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Posts by this author
October 22, 2008
I confess that I am a political news junkie. In the 2004 election my main source of information were blogs (DailyKos, MyDD and Eschaton were my mainstays, with lots of others being hit on a regular basis). I still read them (I've added OpenLeft, AmericaBlog and ThinkProgress to the must read list,…
October 22, 2008
The interconnected web of health and the environment never ceases to amaze me. A good example is a new report from India's Sundarban islands suggesting that climate change, among other things, is contributing to an increase in tiger attacks:
Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world's…
October 21, 2008
Dishonest John McCain may be a distinguished veteran, but he isn't the favorite of veteran's groups. Not that you'd know it to listen to him. He has consistently lied about this, blatantly and brazenly. Like when he responded to a veteran's question about why his voting record on funding the VA is…
October 21, 2008
The New York Times has a very long article by Lawrence Altman, a physician and medical reporter for the newspaper, about the uncertainties regarding the medical histories of the four major party candidates for President and Vice-President. John McCain, a cancer survivor and the candidate who would…
October 20, 2008
I'm not a fan of Colin Powell. He was there and helped start this catastrophic war. Maybe he tried to resist it in private but in public he shouldered the weight of selling it. He bears responsibility for it. He knew better but he was, as always, the good soldier. So now Powell has broken with his…
October 20, 2008
Flu season is upon us and with it the perennial question, should I get a flu shot. In 2006 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) extended its 2004 recommendation that children 6 months to 23 months be vaccinated (2 doses) to now include children 6 months to 59 months (<5 yyears…
October 19, 2008
Thoughts on a Sunday afternoon in the first decade of the 21st Century:
October 19, 2008
This hilarious invocation by an evangelical preacher at a McCain rally in Davenport, Iowa, October 11, 2008, has had plenty of exposure but I couldn't resist replaying its Fatuous Goodness one more time. The argument is that God is All Powerful, so He can make McCain win. But if He doesn't make…
October 18, 2008
The pundits keep telling us that a particular problem for Barack Obama are older, white Catholics. Like this woman?
Sister Cecilia has lived in the convent in Rome for 50 years.
A 106-year-old American nun living in a convent in Rome could well be one of the oldest voters to cast a ballot in the…
October 18, 2008
Here's some public health man-bites-dog news. George Bush's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something right:
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday set stringent new standards for airborne lead particles, following the recommendations of its science advisers and cutting the…
October 17, 2008
Living on a big ranch outside a city in a state with wide open spaces can be wonderful but it can also be a problem if you depend on modern telecommunications systems like cell phone service. If you are the only one around for miles and miles, it isn't that likely you will be supplied with a cell…
October 17, 2008
If Mrs. R. is typical, it's a good thing there are no atomic bug bombs or thermonuclear mouse traps or our neighborhood would be a radioactive dead zone. In our case her malevolent vibrations are sufficient to sterilize the area of vermin (that and our dog) but many people resort to chemical bug…
October 16, 2008
By now everyone knows that Sarah Palin abused her power as Governor of Alaska in trying to settle a personal score with her ex-brother-in-law. Despite the fact that the official bipartisan legislative investigation cited chapter and verse of her unethical conduct and violation of Alaskan ethics…
October 16, 2008
A piece online in The Scientist is an example of silly handwringing by science educators. James Williams, who describes himself as a science educator who trains science graduates to become science teachers, despairs because most trainee teachers he teaches don't have a clue about what makes…
October 15, 2008
It's become a campaign issue that one of the Presidential candidates has been close with a domestic terrorist. So let's look at the facts.
G. Gordon Liddy is a convicted burglar and domestic terrorist. He was also the host, in his home, for a 1998 fundraiser for John McCain's Senate re-election…
October 15, 2008
I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a…
October 14, 2008
The fatuousness of the McCain-Palin campaign's attack on ACORN, a national organization that fights for the rights of low income citizens is matched only by its hypocrisy. McCain has been a past supporter of ACORN and McCain was a keynoter at a recent ACORN sponsored conference. McCain has no…
October 14, 2008
I run a fairly large research program at my University. My NIH grant, which runs in the tens of millions, pays for a lot of things, including a portion of my salary. But as Director, my salary is (alas) only a tiny portion of this complex operation, which has many senior principal investigators…
October 13, 2008
This weekend we passed a milestone. George W. Bush, the current incumbent of the White House, has less than 100 days left in his ill-starred Presidency. In 22 days we'll find out if we will have to suffer through four more years of the same thing under a McCain-Palin (or Palin - ?) administration…
October 13, 2008
Food poisoning can be a miserable experience and sometimes you feel like you want to die rather than endure another minute of the agony, but people rarely die from food poisoning. At least for most causes of food poisoning. The exceptions are the exceedingly rare cases of botulism and the much more…
October 12, 2008
I am still trying to retrieve my lower jaw from the floor, where it fell after reading this:
When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed…
October 12, 2008
With the US elections looming, it's time to get serious:
h/t JC Christian
October 11, 2008
A lot of pundits seem dismayed and surprised at the moral depths to which Dishonest John McCain's campaign has sunk in the last week. I have to disagree. There is nothing surprising about it. This is his MO: do whatever he thinks is necessary. McCain has a long history of lack of principle and…
October 11, 2008
The US government response to the bogus war on terrorism is a mixture of the stupid, the super stupid and the evil. Taking off our shoes at the airport isn't evil but it is probably super stupid. So is the 3 oz. liquid ban. On reflection, maybe there are only two categories: super stupid and evil.…
October 10, 2008
John McCain's white hot anger is legendary among those who know him and among his colleagues (the real reason he won't win the Miss Congeniality Award), but the public still hasn't seen it boil over. So it's useful to have the accounts of those who have. Yesterday in HuffPo Nico Pitney pointed us…
October 10, 2008
The health concerns about bisphenol-A (BPA), a component of hard polycarbonate plastic, has been extended once again (see here, here, here for previous posts on BPA). BPA, a ubiquitous contaminant of human bodies, leaches from water and baby bottles, the lining of tin cans, dental sealants and many…
October 9, 2008
Until his botched grandstanding over the financial crisis last week, John McCain hadn't set foot in the US Senate since last April. That doesn't mean he wasn't doing business as usual, though:
The Bush administration is currently in discussions to send $6 billion in arms to Taiwan. Yesterday, Sen.…
October 9, 2008
Every parent's or grandparent's nightmare is to have their darling little one suddenly carried off by illness. Flu isn't on the radar screen of most parents but in recent years the public health community is taking notice. The first alarm occurred in the bad flu season of 2003 - 2004 when a…
October 8, 2008
Here I am watching 20% of my retirement savings going down the toilet and John McCain tells me he will be doing me a favor over the next ten years by cutting $1.3 trillion from the Medicare and Medicaid budgets. $1.3 trillion. I'm on Medicare and I am not too happy about this. He needs to do this…
October 8, 2008
Early yesterday morning I received an email from my publisher that the journal for which I am co-editor in chief has been sold. Our journal is one of 180 published by BioMedCentral (BMC), the largest open access scientific publisher. The business model of BMC and other open access publishers is to…