbelt, it was supposed to be accommodated in small, self-contained garden cities beyond the belt.
Did the plan work? In one sense it did: The greenbelt is still there, and some people consider that an aesthetic triumph. But the plan certainly did not stop sprawl. As usual, the planners were not able to predict the future with any accuracy. The population grew, household size declined and affluence rose faster than predicted. Development jumped right over the greenbelt–and not into discreet garden cities, because this policy was soon abandoned.
The ultimate result was that much of southeastern England has been urbanized. Moreover, because of the greenbelt, many car trips are longer than they would have been otherwise, contributing to the worst traffic congestion in Europe.
I’m gonna get back to AstraZeneca’s annual shareholder letter now.
Please to enjoy, a faux-outtake from Knocked Up:
Sorry I haven’t written too much lately, dear readers. I’ve been busy with work, and I’m also spending a lot of time reading and trying to write fiction. I have a bunch of posts I’d love to get around to writing, and I really do have notes about them on my bulletin board.
Till then, here’s a picture I took last week:
I watched the first season of The Sopranos a year or two after it had aired. My excuse was that I thought it was overrated because most of the praise I heard came from my co-workers here in northern NJ. As it turns out, that first season was fantastic. But I heard that the second season was utterly terrible, so I never watched it, nor the subsequent ones.
Still, I sat down to watch the final episode last night, figuring Amy could fill me in on any backstory I was missing. A few minutes in, it occurred to me that this episode may get higher ratings in northern NJ than either the 1986 or 1991 Superbowl games.
SPOILER ALERT (so click “More” if you want to read the rest)
Continue reading “Shock ending”
One winter afternoon, my cat returned to the house in a panic, bleeding from one paw. He’d ripped a claw on something, so we cleaned him up and decided he wasn’t going outside for a while.
Since there was a light snow on the ground, I decided to investigate by following his paw-prints. They led on through the yard, across the street, and into some woods behind the neighbor’s house. Given the distance between prints, I figured that he ripped his claw while racing back home, probably on rocks or hard ground.
Of course, anytime we let him out, we wondered what he was up to. A gentleman in Germany wondered the same thing about his cat, so he rigged up a tiny digital camera to hang from Mr. Lee’s collar, and thus began CatCam site.
We’re off to Louisiana for the weekend. I won’t have a chance to get to New Orleans while we’re there, so instead of beads, have some links!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 8, 2007”
I enjoy writing the big Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report each June. Sure, it’s not what I imagined I’d be doing when I was a brooding, pretentious idiot in college, but it turns out that there’s plenty of fun to be had in researching and writing these profiles.
For one thing, there’s the mystery/police procedural aspect of reading through annual reports and SEC statements and trying to figure out just what certain companies are trying to hide. Maybe it’s awful revenues from a new product (now conveniently reclassified into a group of products, so its figures aren’t broken out), or a diminished product pipeline (“I wonder why [company x] isn’t mentioning any of its late-stage projects”), or a quiet reorganization (last year, a company detailed its layoffs and plant closures, but made no statement anywhere about how much money it hoped to save in the process). It can take some detective work to figure this stuff out; I’m sure if I’d gotten myself an MBA, I could parse it more easily.
And for another thing, there’s the drugs.
I always enjoy reading through these companies’ reports to see about all the neat new therapies, the increased survival rates they bestow, the alleviation of previously uncureable conditions, the lifestyle changes we never thought possible. This, too can take some detective work, because some companies don’t seem to know what they have.
Por ejemplar: Today, I added UCB Group to my Top Biopharmas ranking. The company doesn’t have any biologic-based drugs on the market, but it’s got some in the pipeline, which is better than some of the other companies that I’ve included for years.
As part of its profile, I needed to list UCB’s best-selling drugs and how they performed last year. And that was how I discovered Nootropil, which posted around $125 million in 2006 sales.
“Nootropil?” thought I. “I wonder what that’s for . . . ?” Since I got a masters degree in liberal arts rather than business, I knew that the ‘noo-‘ root means ‘mind’ in Greek, and that left me intrigued.
According to UCB’s annual report, Nootropil’s a “cognitive enhancer.” Well, that begged more questions than it answered! Fortunately, the Internet has plenty of answers! It’s my cognitive enhancer!
Nootropil is known generically as piracetam and, according to this wiki page, it’s “a cerebral function regulating drug which, it is claimed, is able to enhance cognition and memory, slow down brain aging, increase blood flow and oxygen to the brain, aid stroke recovery, and improve Alzheimer’s, Down’s Syndrome, dementia, and dyslexia, among others.” Oh, and it has virtually no side effects.
Now if only I can convince them to send me some samples!
I doubt any of these Cold War Soviet video arcade games are as good as Rush’n Attack. (Which couldn’t hold a candle to Contra, of course. I especially liked the level where you had to circumvent a law against federal funding of the secret army. . .)
That said, those commie sonsabitches did develop Tetris, which helped annihilate a generation of American college students.