j7uy5 | August 16, 2006I just love this story. A long time ago, before ScienceBlogs
even existed, people were out there in the wild, searching for a bird
called the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Grrlscientist has been
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2006/05/birds_in_the_news_59_v2n10.php">keeping
us
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2006/03/ivorybilled_woodpecker_a_ghost.php">updated
on the search, and has
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2006/03/goodbye_beautiful_dream.php">this
illustration and caption to show what it is that everyone is
looking for.
Now we learn that…
j7uy5 | August 15, 2006There's a
href="http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/060711_ska.htm">short
article on World Science, that informs us that "the search is
underway for sites that would be suitable for construction of a
radio-telescope array that could receive alien TV.
I knew there was a serious scarcity of decent TV shows, but I did not
know it had gotten so bad that we need to tune in to other planets,
just to have something to do on Friday night.
I used to use an antenna, and I got three stations, maybe four.
On good days, I could get CBC out of Windsor.
Usually, their programs were better. I…
j7uy5 | August 14, 2006A few days ago I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/08/changes_in_the_drugapproval_pr.php">made
note of an article in the NEJM, about proposed changes in the
process for FDA approval of new medication. (
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/6/618"
rel="tag">A Proposal for Radical Changes in the
Drug-Approval Process, by Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D.)
At the time, it wasn't possble for me to do justice to the
paper. It still isn't but at least I will be able to make a
couple of points.
I've taken some shortcuts in this post, not explaining some of the…
j7uy5 | August 13, 2006I was
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2006/01/soup.html">really
worried about Iran after the State of the Union Address this
year. Although not many people shared my opinion, I thought
the most important aspect of the speech was the propaganda aspect, and
I thought that the biggest theme was to lay the groundwork for a war
against Iran.
The rhetoric seemed to be heating up for a while, but has since faded.
My thought on this, is that we would not be able to attack
Iran without instituting a military draft. I think the
Administration has noted, correctly, that the American…
j7uy5 | August 11, 2006
In 1969, after yet another arrest, Flint native
href="http://www.umich.edu/%7Ebhl/bhl/refhome/jls/John.htm">John
Sinclair was sentenced to 9.5 yrs in prison. The
egregious disproportionality of the sentence led to rallying cries of
FREE JOHN SINCLAIR!
Last December, I went to a pub in Ypsilanti, to see the guy play his
music. Outside, there were these free-newsletter dispensers.
I saw the juxtaposition, felt moved by the irony, and snapped
a picture.
Seed
Magazine is cool. The most recent issue
(September 2006; not online yet) has a one-pager on a topic similar to
the FREE JOHN…
j7uy5 | August 11, 2006I was just thinking about the topic, not with regard to myself, but the
issue in general, because of a good interview on Ira Flatow's
href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/">Science Friday.
There is no permalink, yet, but it's the show for 8/11/2006,
second hour. They discuss the progress, or lack thereof, in
finding a vaccine.
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with
respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
I don't worry about it for myself or my family at all, except in the
same abstract way that I worry about pancreatic cancer or something
like that. …
j7uy5 | August 10, 2006I know, it is a lame excuse. But I just found this article,
and am too tired to blog about it. It should be a fertile
inspirational source for someone, though, if someone else wants to get
to it before me.
From the August 10, 2006 New England Journal of Medicine:A
Proposal for Radical Changes in the Drug-Approval Process, by
Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D.
Sometimes, articles of particular interest to public policy are made
available on an open-access basis. This is one of them.
Usually, such articles are worth reading.
j7uy5 | August 10, 2006This is no big surprise, although I did not expect the magnitude of the
effect:
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/bsj-vaw080806.php">Violence
at work significantly boosts clinical depression riskWork-related violence and threats and the risk of
depression and stress disorders
Employees subjected to real or threatened violence at work run a major
risk of becoming clinically depressed, indicates research in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The magnitude of the risk was in direct proportion to the amount of
workplace violence experienced, the study shows…
j7uy5 | August 9, 2006James Robbins, contributing editor at the National Review Online,
thinks global warming is a good idea. This is proclaimed in
his article, Hooray for Global Warming.
This is another version of the "CO2
is life" meme. And like "CO2
is life," it is utter nonsense. Anyone who would say that
fails to grasp a critical point about climate science. I've
never actually done a fisking, and I do not particularly care for it as
a literary form, but this one begs for it...
href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTJmNWI4N2Y2NTBmY2E3ZTIzZjcxM2IzM2ZjNjRkYWI=">Hooray
for Global WarmingSurf’s up…
j7uy5 | August 8, 2006Let us hope that this new article in Nature turns
out to be as important as it seems.
In a recent publication, scientists from Merck report on
title="Wikipedia link"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platensimycin" rel="tag">platensimycin,
which is a previously unknown kind of antibiotic. It is
produced by Streptomyces platensis.
(There were a gazillion authors on the paper, so I did not
all include their names. The first authors, noted to have
contributed equally, were Jun Wang and Stephen M. Soisson)
href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7091/abs/nature04784.html"…
j7uy5 | August 8, 2006I like this article on The Nation website so much,
I'm going to copy it in its entirety. It's from their blog, The
Notion, so I think it is OK to do that.
href="http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=109333">Lieberman
Cancels Campaigning, Fox Carries On
John Nichols
Tue Aug 8, 4:48 PM ET
Joe Lieberman canceled his scheduled campaign events on Tuesday
afternoon, with his campaign announcing that the embattled senator
would spend the rest of primary day making get-out-the-vote calls.
Depending on one's perspective, that's either a sign that the senator
is confident, or a sign that he's…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2006Here are a couple more vacation photos...
Notice that the bottom photo may seem to have been taken from a greater
altitude, although that is not the case. The top one is not
really a
vacation photo; it's from the
href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060724.html">Astronomy
Picture of the Day site. (Credit:
href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts121/121_crew.html">STS-121
Crew,
href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition13/index.html">Expedition
13 Crew, NASA)
The top one was taken from a Space Shuttle; the bottom one…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2006When I was in medical school, back in the mid-80's, there was
a bit of a controversy about whether "tight" glucose regulation was a
good idea. Most people thought it was, but there was some concern that
attempts to control the glucose too tightly could lead to increased
risk of complications from getting the glucose too low.
If I recall correctly, the biggest concern was in patients who
had insulin-requiring diabetes, meaning that they either had type-I
diabetes, or that they had severe type-II diabetes.
I'm not an endocrinologist, so someone jump in and tell me if
I'm wrong, but my…
j7uy5 | August 6, 2006We were asked to identify a film that did something positive for
science. I was not able to come up with anything, not being
much of a film aficionado. So I asked one of my contacts for
ideas.
My contact suggested the film,
href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/">Contact,
with Jodie
Foster, based on a book by
href="http://imdb.com/name/nm0755981/" rel="tag">Carl
Sagan.
Ms. Foster portrayed a scientist, Dr. Ellie Arroway. She
comes across as a regular scientist, not a token female; she is a
scientist who happens to be a woman. Plus, it deals with the
old science vs.…
j7uy5 | August 6, 2006I almost entitled this post "Lying to Congress, Part II," to be
congruent with my
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/07/lying_to_congress.php">previous
post, but it has not been established conclusively that
anyone has lied. All we know at this point is that
information is being withheld, and it appears as
though someone is lying.
From Fox News:
href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,206967,00.html">Congressmen:
Dept. of Interior Fudged Oil Drilling ContractsThursday, August 03, 2006
WASHINGTON — Two congressmen said Thursday someone at the
Interior Department…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2006About 15 years ago, I was giving a lecture on psychiatric medication to
a group of MSW
students. One student asked a question that was intended to
be
provocative. She asked, "how can you justify giving
medication to
treat a problem that is obviously psychological in origin, like
posttraumatic stress disorder?"
What she was referring to, was a paradigm that was commonly held at the
time. Specifically, there was this notion that some problems
were
psychological, and others were biological, in origin. It was
thought, by some, that there was a clear distinction between the two
kinds of…
j7uy5 | August 3, 2006OK, we're home, and I will stop cluttering up SB bandwidth with travel
photos soon. But just one more...
That's it for now.
j7uy5 | August 3, 2006
Hint: It is literally a hands-on exhibit in a Farm and Ranch museum.
The device pictured above is a milking machine. The idea is,
supposedly, for the visitor to learn what the machine feels like to the
cow.
Somehow, I doubt the experience is very similar.