Corpus Callosum is written by a psychiatrist at a small community hospital somewhere in midwestern USA. Email to cc.scienceblogger at gmail dot com.
September 30, 2007
Category: Armchair Musings
In the most recent debate among Presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party, there was an exchange regarding the so-called "ticking bomb" question. The question itself, and the way it was handled, reveals shortcomings in the way we evaluate our candidates....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:29 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 29, 2007
Category: Science in the Media
Howard Hughes Medical Institute has announced a policy to promote open-access publication of scientific papers. They are not only supporting it philosophically, but financially as well. In fact, they are not only supporting it, but requiring it for their researchers:...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:03 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Computing
One of their flagship products, Excel , has been caught making errors doing simple multiplication. According to a Microsoft Developer blog: Yesterday evening we were alerted to an issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of numbers...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 1:28 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 28, 2007
Category: Politics
The government is finally moving the legal system into the 21st century, with wiki-based laws. The idea is that the people are the customer, and the customer should have a say in the rules. This is, oddly, a government-sponsored revolution....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 2:03 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Armchair Musings
The implantable cardioverter defibrillator is a device placed under the skin, near the heart. It delivers an electric shock to the heart when a dangerous abnormal rhythm is detected. As you might suspect, it hurts when this shock occurs (doctors...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:35 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 27, 2007
Category: Chatter
Sorry, no bizarre sex organ photos this time. But the story is interesting from an evolutionary standpoint. Bat Bugs Evolved Fake Genitals to Avoid Sex Injuries Anne Minard for National Geographic News September 25, 2007 For African bat bugs,...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:15 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 26, 2007
Category: Energy
The government, finally getting wise, has installed 100 stations to measure wind velocity in 32 areas. The idea tis to get a map of available resources for the generation of wind power, specifically with the intention of reducing dependence on...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:12 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
I was prompted to rant again about health insurance, after reading a post at Blogcritics. The author was highly critical of the SCHIP proposals. SCHIP: It's for the Insurance Companies, Not the Children Written by Dave Nalle Published September...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:48 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 25, 2007
Category: Computing
In response to customer demand, computer manufacturers pressured Microsoft into offering an easier way for users to "downgrade" their new machines. Business customers who feel that Vista is too bloated and slow, or who find it doesn't run...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 5:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
The long-awaited details of the Hillary Clinton health care finance plan have been revealed. The plan has received lukewarm support from columnists at NYT (Paul Krugman) and The Economist. It has been criticized by Mitt Romney, oddly, as it is quite...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:04 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
A new report on sleep disorders in pain patients reveals a not-very-surprising finding: chronic opioid treatment is associated with very high incidences of both obstructive and central sleep apnea. Higher Risk Of Sleep Apnea When Patients Use Opioid-Based Pain...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:43 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 22, 2007
Category: Chatter
Some people are amazingly creative...or thirsty. (Source)...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 2:42 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 20, 2007
Category: Chatter
The Republican War on Science is not a war on science, after all. It is a war on reality itself....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 2:34 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 19, 2007
Category: Humor
One of the essential skills a medical student has to learn is the ability to take a list of symptoms, exam findings, and lab results and determine which diagnosis is consistent with that data. For example, when seeing a...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:54 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment
Courtesy of NASA, we have this pair of images illustrating the record growth rate of hurricane Humberto (2007): From Earth Observatory Newsroom: Though it was not a powerful storm, Hurricane Humberto did set a record when it formed in the...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 1:11 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 17, 2007
Category: Politics
Look at these news briefs: In March, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, pled guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to making regular protection payments to Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups totaling some $1.7 million between 2001 and...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 5:29 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 16, 2007
Category: Armchair Musings
CNN has an interesting article on the safeguarding of highly enriched uranium. A reporter was allowed to accompany a mission in Viet Nam to remove some cold war era highly enriched uranium from a US-built/USSR-fueled nuclear reactor. It is kind...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 4:36 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
I support universal coverage in a single-payer system. I won't belabor the point. Today I just want to point out another insurance industry lie, printed in the New York Times today. It's in an article about Mrs. Clinton's health care...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 2:12 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 15, 2007
Category: Photos of Interest
If you are willing to settle for a two-dimensional desktop experience, and you love The Matrix, this might be fun. The image is an animated GIF, so it is big. (Sorry to the dial-up users.) The real thing works much...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:20 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 14, 2007
Category: Photos of Interest
This is a regular photo of a tiger at the Albuquerque Biological Park. The photo is on Flickr, taken by Glen. The one below is altered to contain a hidden image. It is from Mighty Optical Illusions by Vurdlak....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 6:36 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment
The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative article on the role of endocrine disruptors in increasing the ratio of girl babies to boy babies in the Arctic. I've written about the topic before (1 2) as have Abel and PZ....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 5:28 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 12, 2007
Category: Medicine
I don't think this has ever happened before. I was reading an article about the organizational chart at the FDA and I laughed out loud. Unfortunately it was not a good "monkey-on-a-goat" LOL moment; rather, it was a "WTF-sounds-like-Bush"...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:41 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 11, 2007
Category: Photos of Interest
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 5:21 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 9, 2007
Category: Photos of Interest
Photo by Fabio Gismondi, on Flickr. I am not sure exactly what these things are. They appear to be wooden curios in a shop. I can't decide which is my favorite....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:24 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 8, 2007
Category: Psychiatry
What is the world coming to? AJP has an article about "intensive" therapy for bipolar disorder. Their definition of intensive? Thirty sessions over a period of nine months. Back in the day, when you could struggle to stay awake during...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 6:43 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 7, 2007
Category: Politics
Mitt Romney's national finance committee (ex-) co-chairman, Alan Fabian, is in trouble. He's been indicted for mail fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice. Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty. The story here, as...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:36 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
This morning the US government revealed that employment is down by 4,000 jobs. The market took a dive. Why was the impact so bad? It is one of two reasons. Either the numbers are so bad, that the government can't...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:58 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 5, 2007
Category: Photos of Interest
This is Theo at his desk, during the first day of Kindergarden, at Eberwhite....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:33 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 4, 2007
Category: Psychiatry
In the 1950's, a new class of antipsychotic drugs was discovered: the antipsychotics. Chlorpromazine (Thorazine®) was the first. By the 1970's, several related compounds had been discovered. In 1976, it was learned that there is a direct linear relationship between...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:30 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment
IBM is launching Project Big Green. Part of the initiative is to consolidate operations in the world's largest data centers. They will replace nearly 4,000 servers with 30 refrigerator-sized System Z mainframes, running Linux, using virtualization technology. This will reduce...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:04 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 3, 2007
Category: Photos of Interest
This picture shows Hurricane Felix 2007 after attaining category 5 status. You can see a video of it, growing as it approaches Central America, at the NOAA site, here. Background info is at The Intersection (more). Chris Mooney points...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 2:16 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Photos of Interest
My pick from Flickr; this is a Pogona vitticeps, or Central Bearded Dragon. The species is found in central Australia. Photography by Joachim S. Müller. The tags indicate that the picture was taken at a reptile zoo in Germany....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:03 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Computing
This is good. Firefox now has an extension that makes it simple to store all your bibliographic information from online research. It is at release candidate 3 stage now, well-developed and fully functional. It is called Zotero. It is...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:00 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Politics
Usually the LA Times does not print things this awful. Usually these things don't bother me so much. The problem is not just that the author is wrong, or that he develops his argument poorly -- although both are true....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:46 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 1, 2007
Category: Medicine
There may be another crisis brewing in health care finance. In the early 2000's, health insurance premiums were increasing by ~10% per year. The increase in premiums was greater than the increase in health care costs. Why would...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:40 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
