Shortly after publishing the final post I went off to my university’s commencement. Of all the duties of a university faculty member, this is one of the nicest and happiest, the moment where we send our intellectual offspring into the world to do good on their own. The students who receive their PhDs (an achievement that takes years of arduous and often frustrating effort) have their academic hoods placed on them by their thesis advisor. It is a wonderful moment for both parties. This year one of them was a young woman whose thesis advisor herself had a thesis advisor for whose thesis I was the advisor. She was, in essence, my intellectual great grandchild. The world keeps spinning. When I got home, I was stunned by the nice things and good wishes people wrote in the comment thread to our Farewell post. I literally blushed. I have a multitude of defects and one is that I don’t handle praise easily. My first impulse is to think of all the reasons why it isn’t true. But the fact is I am also a fairly normal person and it would be both a lie and ungenerous not to admit I was gratified. Who wouldn’t be? So thank you. It meant much, even if I can’t quite fathom it.

Now to my original plan, a note about The Pump Handle. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a public health catchphrase for disease prevention. Its origin is a famous episode that occurred during a cholera outbreak in London’s Soho district in 1854. You can read a detailed account in Steven Johnson’s book, The Ghost Map, or hear Johnson talk about it at a TED talk which we posted a while back here. A London surgeon, Dr. John Snow, traced the source of the cholera to a well in Golden Square and convinced the local selectmen to “take the handle off the pump,” thereby stopping the outbreak. John Snow is now considered the Father of Epidemiology (there is a more complicated historical background here, including a bit of mythology, but I’m not blogging any more so you’ll have to ferret it out on your own). When some of my friends and colleagues decided to start another public health blog a few years ago I suggested the name The Pump Handle and so it is.

The Pump Handle blog has, as of today, moved to Scienceblogs.com and will hold down the public health blog position that Effect Measure occupied. There are other blogs at Scienceblogs that also do public health, notably Tara Smith’s fine Aetiology, and many of the other medical and biological sites discuss public health issues regularly. Now TPH will be here as well and make public health its sole subject. Public health blogs aren’t very common. There are many medical blogs and blogs devoted to microbiology but not too many devoted to public health in general. So the very existence of TPH is important.

But beyond just the blog’s existence, the contributors there are public health heavy hitters. The bloggers at TPH have a wealth of knowledge and experience in environmental and occupational health and that will no doubt continue to be a major topic. But I hope to blog there on occasion on other matters (my business is the same as theirs I prefer not to blog about what I do professionally) and they plan to attract other contributors to broaden the scope. Make no mistake, though. These folks are real experts in their subject area. Jordan Barab’s Confined Space blog got folded into TPH when he gave up his site and he is now Deputy Director of OSHA. The blog master at TPH is Liz Borkowski who blogged originally at unbossed and works in policy at Georgetown. Celeste Monforton also blogs at TPH. She is a PhD in policy who has advised the Governor of WV on both the Sago Mine Disaster and now Upper Big Branch. A former contributor to TPH was David Michaels, who now is Obama’s OSHA Director and another TPH contributor is Susan Wood, a professor of health policy and environmental and occupational health at Georgetown and the Executive Director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health there. The folks are recognized authorities in the world of public health and readers will learn from them — and as I have good cause to know, they will learn from you. I hope they develop the kind of loyal, critical, feisty, knowledgeable and influential readership we were privileged to have at Effect Measure. They couldn’t do better than that.

So that’s the note. We don’t live here any more. Further inquiries at The Pump Handle.

I pondered long and hard about whether to mention names of the many wonderful friends, adversaries, readers, commenters, offline email correspondents, fellow bloggers, forum leaders and sources that made EM what it was. It’s a dangerous thing to do because you inevitably leave out people whom you cherish, respect and, despite differences, have managed to develop a great affection for. So we’re not going to do that. I hope you know who you are or at least realize now you fit that description even without recording your name. Having said that, we are going to make three exceptions, both for historical and personal reasons.

The first is Jordan Barab, whose occupational health and safety blog, Confined Space, was a model for what can be done with the blogging form in public health. When we started EM, Jordan and I met for coffee at a local coffee house and he couldn’t have been more helpful and encouraging. He was a pioneer in public health blogging and a master at it. When he became a senior congressional staffer he gave up the blog, but many of its functions were folded into The Pump Handle, so history is repeating itself. Jordan is now Deputy Director of OSHA. Imagine that.

The other two names are the late Melanie Mattson and Greg Dworkin, known far and wide under his blog name, DemFromCT. When we started blogging about avian influenza at EM back in late 2004 it was a topic barely discussed in the blogosphere. Melanie and Greg, separately, were two exceptions and we began to correspond via email and link to one another. When one of my commenters suggested my ever more numerous flu posts could be collected in a wiki format, I suggested it to Greg and Melanie and Flu Wiki was born. I was there at the founding, it is true, but like a delinquent parent I soon had left it to Greg and Melanie to raise the infant site without much help from me. And they did, in grand fashion. Melanie was a very sharp, deeply concerned and committed person who worried tremendously, perhaps excessively, for her fellow humans. She had a difficult and troubled life, and died too early. She was a blog pioneer and is remembered with deep affection by many of her fellow bloggers. As for Greg, if I didn’t know him personally I would suspect he was not a person at all but a group of people. A front-pager at Daily Kos, perhaps the world’s biggest blog, and one of the main anchors of Flu Wiki, Greg is a practicing pediatric pulmonologist who sees flu at the bedside but also has a public health perspective. When he blogs on health topics as DemFromCT at Daily Kos he does so with the eye of a consummate expert. His politics are progressive as befitting someone on the front lines of the battle to make this a better world. He is also a friend. My hat’s off to you, Dem. You’re still at it. I don’t know how you do it — but I’m glad you do.

So that’s it, folks. We’ll follow up soon with information about The Pump Handle, where you might occasionally catch a glimpse of us. But we can no longer blog day in and day out and sporadic blogs lose their audience quickly. EM is now passing into blog history, a good approximation of oblivion.

So it’s time to bid you a farewell and we are doing it in the most literal sense: a wish that wherever you fare, you fare well and safely and in peace. It’s what we wish for everyone and what this blog was all about.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

Conscientious Objector, Edna St. Vincent Millay

If you want evidence of our expertise, there is quite a lot of it available. On the old site over at Blogger there are 1170 blog posts going back to the end of November, 2004. We moved here to Scienceblogs.com on June 9, 2006 and here you can find an additional 2381 posts (not counting this one). Among the comments here (we lost the comments on the Blogger site) you can find us weighing in on many among the 36,985 published so far (more by the time you read this). Are we accurate reporters of the science we talk about? You can judge for yourself, but I can tell you honestly we have had many nice emails from fellow scientists whose work we have taken the time to explain. I don’t think we have ever had one tell us we got it all wrong, although on occasion we have had additions or clarifications and once or twice we’ve made mistakes which we promptly corrected in the post, including indicating it is a correction. It’s true good science reporters do things we don’t. For example, they will get in touch with the authors for additional explanations. We don’t do that because we don’t have to. We report on things we understand and that don’t need to be explained to us. And we give alternative views when we think we should, again because we understand the context. What we don’t do is go hunting for someone with a different view for the sake of “balance.” How are you as a reader to know if the alternative views are well founded, prevalent or are serving special interests? You don’t, to put it bluntly. At least in our case you know whom you are trusting or not. Us. And as noted, you have a lot of evidence to help you form that judgment.

Then there’s the issue of “authority.” If you don’t know our name, how can you hold us accountable? Another question might be, if I gave myself a name, how would that make me accountable? At least you know “revere” is a pseudonym. I could instead have made up multiple plausible sounding names and under the same posts. Would that change anything? I suppose you could say that would enable you to look up my education, publications and experience. But I’ve already told you those things, except for the publications (in my case there are about a hundred and a bit), but you aren’t going to read them anyway, are you? Let’s be honest. Most aren’t at all relevant unless you have some very specialized interests and education and most don’t bear on things we discuss here. They are written for my scientific colleagues. The blog is written for you.

Which brings us back to the strange idea of “authorship.” Compared to book writers and reporters, most of whom have editors and publishers, we have much more claim to be the author of this blog. But even that claim is pretty weak. We use and in many cases depend upon news articles or reports or scientific publications done by others, and we, too, have to take most of the things we read on faith. Unless we know a field unusually intimately in a way that is impossible for most topics of general interest, we haven’t read all the citations in a paper and aren’t likely to go read them to check the veracity of the author’s claims about them — unless we have good reason or prior knowledge that it is wrong. Nor do we have the raw data the work is based on, and if we did, we aren’t likely to re-run the analyses. Life is short. There are things we must take on faith, which is why scientific misconduct is such a serious offense. It loosens the glue that keeps the system together. Add to this the fact that so much science today is done in teams, sometimes numbering in the many dozens or hundreds, and the idea of authorship seems to be a mirage. Even as a sole author, my words are enmeshed in a web of interlocking and connecting ideas, many depending upon faith for their coherence and force. Which are the ideas of the author and which of others. All I can claim is to have strung the words together in a way I think unique to me. Big deal. That doesn’t make me an author. At most it makes me a paraphraser. I try to set down new ideas, to add value. But I am using raw materials provided my many people unnamed but with some claim to be co-authors.

Finally, one more comment. In a private email with one of my readers I said to him that I, the person tapping the keys, was not the same as the persona, “revere.” His response was some shock that I could be different things to different people. But we are all different things to different people. I don’t talk the same way or about the same things with my students, my children, my spouse, my boss, my colleagues or close or casual friends. That’s normal. It isn’t that we are hiding things or saying one thing to one and something different to another. It is that we have multiple personae generated by our social and personal relationships and their needs.

So it is with “revere.” Revere has his own persona that doesn’t coincide with that of any actual person. He has his own voice with its own diction and subjects of interest and ways of expressing itself and all the other things that make up a personality. So even if I were inclined to reveal the names of anyone who writes under the name of “revere” (and “the reveres” have made a decision about this which I will abide by), it wouldn’t mean anything of substance.

This has been a very longwinded way to tell you nothing. But there was a lot of stuff I felt like getting off my chest along the way. Selfish of me, I know. Now you know something else about me.

Antimicrobial pesticides (e.g., sterilizers, disinfectants, and sanitizers) are chemicals used to destroy or suppress the growth of harmful microorganisms on inanimate objects and surfaces. Health-care facilities use antimicrobial pesticides to prevent pathogen transmission from contaminated environmental surfaces. Occupational exposures to antimicrobial pesticides are known to cause adverse health effects. (CDC, MMWR [cites omitted])

This is apparently the first ever attempt to count injury from using these santizers. They are mainly quarternary ammonium compounds (QACS), glutaraldehyde and bleach solutions. QACs are used to wipe down surfaces and it’s likely that’s what I used mainly as a houseman in the hospital. They are also used for things like blood pressure cuffs that come in contact with a patient’s skin. Glutaraldehyde is used by immersing heat sensitive medical instruments in it, things like cystoscopes. Bleach is used to decontaminate blood spills and for environmental sanitation. Wiping everything with bleach solution is likely what was done in many schools closed in the early days of the flu pandemic. It wouldn’t have done much good but it’s reassuring to parents. Any of these chemicals can cause irritation and if splashed in the eye can cause ocular injury. CDC estimates there are about 5000 different products on the market and over half are marketed specifically to health care institutions. They come in all forms: formulated into sprays, liquids, concentrated powders, and gases and we know very little about occupational hazards entailed by their use. Only the four states in the title of the report require reporting of adverse events from these products by health care institutions and even these reports are almost certainly produce underestimates. In the five year period 2002 – 2007 there were only 401 acute events related to work in health care facilities and involved the demographic of the user workforce: mainly female (82%) and in the 25 – 54 age range (73%). Note that when I worked as a houseman I wasn’t in either demographic group. Job titles were mostly janitor/housekeepers, nursing/medical assistants and technicians. Almost all (85%) were low severity, most commonly eye irritation or conjunctivitis, then headache or dizziness and respiratory symptoms. It was in these latter cases that the serious effects occurred, one of them fatal:

The fatal case occurred in a woman aged 52 years employed as a laundry worker at a Michigan nursing home who had a 2-year history of non–steroid-dependent asthma and chronic bronchitis. She smoked two packs of cigarettes and some marijuana daily. In February 2007, she was exposed to nondiluted bleach fumes from an open pail near a running clothes dryer for 10–15 minutes. She complained of shortness of breath, used her albuterol inhaler, but collapsed. 9-1-1 was called, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation and intubation were performed at the scene. She never regained consciousness and died 5 days later in the hospital.

The most obvious intervention would be use of eye protection whenever splashing is possible or there is spraying. Probably not going to happen. This is a low paid workforce, although many are now unionized, which might help. The data we have here is fragmentary and incomplete. It shows that these agents, familiar as they are to those of us who spend a lot of time in hospitals, are not benign. Like many things they can cause harm. While this is true of many things, these are agents whose use is to kill living cells, unwanted bacteria. But they are very non-specific so it isn’t too surprising that human cells that get in the way might also be harmed.

It’s a commonplace that hospitals are dangerous places for patients. They are also dangerous places for workers. We are familiar with the pathogen problem and the ergonomics issues of raising and lifting. Now we can add disinfectants to the list. They aren’t at the top, that’s for sure.

But they are there.

Indonesia didn’t ban leaded gasoline until a few years ago, decades after the rest of the world. Innospec, the only maker of the lead additives, was only too happy to sell it to them. Not just happy. They made it happen by “systematic and large scale” bribery of Indonesian officials, in the words of a British judge:

Innospec concentrated its efforts on a small number of developing countries. Mitchell said that “despite worldwide environmental and health pressure to change to unleaded fuel” Innospec used middlemen to pay bribes of up to $17m to “sweeten” Indonesian government officials between 1999 and 2006. These bribes secured orders worth $170m.

Indonesia had intended to phase out TEL and leaded fuel from 1999 but Innospec set up a slush fund to bribe officials to block legislative change until 2006 and prolong its sales there, Mitchell said. (Rob Evans, The Guardian)

The whole rotten scheme was discovered during the investigation of the “oil for food” program involving kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime, then under international sanctions. Document discovery of Iraq kickbacks also uncovered the Indonesian ones. The results was a years long investigation by UK’s Serious Fraud Office resulting in a record fine $12.7 million and another $25 million in the US for the Iraq kickbacks. That may sound like serious money (and it is for most of us), but it is estimated that the $17 million in bribes they paid Indonesia brought them $170 million in business. That puts them over $100 million ahead, even after counting the bribes and the record fines. Not much disincentive, I’d say. Prison terms might work better.

Not to worry, though:

Nicholas Purnell QC, for Innospec, told the court that the US-owned firm had undergone a “sea-change” and come clean and reformed itself. (The Guardian)

That’s a relief. And I’m sure BP has learned their lesson, too, and won’t blow up any more workers or spill any more oil. After all, the gargantuan costs they have incurred in the latest clean-up is said to amount to only 4 days profit. So neither BP nor Innospec are Dead Ducks. The dead ducks are floating in the Gulf.

President Barack Obama?s plan to fight drug abuse and trafficking proposes spending $15.5 billion next year and shifting the emphasis from fighting a war on drugs to treating the problem as a national health issue, the administration?s top drug-policy adviser said in an interview.

?It?s a disease, it?s diagnosable and it?s certainly something that can be treated — but it?s not a war,? said Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The president?s plan calls for increasing drug-control spending by 3.5 percent in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. It aims to reduce drug use among American youth by 15 percent over five years, and to make similar reductions in chronic drug use, deaths from drug use, and driving under the influence of illicit substances. (Peter Green, Bloomberg News)

By criminalizing use of opiates we have also denied their rational use to people with chronic pain. Not to mention criminalizing behavior like pot use which is certainly no worse than alcohol. If we could decriminalize these things than that would also undercut organized crime, a major part of the “drug problem.” They may be the alleged targets of the “war on drugs” but it is mainly foot soldiers and innocent civilians that are the collateral damage.

Addictions aren’t harmless. If their use doesn’t have medical benefits like pain relief and is only for recreation or use as a coping mechanism for other problems then they can be serious. Addiction is a public health problem, like alcoholism or smoking and should be addressed in that way. Kudos to the Obama administration for not only recognizing this but proposing to do something about it:

The administration proposes spending $1.7 billion, up 13.4 percent from this year, to increase prevention efforts, including mentoring programs for schoolchildren.

?If you start early? presenting children with drug- prevention messages, ?that?s been proven to be effective, and that?s where we want to go with this,? Kerlikowske said.

An increase of 3.7 percent in treatment funds, to $3.9 billion, includes a new emphasis on training primary care physicians to identify and help treat addiction before it becomes chronic. The funding request is part of Obama?s proposed fiscal 2011 budget.

?If you are able to do an intervention with somebody on drugs early, it saves money — treatment is about half the cost of incarceration,? said Kerlikowske. ?You can?t arrest your way out of the problem.? (Bloomberg)

That said, there is a lot of work to be done to undo the “war” footing that we have been hoodwinked into accepting. The decriminalization of pot is already starting but it isn’t going fast enough. There should also be a rational approach to the appropriate use of drugs for chronic pain. They are medically indicated more often than prescribed, but doctors are too nervous about becoming even more collateral damage in the phony war on drugs.

I am sure there will be push back from the hardnosed hard right. They not only want to be tough on crime, they also want everyone to accept what they think is a crime. Like abortion.

And of course drug use. While they drink a toast to prohibition.

Methods: We isolated Salmonella from raw chicken purchased from a randomly selected sample of retail outlets in central Pennsylvania during 2006-2007. Salmonella isolates from meat were compared, using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, to isolates in the PulseNet database of Salmonella recovered from humans.

Results: Of 378 chicken meat samples, 84 (22%) contained Salmonella. Twenty-six (31%) of the Salmonella isolates were resistant to ≥3 antimicrobials and 18 (21%) were resistant to ceftiofur. All ceftiofur-resistant isolates exhibited reduced susceptibility (minimum inhibitory concentration >2μg/mL) to ceftriaxone and carried a blaCMY gene, as detected by polymerase chain reaction. Among the 28 Salmonella serovar Typhimurium isolates, 20 (71.4%) were resistant to ≥3 antimicrobials and 12 (42.9%) were resistant to ceftiofur. One ceftiofur-resistant Salmonella serovar Typhimurium poultry isolate exhibited a rare pulsed-field gel electrophoresis pattern indistinguishable from a human isolate in PulseNet; both isolates carried the blaCMY-2 gene. (M’ikanatha et al., Multidrug-Resistant Salmonella Isolates from Retail Chicken Meat Compared with Human Clinical Isolates, Foodborne Pathogens and Disease [onlinhe ahead of print; doi:10.1089/fpd.2009.0499, sub required]

In essence they determined a molecular fingerprint of salmonella isolated from supermarket chicken and compared it to those in a database of molecular fingerprints from salmonella isolated from people with salmonellosis. There was one exact match, but the sample was pretty small. Was chicken a source of that case? We don’t know. We only know that this rare salmonella serovar was found in both supermarket chicken and a human. It isn’t clear if they were even from the same geographic area. Of interest is that the match was for salmonella resistant to the new generation of cefalosporins. Make of that what you will.

About a fifth of the supermarket chicken samples contained salmonella. That doesn’t mean you would get sick from eating the chicken if it was properly prepared and cooked, since cooking kills salmonella. On the other hand, it would be possible to cross-contaminate foods that are eaten raw, say by cutting salad on a cutting board that was not properly washed after being used to cut up the chicken or by unwashed hands that handled the raw meat and then the salad. Sometimes juice from the raw meat drips onto food eaten raw. Lots of possibilities, so don’t count on cooking alone to protect you.

Of the salmonella that was there, almost a third were resistant to three or more antibiotics and a fifth to the third generation cephalosporins. This included the one that matched the fingerprint of the human isolate in CDC’s Foodnet surveillance system.

If large commercial poultry operations are breeding grounds for drug resistant salmonella, the bugs still have to get out and into the community. This small study shows that they make it all the way to the supermarket refrigerator case as one possible route.

Bon apetit.

Long a metaphor for the desire to distance oneself from immoral acts, hand washing doesn’t just wipe the conscience clean – it also changes how an individual regards a decision they have just made.

Lady Macbeth notwithstanding, the physical act of washing one’s hands is known to ease the guilt we feel about past unethical deeds. Now it seems that the act also removes our natural inclination to validate even trivial past decisions. (Wendy Zuckerman, New Scientist)

The validation of trivial decisions here involves ranking music CDs. Student subjects ranked 10 of them and then were asked to choose which of their fifth or sixth ranked ones they’d rather own. That’s the set-up. Presumably most people would decide to own their fifth ranked rather than sixth rank, but the difference was that this was now a decision, not a ranking. It’s apparently well known that after deciding something, it is a natural reaction to reinforce your decision by investing what you chose with even more positive qualities and what you rejected with more negative ones. The act of choosing also polarizes and hardens opinions.

It was at this point in the experiment that hand washing came in. Half of the 40 student subjects were asked to judge the quality of a liquid soap just by looking at it and half by using it to wash their hands with it. This was unrelated to the CD judging, but afterwards they were asked to rank the CDs again. Those who didn’t physically wash their hands exhibited the expected pattern of ranking the chosen CD higher in the ten than the one they rejected, pushing each up or down an average of two places. That’s a pretty big change. The students who physically washed their hands kept the same ranking. The post-choice polarization didn’t happen. The effect wasn’t limited to CDs. It was the same with jam preferences and it wasn’t limited to liquid soap. It also worked with hand antiseptics. Physical hand cleansing not only removed dirt and microbes but also the need to justify decisions.

There are two interesting aspects of this noted by the researchers, led by Spike Lee and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan, writing in Science. The first is the more obvious one that some metaphors are not just metaphors. They may have a literal content. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, as Sigmund said.

The other is more interesting: that seemingly irrelevant and trivial daily tasks might have a significant effect on how we see the world, in this case how we justify the choices we make.

You can find the article here: Lee, S. Schwarz N., “Washing Away Postdecisional Dissonance,” Science 7 May 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5979, p. 709. DOI: 10.1126/science.1186799

If you decide to read it, you might or might not wish to wash your hands afterward.

The most pervasive myth about mathematics is that the logical structure of mathematics is definitive–that logic captures the essence of the subject. This is the fallback position of many mathematicians when they are asked to justify what it is that they do: “I just prove theorems.” That is, when pressed, many mathematicians retreat back to a formalist position. However, most practicing mathematicians are not formalists: “what they really want is usually not some collection of ‘answers’–what they want is understanding [cite is to an interview with mathematician William Thurston].” The statistican David Blackwell is quoted as saying, “Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been. I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing.” (Byers, How Mathematicians Think, pp, 25-26; emphases in original)

I read this and my first reaction was disagreement, although I couldn’t figure out why. The obvious reason was that I consider myself a researcher and I am interested in research. But I’m also interested in understanding, and I didn’t see those things as in opposition, although I had to agree that doing research and understanding are different, so there was a problem somewhere. When people ask what moves me to do science, I almost always say something like, “I want to find out how the World works.”

I like to think of myself as an altruistic person and naturally I hope that what I do will make the world a better place for everyone. That does direct my curiosity to some extent. I’m not indiscriminate about what parts of the world’s workings I’m interested in. But if I am completely honest with myself (and like everyone I’m probably often not honest with myself) I think I’d say that the strongest motivator is just wanting to know the basic principles of the world I live in. That’s more than just a description of the mechanism but the general plan which governs how the mechanism works. Like most scientists, I assume these principles are knowable, regular and that science is the way to know it.

None of that sounds incompatible with Blackwell’s goal of “understanding,” but there is one additional element that is crucial and goes beyond it. “Understanding” is something an individual has. It’s subjective. It’s a slippery concept, but it’s like assimilating an explanation that satisfies us in some way. But if something is going to be scientific, the product of research, then it must be intersubjective. That’s why religious or supernatural concepts aren’t science for me. They can’t be displayed in a way for all to see but depend on individual and subjective knowledge. The question isn’t so much testability or falsifiability as it is what those things imply: the ability to make the evidence available to anyone and everyone. So when I say that research is trying to figure out how the world works, I mean producing explanations that are shareable and intersubjective, not just a form of my own understanding.

Science is a social enterprise, not a solitary one, even if some of us carry it on in a solitary fashion, alone with our computers, or paper and pencil. I do what some people might refer to as Grand Theory, but it is not meant to be Grand Theory just for me, but Grand Theory for the Ages. Pretty ambitious. But how else should we do it?

We all know that hard won science is in a sense temporary. That at some point a revision will come along that will sweep away what was considered true in the past. It doesn’t matter. I’m still trying to build something that will last forever because it’s True. We all lie to ourselves. Even when we think we are being honest with ourselves. Go figure.