May 14, 2008
Category: Academia
I realize that in the spectrum of boneheaded moves by the
Administration, this one is not the most extreme. Still, it
was a pretty dumb thing to do.
Blunt
Federal Letters Tell Students They're Security Threats
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: May 13, 2008
WASHINGTON -- A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T.
applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card
allowing him to work around ships and docks.
What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen, received in return was a letter
that not only turned him down but added an ominous warning from John M.
Busch, a security administration official: "I have determined that you
pose a security threat."
Similar letters have gone to 5,000 applicants across the country who
have at least initially been turned down for a Transportation Worker
Identification Credential, an ID card meant to guard against acts of
terrorism, agency officials said Monday.
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:36 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 12, 2008
Category: Psychiatry
A while back,
Gred
Laden and
Dr.
Shock independently linked to a remarkable video.
In it, a famous author-surgeon-professor reveals that he had
had an episode of severe depression. Moreover, he underwent
treatment with electroconvulsive therapy. It worked, he got
back to work, and went on to have a distinguished career. The
video can be seen here --
Sherwin Nuland:
My history of electroshock therapy.
His point, I suspect, was really to help destigmatize mental illness.
As an aside, the thing I found most interesting in his talk, was
something that was apart from his main message. When he sank
into a severe depression, he was hospitalized. His most
troubling symptoms were obsessions. Here, I mean obsessions
in the technical sense: intrusive, repetitive, horrific thoughts
(and/or images) that are accompanied by great anxiety.
His experience highlights an important point about psychiatric
diagnosis.
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 11, 2008
Category: Chatter
Make echinacea tea, fairly strong. Refrigerate it.
Get some 100% pomegranate juice. Refrigerate that.
Wait until cold. Mix together in 1:1 proportion.
Drink.
There is no particular reason for this, other that simply to have the
experience.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:22 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2008
Category: Politics
There is an interesting article put out by Associated Press, authored
by Seth Borenstein. Mr. Bornstein suggests that scientists
are increasingly expressing an interest in running for office.
The involvement of scientists in politics is not new. Think
of
Ben
Franklin. But many have been involved from the
sidelines. Franklin, for example, did not hold an elected
position until the end of his life. (He was President of the
Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania 1785-88.)
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:48 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 8, 2008
Category: Medicine
One thing about hospitals, is that they
use an awful
lot of
electricity. We already know about some of the
challenges
that will occur in health care in the post-peak-oil era; I wrote about
that in
October
2007.
...Petroleum scarcity will affect the health system
in at least 4 ways:
through effects on medical supplies and equipment, transportation,
energy generation, and food production...
One way this will affect medical care is that it will change the
relative costs of certain kinds of care. Everything will cost
more, of course. More interestingly, the costs for some
things will rise much faster than for others. For example,
the cost for ICU care -- already staggeringly expensive -- will rise
faster than less intensive kinds of care.
I was thinking about this when I was reading up on
proton
therapy. Proton therapy is a kind of
radiation treatment, usually used to kill tumors. There are
only a few proton therapy facilities in the world (five in the USA).
More are being planned, but it is
controversial.
The reason they are controversial, is that devices used
happen
to be the most expensive medical devices on the planet.
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:50 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 5, 2008
Category: Politics
The urge to fisk is an omnipresent danger for all bloggers.
Usually I am strong. Usually I resist.
But this essay on World Net Daily got my fisking neurons all
in a twitter. It's by David Kupelian, and it's a World Net
Daily Exclusive! (Because no one else would print it.)
How
Hillary will lead America into hell
Posted: May 02, 2008
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:45 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 4, 2008
Category: Psychiatry
Dinah, writing at Shrink Rap, got
mentioned
in the
Wall Steet Journal, of all places. Her post "
My
Therapist is a Creep" caught the attention of their health
blogger, Scott Hensley.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:07 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2008
Category: Public Health
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it was noticed that
there were cuts in the budget to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The rationale was that we needed to shift more funds to the
global and perpetual war on terror.
At the time, I said that "the terrorists" won't have to bother trying
to poison us. Our own companies would do it for them.
Yup.
TRIBUNE
EXCLUSIVE: EPA's top Midwest regulator forced out
Mary Gade, based in Chicago, says Bush administration made
her
quit over Dow Chemical case
By Michael Hawthorne | Tribune reporter
7:31 PM CDT, May 1, 2008
The Bush administration forced its top environmental regulator in the
Midwest to quit Thursday after months of internal bickering about
dioxin contamination downstream from Dow Chemical's world headquarters
in Michigan.
In an interview with the Tribune, Mary Gade said two top officials at
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington
stripped her of her powers as regional administrator and told her to
quit or be fired by June 1.
Gade said she had told the agency she would resign her position, based
in Chicago.
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:27 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 28, 2008
Category: Armchair Musings
The Ubuntu craze is sweeping SciencBlogs:
Aardvarchaeology,
Scientific
Indian,
Greg
Laden,
Corpus
Callosum, even
PZ's
kid.
At SB, we strive for logic and precision. Enough so, that we
swoon over passages such as
this
one, from
Gottfried Leibniz:
"The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make
them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find
our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we
can simply say: Let us calculate [calculemus], without further ado, to
see who is right." (The Art of Discovery 1685, W 51)
Even though Leibniz predated empiricism, scientific types are drawn to
his love of logic. Computer users, too, are fond of Leibniz:
he invented the binary number system.
Leibniz was a great thinker, as well as a great mathematician.
Scientists have long used the binary computers Leibniz made
possible, to aid in their computations; however, they have not been
able to use them to aid in their thinking. Until now:
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:01 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 27, 2008
Category: Humor
From xkcd; click on image to see the original.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:10 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 23, 2008
Category: Personal
Everyone's
anatomy has little quirks. One of mine, is the length of the
roots
of my wisdom teeth. They go down halfway to Sulawesi.
When
I was in college, I had to have two of them extracted. The
oral
surgeon told me they were "difficult extractions."
Magnanimous as
he was, he gave me a prescription for Tylenol #3. Which is
what
they give you when they want you to think you are getting something
that will work, even though they know perfectly well that it is
completely useless.
So I went back to the house where I was
renting a room. There was this strange guy there.
Things
like that happen in college. One of your housemates invites
someone over, and they end up staying for days, or weeks, but too long
in any event.
I was never sure exactly who was responsible for
this visitation. Then we got to talking and I told him my
mouth
hurt, and why. He said something like "dude, just try some of
this." Reaches into a backpack and pulls out an enormous bag
of
dried leaves of cannabis sativa.
I knew perfectly well
that that would be useless, too. Cannabis is not particularly
effective for acute pain. So I waved that off.
The guy
hung around for a couple of weeks, stank up the place, eventually ran
out of pot, and moved on. I have no idea where he went.
What
I did, rather than mess around with drugs, was to go down to my room,
which was in the basement, and listen to
Patti Smith,
real loud.
I had a fairly new pair of Polk Audio Monitor Series 5
speakers.
Modest, but effective.
The basement room was somewhere that nobody else would live.
But because of that, it was only $100 a month.
There were books everywhere, which improved the acoustics.
Listening to Patti Smith did not alleviate the pain at all.
What it did, was to make the experience more
interesting.
Unlike the opioids, which make everything dull.
Patti
Smith is to the limbic system what Ikebana is to botany. She
takes raw emotion and shows it to you in a new way. There
always
is an unsettled precision to the display.
A composition by Johann
Sebastian Bach has mathematical precision. A composition by
Patti
Smith has passion precision. It isn't digital, of course.
It is like she has a genlock for brain waves.
To those who haven't seen it yet, here is a link to
Patti Smith's
website. Nicely done. Check out, in
particular, the
ihavesomeinformationforyou
link. It's like a blog, but it is just a series of entries.
There's no RSS feed. Can't have everything, I
suppose.
Also you can listen to an
acoustic
performance she did in the Current studio, archived by
Minnesota Public Radio. If you haven't heard anything by her
yet, you can cut your teeth on this one. You'll find that the
roots of her wisdom go pretty deep.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:20 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2008
Category: Politics
A
while back, a guy named Lyle Rossiter wrote a book,
The
Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.
I haven't read the book, so this is one of those posts that
is less than fully authoritative. Perhaps someone who
has
read it can point out any errors I might have made.
The book was published by Free World Books, LLC, which is not exactly a
marketing powerhouse. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is
the only book put out by that particular publisher. So I am
guessing that I won't get any corrections from people who read it,
because hardly anyone even knows about it.
Someone pointed it out to me, though, based upon a link to a post on 15
February, 2008, at World Net Daily. I searched a bit and
found some excerpts from the book.
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:32 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2008
Category: Psychiatry
“Doctors think, ‘Well, of course
she’s depressed — she’s dying of breast
cancer,’” he said.
I do see that kind of response sometimes, not just with regard to
terminally ill patients. The physician does not think the
depression should be treated, because it is felt to be an expected
response to the situation.
If I even show up in an emergency department with a gunshot wound in my
abdomen, I sure hope the doc doesn't refuse to treat it, saying "of
course he's bleeding to death, he's been shot in the spleen."
The fact is, some patients with terminal cancer do develop major
depression. But it is not inevitable. It happens in
only about 25% of such patients.
Plus, the cause of the condition does not matter. If the
condition is present, and causes a problem, and the patient wants
something done, then it should be treated. An update to a
Cochrane Review on the subject shows that psychotherapy can be an
effective treatment for depression in terminally ill cancer patients.
Moreover, psychotherapy is comparable in effectiveness to
antidepressant medication.
I saw a reference to this finding in a
news
release from the Center for the Advancement of Health.
When I went to the Cochrane site, there was a message saying
"The Cochrane Library is being updated today with the latest issue.
Please note that you may experience difficulties viewing articles or
performing searches..." I was not able to find the actual
report; only the abstract for the study protocol was available.
Still, the bottom-line conclusion is what is important.
In the review, treatment effects for this group of
patients were only slightly less than those found in clinical trials of
antidepressant medications in people treated outside of cancer centers.
“The effects are almost comparable to those obtained in
antidepressant pharmacotherapy studies in general psychiatry
settings,” Akechi said.
“It’s a clinically meaningful
difference,” said David Spiegel, associate chair of
psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of
Medicine. “The key finding is that psychotherapy for
depression for gravely ill cancer patients works.”
Spiegel, an expert on therapy in cancer patients, was not involved in
the Cochrane review, although he was the lead investigator on one
included study of this therapy.
Dr. Spiegel may lack objectivity on the matter. But the
Cochrane review process is designed carefully to eliminate as much bias
as possible. The conclusions of such reviews generally are
held to be valid. If something does not work, or if the
evidence is insufficient to warrant a conclusion, they will say so.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:27 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2008
Category: Bioethics
Here at ScienceBlogs, we've regularly posted about the thorny issue of
antibiotic overuse, and the subsequent antibiotic resistance.
This is a good example of evolution in action; it's also a
good reason why we need to study and understand evolution.
But antibiotic resistance is not the only such example. The
same principle applies to herbicides and weeds.
Naturally, a good example comes to us courtesy of
Monsanto,
the company that
everyone
loves to hate. (There is even a movie now,
The
World According to Monsanto. It's on
Google video,
here.)
You see, Monsanto has made a lot of money by engineering crops that are
resistant to their most popular herbicide,
Roundup® (
glyphosate).
The idea is that you can plant these crops, then bathe the field with
Roundup. The herbicide kills the weeds, but the crops are
unaffected.
Any biology sophomore could tell you, that sooner or later, you will
get Roundup-resistant weeds.
Now it has been documented. Roundup was
first used
in 1976. In 1996, Monsanto introduced
Roundup-ready
soybeans. No Roundup-resistant weeds were detected
before the widespread use of the resistant crops. Even then,
it took a while. But now...
Glyphosate-resistant
johnsongrass in Mid-South
Mar 19, 2008 10:09 AM, By David Bennett
Farm Press Editorial Staff
Read on »
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:57 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 13, 2008
Category: Environment
Forget to water your tomato plants? Try using ollas
(pronounced oy-ya).
Olla is Spanish for
pot,
as in
clay pot.
What you do is to get
unglazed clay pots, bury them near the plants, and put water in them.
The water leaks out very slowly, because the unglazed clay is
permeable. This creates a water plume underground.
What you see here are ollas, each made from two unglazed clay pots.
These pots cost $1.03 at K-Mart,on sale. Two are
bonded together using caulk. I used caulk that is intended
for kitchen counters, figuring it would be relatively nontoxic.
One hole is filled in; the other is left open. The
ollas are buried such that the hole peeks out.
The photo illustrates:
1) on the left: a buried olla with a matching clay cover.
The cover is intended to be used as a tray to set the pot on,
but here, it is used to cover the hole. You don't want to
breed mosquitoes and propagate West Nile virus, after all.
2) middle, lower-left: one olla with the open hole on top.
3) middle, upper-right: one olla with the occluded hole showing.
4) one of the covers laying on the ground.
5) a buried olla, with the opening showing.
6) various tomato plants.
7) soaker hose.
Some people connect the ollas to a
drip irrigation system.
This is done by getting corks with holes in them, and
threading tubing from the irrigation system emitters into the corks.
The ollas help to conserve water. Perhaps more importantly,
they help keep the plants alive.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:29 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
