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March 31, 2009
Tufts University is the latest institution to step in the Conflict of Interest mess and come out with shoes that smell. The University had organized a conference on conflict of interest in medicine and research, with Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley as the keynoter. Grassley has been an…
March 30, 2009
A little over a week ago the Environmental Protection Agency sent the White House its finding that global warming endangers public health and welfare. This doesn't sound like news, and except for a minority of scientists out there it is very, very old news. But in the context of a 2007 Supreme…
March 29, 2009
I have a particular interest in food poisoning. I admit there is something unhealthy about my fascination but there it is. One of the more interesting ones is ciguatera fish poisoning, and CDC has just reported an unusual cluster from North Carolina. Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP) happens when a…
March 29, 2009
If it's true that atheism is a "religion" because it has a "non-belief system," there are a helluva lot of atheists out there, since there are a lot of religions and most people believe in at most one of them. Or as one wag put it, "We are all atheists. It's just that I believe in one less god than…
March 28, 2009
When my mother died last year at the age of 103 it ended a life that went from the Wright Brothers first flight through to the internet. That's a lot of change to accommodate, but she did it pretty well, although there were things she could not get used to. One of the things that was hardest for…
March 27, 2009
I may be one of the few people in the world of TV watchers who has never seen a single episode of CSI: Whatever, a show featuring (I am told) "scientific" forensics work. Mrs. R., however, is fond of watching another show, Bones, which features a forensic anthropologist who works with a team that…
March 26, 2009
The American Scientist is the magazine of the scientific society, Sigma Xi. You can get it on the news stand, and that's where I bought the latest issue (March-April, 2009). One of the articles is by historian of engineering, Henry Petroski, and it's about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The bridge was…
March 25, 2009
"The Stupid. It Burns!" I don't know where this Simpson-esque phrase comes from, but The Stupid burns pretty bright in the brains of Republican Governors Mark Sanford and Bobby Jindal who are refusing stimulus money for unemployment compensation even though their states have some of the highest…
March 24, 2009
When the Wall Street Journal called attention to a claim that the Journal of the American Medical Association called a whistle-blower a "nobody" and a "nothing," a claim JAMA denied, I didn't know what to think. I was inclined to give JAMA the benefit of the doubt. Whatever dealings I've had (and…
March 23, 2009
One of the nastiest things about the years after the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1994 and Bush the White House in 2001 was the increase in inequality in the US. The rich not only got richer and the poor, poorer, but rich got more comfortable and led better lives. The idea that they…
March 22, 2009
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has the ultimate explainer/blamer on the banking meltdown. It ain't pretty and it spares nobody. Nobody:
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three…
March 22, 2009
Don't blame me. People aren't becoming atheists because there are atheists on TV, newspapers and the internet. There are atheists on TV, newspapers and the internet because people are becoming atheists:
March 21, 2009
There are certain things that go under the rubric "complementary medicine" that also boast they represent the Wisdom of the Ages -- old therapies for currently difficult conditions that turn out to be just as good as our current therapies. Or just as bad. This week the British Medical Journal has a…
March 20, 2009
If the 1960s film, The Graduate, were to be made today (Graduate, II: The Stimulus), the iconic scene at the party where a friend of the family takes Dustin Hoffman aside and whispers in his ear, "I have only one word for you, Plastics") would be transmogrified into, "I have only three words for…
March 19, 2009
Papers on biodiversity are not my regular science reading fare and the reason I found my self reading the article "Initial community evenness favours functionality under selective stress" by Wittebolle et al. in Nature from last week isn't very important. But I did find myself reading about the "…
March 18, 2009
The Conflict of Interest talk these days is all about doctors and medical school lecturers who are in bed with Big Pharma, but the bed is pretty crowded. Researchers are there, too. Not that this hasn't been a topic of conversation. And not that researchers aren't conscious of it and frantically…
March 17, 2009
President Obama used his weekly radio address last weekend to talk about an urgent matter for all Americans. Which one? It could have been any of a half dozen, but it was one that received essentially no attention from the last administration: food safety. He also officially announced his…
March 16, 2009
There is an attitude toward the prospects of an influenza pandemic and what, or what not, to do about it that I have little patience with. We saw examples a couple of years ago with the writings of Wendy Orent and Marc Siegel and now it is surfacing again from Philip Alcabes, in an op ed in the…
March 15, 2009
Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the death of peace activist Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by a caterpillar tractor driven by the Israeli Defense Forces in occupied Palestine. She was trying to negotiate with the driver not to destroy the homes of Palestinians being subjected to collective…
March 15, 2009
Every once in a while we use this space for news clips reporting someone sighting the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or Mother Teresa or Michael Steele on a wall or a piece of toast. Like this:
The point is less about the benighted souls whose over active pattern recognition is featured as to…
March 14, 2009
As regular readers know, Albert Einstein was my culture hero when I was a youth (and he still is, although I am no longer a youth). But it's all relative.). Anyway, today is the 130th anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, here's another peek at what's happening in the world of robotics (see here…
March 14, 2009
There is a good summary by Robert Roos at CIDRAP News about the $420 billion spending bill signed by President Obama this week to cover the next six months. The good news edges out the bad news, so the net is positive, a welcome change from the kind of deeply depressing budget news to which we…
March 13, 2009
I'm just getting around to reading the Brief Report by Blachere et al., "Measurement of airborne influenza virus i a hospital emergency department" (Clinical Infectious Diseases 2009:48:483-440) but it's quite interesting. We've noted fairly often here that we still don't know for sure what the…
March 12, 2009
My problem with The Onion is that sometimes their pieces are so good I can't figure out how to extract pull quotes. I just want to reprint the whole damn thing and that's not exactly "fair use." So if want to read it all you'll have to go there (link with pull quote after the jump). Here's a piece…
March 11, 2009
We've all heard stories about how emergency workers (aka first responders) have had trouble communicating at disaster sites because their equipment was not "interoperable," that is, operated at different frequencies or use incompatible methods. But disasters in big cities have other problems, even…
March 10, 2009
Way back on New Year's Eve of 2005, when we were still hosted over at Blogger, I did one of my more popular posts about how a toilet works. Most people don't know. I'm guessing they have some kind of vague mental image that when you push the toilet handle a trapdoor opens up somewhere and the…
March 9, 2009
I'm sure it will be years before we have cleaned up all the garbage -- literally and figuratively -- from the Bush administration's Environmental "Protection" Agency. The notoriously conservative DC Appeals Court, in a unanimous decision, did its part recently when it declared the Bush EPA's…
March 8, 2009
I might be an atheist but I'm glad when the food industry "gets religion." How observant they will be is another question, but for now, they are making noises to suggest they know which side their bread is peanut-buttered:
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) issued the following statement…
March 8, 2009
Now is the time to look anew at who they own:
March 7, 2009
If we had decent substance abuse services in this country instead of criminalizing drug use, addicts like Rush Limbaugh could get treatment for their sociopathic personality disorders. In a spirit of understanding of his affliction, if not bipartisanship, I therefore gladly post John Amato's plea…