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[Note: I originally posted this last Thursday under another title but it got lost in other events of that day. As I find it ironic that Mr Comarow has been attacked by an alternative medicine practitioner and advocate, I find this story worthy of reposting.] A few weeks ago the skeptical blogosphere was up in arms about an article in US News & World Report by Avery Comarow on alternative medicine services in US academic medical centers. Mr Comarow is a senior medical writer for USN&WR and best known as editor for the last 18 years of the magazine's annual feature, America's Best…
I am very deeply touched (as I was literally yesterday) by the outpouring of support and best wishes from fellow bloggers on the liveblogging of my vasectomy. For all of the dark humor and puns, you have each been instrumental in supporting my aim of telling men relatively quick and painless the procedure is, or at least getting them to think about this as a contraceptive alternative to having their wives undergo a more involved tubal ligation. I'll still never understand what makes things fly in the blogosphere as I spend hours writing what I think are thoughtful posts about drug safety…
Back in January several science bloggers had an exchange that degenerated into discussion of the process and aftermath of the vasectomy. Well, as PhysioProf is wont to say, today I will sack up, literally. As part of my gift to PharmGirl for her [significant] bday next week I will undergo the knife this afternoon to render me no longer able to contribute to the gene pool. Of course, I won't be completely sperm-free until 20 to 30 post-operative ejaculations, the thought of which brings me great comfort. We have had one child and do not anticipate wanting any more - we got us a good one the…
A bunch of people have sent me links to an article about MapReduce. I've hesitated to write about it, because the currently hyped MapReduce stuff was developed, and extensively used by Google, my employer. But the article is really annoying, and deserves a response. So I'm going to be absolutely clear. I am not commenting on this in my capacity as a Google employee. (In fact, I've never actually used MapReduce at work!) This is strictly on my own time, and it's purely my own opinion. If it's the dumbest thing you've ever read, that's my fault, not Google's. If it's the most brilliant thing…
I've gotten both some comments and some e-mail from people in response to my mini-rant about Erlang's macros. I started replying in comments, but it got long enough that I thought it made sense to promote it up to a top-level post. It's not really an Erlang issue, but a general language issue, and my opinions concerning it end up getting into some programming language design and philosophy issues. If, like me, you think that things like that are fun, then read on! I'll start at the absolute beginning. What's a macro? A macro is a meta-structure in a language which defines a translation of…
About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted: What would normally be a modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as: Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools. When I read that, I…
[Aufmerksamkeit! Begrüßen Sie deutsche Freunde und Leser des Focus Wissenschafts-Community. Glückwünsche zu Profs Ertl und Grünberg auf dieser enormen Ehre!] I'm intentionally being dramatic but an interesting discussion emerged in the comment thread of my post on the work of Germany's Gerhard Ertl being recognized with this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. One reader had a perception that the work of an American contributor to surface chemistry was being ignored. Dr Gerald Harbison followed up on this notion at his own blog, The Right Wing Professor. Indeed, the three scientists that…
Colored Petri Nets The big step in Petri nets - the one that really takes them from a theoretical toy to a serious tool used by protocol developers - is the extension to colored Petri nets (CPNs). Calling them "colored" is a bit of a misnomer; the original idea was to assign colors to tokens, and allow color-based expressions on the elements of the net. But study of analysis models quickly showed that you could go much further than that without losing the basic analyzability properties that are so valuable. In the full development of CPNs, you can associate essentially arbitrary collections…
The monthly Denver mag, 5280, made its way to Chez Pharmboy last week with a very familiar face staring back - and not because I've had a cardiac cath...yet! w00t! For our readers in the Queen City of the Plains, read more here about your favorite cardiologist.
This morning, Drs Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of "principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells." The technology for homologous recombination in embryonic stem cells permits specific targeting of genes for disruption or modification in the resulting animal. Known as transgenic gene "knockouts" (and more recently, "knock-ins"), the methodology has allowed the study of specific processes in normal development, adult physiology, and…
Via Clinical Cases and Images, I just learned that Mark Rabnett at the University of Manitoba has just compiled a comprehensive list of medical student bloggers. No one source is complete, so I hope this list will be of help to the fevered mind that cannot rest until every blogging student in the health sciences has been tracked down. I see a permanent job for a few people who are willing to work for no salary while exposing themselves to resident evil, anger, fear, and cadaver fumes. As for me, if I don't wake up screaming I just may have to go back to renegotiating Nietzsche in the…
I've got to admit that I've really enjoyed reading Health Blog from the Wall Street Journal. Short, pithy, and great bites about health/pharma stories that make it into one of the best sources for news in the US (its op-ed page notwithstanding). So, I was tickled on Friday to see Health Blog interview AggravatedDocSurg. Little did I know that the Aggravated One was a general surgeon in APB's former stomping grounds of The Centennial State. Here was the quote that made the interview from one of his public service announcements. We've got advertisements on TV continuously for Plavix. It's not…
Doug Farrago, MD, is a private practice doc in Maine who has been publishing the print medical satire journal, Placebo Journal, since 2001. Doug does it all, including spoofing drug company adverts, collecting humorous doc stories, and generally poking fun at drug reps, HMOs, and lawyers. About two years ago, Doug started sending out e-mails of the Placebo Gazette, a rather bloggy and somewhat more serious newsletter of issues facing docs and medicine in general. Imagine my surprise in Placebo Gazette #81 where Dr Farrago threatened to start writing a blog: The Detroit Free Press did an…
This came up in a question in the post where I started to talk about π-calculus, but I thought it was an interesting enough topic to promote it up to a top-level post. If you listen to anyone talking about computers or software, there are three worlds you'll constantly hear: parallel, concurrent, and distributed. At first glance, it sounds like they mean the same thing, but in fact, they're three different things, and the differences are important. The connection between them is that they're all terms that describe systems made up of computers and software that are doing more than one…
I feel like a bit of a change of pace, and trying a bit of an experiment. Re-reading Backus's old FP work reminds me of what I was doing the last time I read it, which was back in grad school. At the time, I was working on some stuff involving parallel computation, and I discovered Robin Milner's π-calculus as a tool for describing parallel computation. You can think of π-calculus as being a sort of parallel (pun intended) for the λ-calculus: in sequential, single-threaded computation, λ-calculus can be a great tool for describing what things mean. But λ-calculus has absolutely no way of…
For those who have been asking over the last couple of days, here are the oath of a pharmacist as recited at US colleges of pharmacy and a code of ethics adopted in 1994 by the then-American Pharmaceutical Association (now the American Pharmacists Association; still APhA). There seems to be a strong focus on the patient in the code of ethics but there's also a bit of wiggle room that can be interpreted as one sees fit. Oath of a Pharmacist At this time, I vow to devote my professional life to the service of all humankind through the profession of pharmacy. I will consider the welfare of…
Yesterday's discussion of a pharmacist's right to refuse filling prescriptions based on moral or legal grounds generated some great discussion. I appreciate the thoughtful discussion of the commenters as well as two posts on the topic by Prof Janet Stemwedel. The first draws from her older post on the topic nearly two years ago, illustrating that we haven't come very far in this debate. As Janet noted then Obviously, we've got a tug-of-war here between the moral convictions of the health care professionals and the moral convictions of the patients. I'm also going to quote Janet heavily…
As long as I'm doing all of these basics posts, I thought it would be worth explaining just what a Turing machine is. I frequently talk about things being Turing equivalent, and about effective computing systems, and similar things, which all assume you have some clue of what a Turing machine is. And as a bonus, I'm also going to give you a nifty little piece of Haskell source code that's a very basic Turing machine interpreter. (It's for a future entry in the Haskell posts, and it's not entirely finished, but it does work!) The Turing machine is a very simple kind of theoretical computing…
Brazilian researchers have been experimenting with an gel containing an algae-based anti-HIV compound designed for use by women to prevent the spread of the virus. Derived from the Brazilian brown alga, Dictyota pfaffii, two papers are available the describe the isolation and biological activity of the most active of the components, the dolabellane diterpene 8,10,18-trihydroxy-2,6-dolabelladiene. The compound does indeed appear to inhibit HIV reverse transcriptase at concentrations (about 16 micromolar) that can be maintained in a vaginal gel preparation. Human trials are expected to being…
In my discussion with Sal Cordova in this post, one point came up which I thought was interesting, and worth taking the time to flesh out as a separate post. It's about the distinction between a Turing equivalent computing system, and a Turing complete computation. It's true that in informal use, we often tend to muddy the line between these two related but distinct concepts. But in fact, they are distinct, and the difference between them can be extremely important. In some sense, it's the difference between "capable of" and "requires"; another way of looking at it is "sufficient" versus "…