revere
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January 10, 2010
I discovered a stunning Youtube video via Boingboing, so consider this post just an excuse to show it to you. But as long as its title involves potato salad, I thought I'd reiterate some points we've made in the past about potato salad and food poisoning.
Potato salad is a frequent vehicle for one…
January 10, 2010
Via microdot at The Brain Police I learned of the latest intellectual(?) property/trademark claim. Popedom:
The Vatican has awarded itself a "unique copyright" on the Pope's name, image, coat of arms, and any other symbol or logo related to the Holy Father.
"The use of anything referring directly…
January 9, 2010
The decades roll on but we still have wonderful friends from long ago who've kept at it, who grew up to be true and courageous and with a joyful heart. One of them celebrates her birthday today. She stays for me, Forever Young.
Bon anniversaire, Muffin, from me and Mrs. R.
January 9, 2010
My little ones now have little ones of their own, just barely out of their cradles. When this song was written, the prospect of global nuclear annihilation wasn't far fetched. Each side had massive overkill. There are still nuclear weapons so the threat isn't gone. But it's not a threat of nuclear…
January 9, 2010
Continuing our discussion of causation and what it might mean (this is still a controverted question in philosophy and should be in science), let me address an issue brought up by David Rind in his discussion of our challenge. He discussed three cases where a rational person wouldn't wait for an…
January 8, 2010
Let me start with an apology. This post is again fairly long (for a blog post). Blog readers don't like long posts (at least I don't). But once I started writing about this I was unable to stop at some intermediary point, although I might have made it more concise and less conversational. I haven't…
January 7, 2010
When I was growing up "world music" didn't exist as a genre and didn't exist for me in any form. Now it's just a keystroke away. This is a different world for the younger generation, not just musically. Despite all the wars and the problems in the headlines, I think it's a better one.
Chanda Mama…
January 7, 2010
We all saw it coming. If you could have a bomb under your balls, why not a bomb in your honey pot?
U.S. officials say a suspicious material found in a passenger's bag that triggered a security scare at a California airport on Tuesday actually turned out to be bottles of honey.
The scare caused a…
January 6, 2010
If you don't share the sentiments, just enjoy the music. But why wouldn't you share the sentiments?
January 6, 2010
Rush Limbaugh has done a personal biopsy of the US health care system and found it healthy:
"Based on what happened to me here, I don't think there is one thing wrong with the American healthcare system. It is working just fine," he said.
Limbaugh, a multimillionaire, said he got no special…
January 5, 2010
Conscientious refusal to participate in acts which are immoral although legal is a world wide phenomenon. It isn't new. We don't hear about the brave souls in highly repressive countries that risk death or imprisonment, but they exist. We celebrate them when they resist regimes we don't like, as in…
January 5, 2010
Just a day into the New Year I was feeling feisty and issued a challenge to readers and the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) blogosphere in general. I asked for a critique of a fictitious uncontrolled, non-randomized non-blinded small scale clinical study. It was truly a fictitious study. I made it up…
January 4, 2010
I was also a conscientious objector, in another war. I couldn't in conscience claim the kind of religious grounds that young Joshua Casteel did, but I have to hand it to the kid. This is an amazing story:
January 4, 2010
In early September swine flu was just ramping up in the US and there was no vaccine. CDC envisaged adequate vaccine supplies by end of October but in reality this was too optimistic. For a period of weeks, the news was full of stories of long lines at vaccine clinics and the frustration of worried…
January 3, 2010
Here's some forgotten history. Not ancient history, but nonetheless forgotten. Just a week over 30 years ago, the end of 1979, Afghanistan had a functioning government, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The fact that it functioned, which now sounds remarkable, was not a good thing as…
January 3, 2010
New York Times correspondent Don McNeil is an excellent medical reporter. He always asks intelligent questions at the CDC pressers and he writes good articles. And he's written one for The Times yesterday that I agree with, although his support for it seems to me less than objective. In essence he…
January 3, 2010
It seems to us the battle between the secular and the religious is settling down into a predictable form of trench warfare. From the secular side (that's where my trench is located) comes this recitation of the now accepted responses to the now expected arguments of the religious against us…
January 2, 2010
We've had other wars besides Iraq and Afghanstan djinned up or whipped on by our "free press." Sometimes it's good to remember that "the power of the press" also meant the power of the person who owned the printing press. People like William Randoph Hearst, who had the power to make "the splendid…
January 2, 2010
It's easy to lose track of current events during the holidays, so here's an update of the week's most important news. We lead off with a breaking swine flu story:
January 2, 2010
I've noticed that whenever I have the temerity to suggest (e.g., here and here) that maybe the word of the Cochrane Collaboration isn't quite the "last word" on the subject and indeed might be seriously flowed, I hear from commenters and see on other sites quelle horreur reactions and implications…
January 1, 2010
First day of a new year. First day of a new decade. It's dark out. So it's important to keep even a small light on in Times Like These:
Lyrics for In Times Like These by Arlo Guthrie
In times like these, when night surrounds me
and I am weary, my heart is worn
And the songs they're singing don't…
January 1, 2010
I doubt many of our regular readers will be surprised to hear that at least one of The Reveres was sort of geeky while young (now, of course, he's just sort of geeky while old). I thought about this objectively (geeks don't think we are really geeky; we just think the things we do that others call…
December 31, 2009
Last day of 2009, another year of war. A good time to step back and try for perspective. We'll let a young Nanci Griffith do it for us with this wonderful song by Julie Gold:
Happy New Year to all our readers, whether near or from a distance.
The Reveres, New Year's Eve, 2009
December 31, 2009
Given the usual response to terrorist threats on airplanes, we expect the latest move to protect us will be to require us to travel nude. OK. Probably not. Republicans are too skittish about public nakedness. They prefer it in the privacy of their mistresses' beds. What we will see, instead, is yet…
December 30, 2009
When the US still had "mandatory" conscription for males it was still possible to claim exemption on the basis of a conscientious objection to war. While this usually required a religious basis and was almost impossible for doctors because of a supposed non-combattant role, we were still given full…
December 30, 2009
The caves in the Dordogne department in southwest France are most famous for paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux (the Dordogne is also famous for the being the home of microdot, whose blog The Brain Police is one of my daily reads). Now it has yet another claim to fame: the discovery of the first…
December 29, 2009
Some needs to edit this to add faces from the Obama administration to those from the Bush administration. Because lives are still in the balance and Obama has his thumb on the scale. Jackson Browne:
December 29, 2009
When I recently got rid of my 15 year old car for one that is only 2 years old, I was amazed and impressed at the number of genuine safety features, many of them hidden or not obvious. Cars are simply much safer now than they were, even a decade ago, not to mention when I was a youth. Here's a…
December 28, 2009
War can take and spoil lives in many ways. The killing doesn't stop when the war is over or a combat role is ended. This year again has seen record suicide rates for the US military, but one can assume the same is true for those fighting on the other side and for the millions of civilians caught up…
December 28, 2009
It's the end of the calendar year and the traditional time the media looks back on "the biggest stories of the year." There are websites about almost any subject (even one on a particular model of running shoe, I am told), but those of us who write specialized blogs (as opposed to ones about…