j7uy5 | May 16, 2007
Yet
another photo from
href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17644">NASA's
Earth Observatory page, showing yet more evidence of what
carbon dioxide hath wrought.
In
the past 125 years, the Athabasca Glacier has lost half of its volume
and receded more than 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles), leaving hills of
rock in its place. Its retreat is visible in this photo, where the
glacier's front edge looms several meters behind the tombstone-like
marker that indicates the edge of the ice in 1992. The Athabasca
Glacier is not alone in its retreat: Since 1960…
j7uy5 | May 15, 2007Often,
on this blog, I've ranted about the risks that our government, and our
corporate citizens, e.g. pharmaceutical companies, expose us to on a
daily basis.
Perhaps it would be good to put some of those risks in perspective.
That is, to compare the risks of various medications to
others risks that we take on a routine basis. In the May/June
issue of the journal, Health Affairs, there is an article on the
subject. The full thing is behind a pay wall, but we'll get
to the heart of the matter anyway.
href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/636">What's…
j7uy5 | May 15, 2007What
is the correct follow-up for an impeachmint?
There
is only one possible answer...
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007Speaking
of open-source software, I recall posting a while back when
the percentage of visits to Corpus Callosum, by users of Internet
Explorer, dropped below 50%.
Now, it is 24%. Roughly parallels President Bush's approval
rating. I wonder what those two stats would look like on a
graph over time.
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
From CNN Money:
href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/">Microsoft
takes on the free world
Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a
big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants
royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.
Fortune's Roger Parloff reports.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Roger Parloff, Fortune senior editor
May 13 2007: 1:06 PM EDT
Free
software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often
high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and
then…
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Domestic violence and
other forms of childhood trauma are all too common. The
effects of trauma on children have been studied in a variety of ways,
but much of this research has not employed strict diagnostic criteria.
Now, the Archives of General Psychiatry
has published an article that addresses this. It is
subscription-only, but there is a
href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/tb/5602">good
summary of it on MedPage Today,
so nonspecialists don't really need access to the full article.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif…
j7uy5 | May 13, 2007The
LA Times reports on the Senate passage of a bill that should enhance
the oversight of drug safety by the FDA. Numerous posts here
on ScienceBlogs, and elsewhere, have commented on the problems with
safety oversight. The existence of these problems has been no
secret since the Vioxx problem came to light a few years ago.
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fda10may10,1,7947418,full.story?coll=la-headlines-nation">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fda10may10,1,7947418,full.story?coll=la-…
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007I
took out the blogroll for now because it was taking forever to load.
I will put it back, somewhere, probably at the bottom of the
page. I hate to do that, but Blogrolling was just not
responsive enough.
UPDATE: The blogroll has been moved to its own page, accessible via a link under the "Blogroll" heading n the sidebar, or using the "Blogroll" gray tab under the banner." Note that it loads more quickly now.
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007For
anyone who is interested, Medscape has a nice, concise
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/554128">summary
article about medication treatment options for bipolar
disorder. They focus on the atypical antipsychotics, but
cover the mood stabilizers, too.
width="500">
Generic Name
Trade Name
Manic
Mixed
Maint.
Depr.
Valproate
Depakote
X
Carbamazepine extended release
Equestro
X
X
Lamotrigine
Lamictal
X
Lithium
X
X
Aripiprazole
Abilify
X
X
X
Ziprasidone
Geodon
X
X
Risperidone
Risperdal
X
X
Quetiapine
Seroquel
X
X…
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007
href="http://www.southwestbioenergy.com/html/news_release__.html">Southwest
BioEnergy has announced a plan to build a
href="http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/">biomasss
electrical generation facility in
href="http://www.google.com/maps?q=Vado,+NM,+USA&sa=X&oi=map&ct=title">Vado,
New Mexico. Vado is rather close to the middle of
nowhere, but it also happens to be very close to a whole lotta cattle
and cows. Said quadrupeds produce about 275 tons of
manure per day.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
Sounds like a joke, but it is not. They think they…
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007You
all will be pleased to know that bug #177773 in cowsay has been
fixed. The cow's tongue now will be rendered correctly.
j7uy5@localhost ~ $ cowsay Corpus Callosum is weird!
___________________________
< Corpus Callosum is weird! >
---------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
___________________________
< Corpus Callosum is weird! >
---------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (**)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
U ||----w…
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007
I find it amusing to see things that are both elaborate and pointless,
especially if the pointlessness is obvious. (from:
href="http://xkcd.com/c257.html">XKCD)
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007
rel="tag">
Jack
Lessenberry
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> is fairly well known in
Ann Arbor, being an historian, journalist, and senior political analyst
(or something like that, I can't remember his exact title) for
href="http://www.michiganradio.org/">WUOM.
A year ago, he wrote:
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://jackshow.blogs.com/jack/2006/01/essay_thinking_.html">Essay:
Thinking About Impeachment - 1/18/06
If you had to place a bet on anything, one of the safest wagers I can
think of is that President George W. Bush will NOT be…
j7uy5 | May 11, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Blackwater USA was
co-founded by former Navy Seal Erik Prince, a "billionaire right-wing
fundamentalist Christian from a powerful Michigan Republican family."
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">By the end of 2004
Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, was bragging to the press of
"staggering" 600 percent growth. "This is a billion-dollar industry,"
Jackson said in October 2004. "And Blackwater has only scratched the
surface of it."
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">According to Scahill,
there are tens of thousands of private…
j7uy5 | May 11, 2007Some
call it "hillbilly heroin," something I could not bring myself to say
aloud. But that illustrates the strong feelings that people
have about the drug,
href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/drug/infopage/oxycontin/">Oxycontin.
As painkillers go, it is pretty strong. Sometimes
it is an appropriate choice, particularly in cancer patients.
Now, we hear that the company, Purdue
Pharma LP, and its top executives have been given heavy fines
for the way they marketed the drug.
href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10118248&surl=http%3A//www.michiganradio.org/&…
j7uy5 | May 8, 2007
The spoof site is here.
The spoof video:
I know this is kind of old, but still worth a chuckle or two.
j7uy5 | May 6, 2007(Note: if the accent marks look weird, set your browser to view character encoding as Unicode (UTF-8))
One
of the problems with the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders">Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is that there is
no clear rationale for the division of problems into Axis I vs. Axis II
disorders. It is assumed, sometimes, that Axis I disorders
are "biological" and Axis II disorders are "psychological."
Legend has it that the division arose directly from the conflict
between psychodynamically-oriented…
j7uy5 | May 5, 2007"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401976.html?hpid=topnews">Resilient
Infections Worry Military Doctors" is a headline in the
Washington Post. It reflects a serious concern often noted
here at ScienceBlogs. I read it and worried, again.
But perhaps there is hope: maggots. From
News@Nature.com:
href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/070430-13.html">Maggots
eat up resistant bacteria
Creepy
crawlies are the latest weapon in the anti-MRSA arsenal.
Published
online: 4 May 2007
doi:10.1038/news070430-13
Katharine…
j7uy5 | May 5, 2007Sometimes
newspapers raise more questions than they answer. In the case
of this WaPo editorial about Medicare, I find myself wishing that they
had done a little more research.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401871.html">Unsustainable
Medicare
Fixes
for the program's funding will be needed soon.
Saturday,
May 5, 2007; Page A16
THE
RELEASE last week of the annual report of the Medicare trustees
underscores an unavoidable fact that too many politicians have
nonetheless been avoiding for too long: Of all the entitlement
programs,…
j7uy5 | May 4, 2007For
some completely inexplicable reason, MT won't let me reply to the
comment under my last post. But I can still post posts, so
here is the question and the answer:
Q: Wow, is this serious? I have amblyopia, and would
really, really love to get some of my vision back. In part because it's
a pain in the butt, but also because I have a cavernous angioma in the
left side of my brainstem that affects my balance. My neurologist has
told me that I would have fewer problems if my right-eye (the weak one)
were better.
Interestingly, I have been taking benzos for neuropathy and ataxia
(clonazepam…