j7uy5 | November 25, 2006I was a bit perplexed by a recent study on a new treatment for alcohol
withdrawal. Ordinarily, I am in favor of new treatment
options, based on the supposition that nothing works for everyone, and
having more options is good. This counterbalances, to some
extent, the anti-pharma screed about "me-too" drugs, but that is
another story.
href="http://www.aafp.org/afp/20040315/1443.html" rel="tag">Alcohol
withdrawal is a significant clinical problem. While
most people who drink alcohol can simply stop, with no danger, people
who routinely drink too much may go into withdrawal. That is…
j7uy5 | November 23, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving!
About the image: it's big, I know, kind of slow for those with dial-up,
and it's going to mess up the formatting of the page for those with
lower-resolution monitors. I did shrink it some, but
shrinking degrades the quality quite a bit.
The above image is from the Wikipedia
article on pi (π). It was
made
by John Reid.
This image is from
href="http://www.tonidunlap.com/pumpkin_pie.htm">Toni's
kitchen; it depicts pumpkin pie with orange marmalade.
j7uy5 | November 23, 2006The NEJM has another open-access article about drug safety.
As usual, when they publish something on an open-access
basis, it is something of interest to the general public, pertaining to
health care policy.
This one describes specific instances of drug companies concealing
information from the FDA and the public.
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/21/2169">Dangerous
Deception — Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects
Volume 355:2169-2171 November 23, 2006 Number 21
Jerry Avorn, M.D.
September 30 is becoming a day of infamy for drug
safety. On that date in…
j7uy5 | November 22, 2006"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division
of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader,
and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble
apprehension, it to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our
Constitution." -John Adams
Source,
found at The
Center for Michigan, self-described as: a new "think and do"
tank, seeking far-reaching, moderate policy solutions to the state's
deep economic and political problems.
j7uy5 | November 21, 2006The big news on the USA culture front: Rupert Murdoch has personally
intervened, and
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/us/21simp.html?ex=1321765200&en=8a7b71ce038300ee&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">canned
the OJ Simpson deal. He actually
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/say-it-aint-so-rupe_b_34547.html">apologized.
So, maybe we have found the outer limit of decency.
In other news, a court rejected the argument of a person who sued a
city over its logo. He argued that the logo, which depicts
crosses, was an unconstitutional governmental…
j7uy5 | November 21, 2006HT to Murph
at Common Monkeyflower for reminding me about this.
Youtube has a video montage, set to the tune of "Let's
Impeach The President" by
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Young">Neil Young.
There's another video that just has a static picture, and the music, in
case you want to hear the song with less distraction. The
audio quality is a bit better, too.
I know, I recently put up a post with a rationalization of the
restraint on this issue that the Democratic Party is exhibiting, and I
think it is the correct strategy. At the same time, an
occasional display of…
j7uy5 | November 19, 2006I've been holding back on this one, but it is time to speak out.
On November 2, 2006,
href="http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-11-02T230517Z_01_WEN9025_RTRIDST_0_TECH-MICROSOFT-NOVELL-BALLMER-DC.XML">Microsoft
and Novell announced a deal.
The deal involves Microsoft paying Novell, and the two
companies working together to ensure a certain level of
interoperability between Novell's Suse (a Linux distro), and
Microsoft's Windows. In return, Novell would get protection
against intellectual-property litigation.
By way of background…
j7uy5 | November 19, 2006Catching up on news from earlier in the week, I came across a couple of
items. One is a breathtaking development in Mexico, a country
that is 88%
Catholic; the other from South Africa:
href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4324824.html">Mexican
capital legalizes gay unions
City lawmakers give OK despite fierce protest
by Catholic Church, conservatives
By MARION LLOYD
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Nov. 10, 2006, 3:14PM
MEXICO CITY — Defying fierce opposition from Roman Catholic
leaders and conservative groups, Mexico City lawmakers overwhelmingly
approved a…
j7uy5 | November 18, 2006The Game just started. I am not going to live-blog it, in the
traditional sense, but
I am going to make a few comments.
The student newspaper at UM is the Michigan Daily. Right now,
their entire front page (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/Remembering_Bo.JPG">screen
shot) on the website is a memorial to the recently-deceased
former head coach, Bo Schembechler.
Michigan
got the ball first; the kickoff went out the side of
the end zone. They started on the 20, then marched down the
field with the same level
of precision as the marching band, and with about the…
j7uy5 | November 18, 2006
href="http://www.beliefnet.com/story/204/story_20419_1.html">Philanthropy
Expert: Conservatives Are More Generous
By Frank Brieaddy
Religion News Service
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is
about to become the darling of the religious right in America -- and
it's making him nervous.
The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in
the liberal arts, Brooks has written a book that concludes religious
conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts
of charitable activities, irrespective of income.
In the…
j7uy5 | November 18, 2006Really. A doctor said that. An obstetrician, in a
presentation entitled
href="http://www.abstinence.net/pdf/contentmgmt/EricKeroackPresentation2003.pdf">The
Neuroendocrine and Biochemical Basics of Human Sexuality: The Results
of Non-Marital Sexual Activity. [Note: the link
goes to a 7MB PDF.]
The author, Eric J. Keroack, M.D., F.A.C.O.G., gave the presentation on
June 27, 2003, for the National Abstinence Clearinghouse 2003
Conference.
He's in the news, as described by
href="http://www.upi.com/HealthBusiness/view.php?StoryID=20061117-074039-9953r">UPI:
...the Bush…
j7uy5 | November 18, 2006Rehabilitation of disused industrial sites has been a costly and
contentious issue in urban planning. Sites that are mildly or
moderately contaminated are called
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownfield" rel="tag">brownfields.
Research is underway to see if some brownfields can be used
to grow crops, specifically for the production of biofuels.
Michigan
State University, known affectionately as "Moo-U," in
collaboration with
rel="tag">DaimlerChrysler and
href="http://www.nextenergy.org/" rel="tag">NextEnergy,
has small plots of soybean, corn, canola and switchgrass…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2006Another product that makes me go "hmmm." Once or twice in my
life I've paid extra for high-performance random-access memory, but
I've never paid extra for the
href="http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/10/17/log_ocz_camouflage_ddr2_memory/">paint
job.
This is the PC2-6400 Special Ops Urban Edition from
OCZ.
I suppose if you have a problem with tiny snipers running around in
your case, it might make sense to get these. Or, if you are
fond of using old parts to make jewelry or something like that, it
could be pretty cool. But, what the hell, sometimes it makes
sense just to have fun…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2006Casual users might not notice much difference between Firefox 2.0 and
IE 7.0. But with continued use, the advantages of Firefox
become increasingly evident. This is especially true for
people who take the initiative to install a lot of extensions.
What is less obvious, is that Firefox still has the advantage in
security, as confirmed by a recent report:
href="http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/7asiAzrqaYcW7j/Firefox-The-Better-Phisher-Fighter.xhtml">Firefox:
The Better Phisher Fighter
By Jay Lyman
LinuxInsider
11/16/06 4:00 AM PT
Mozilla and Microsoft are duking it out over…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2006Yet Another Book Meme. I found this one at Yet Another Ann
Arbor Blog, named Bloug.
href="http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000506.html">Nov
16, 2006: Fie on Louisa May Alcott, Roald Dahl, Cormac McCarthy, and
all their ilk...
Now that's a weird list! These are authors of books that, according to
href="http://www.librarything.com/">LibraryThing's
new "UnSuggester"
service, are least like Information Architecture for the World Wide
Web. UnSuggester looks at co-occurrence (or, in
this case, lack thereof) in LibraryThing
members' collections; sadly, Green Eggs and Ham…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2006The Blogosphere has had a bit of a twitter over the issue of the
impeachment of President Bush. The most assertive progressive
href="http://alterx.blogspot.com/2006/11/nancy-its-your-duty-to-impeach-bush.html">
are upset that the issue is "
href="http://www.democrats.com/Why-Conyers-Changed-Tune-On-Impeachment">off
the table," in the words of Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers.
Conservatives are
href="http://slagblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/yes-mama-sheehan-back-in-saddle.html">skeptical,
imagining that the Democratic leadership is just as vicious as the
Republicans leadership. …
j7uy5 | November 15, 2006OK, so it is not totally a myth; there are plenty of compassionate
conservatives out there. But the phrase can be used to
whitewash policies that are just plain mean.
Florida is illegally imprisoning mentally ill persons, repeatedly,
systematically, and is doing nothing to try to solve the problem.
This is a gross violation of civil rights. It is an
astonishing affront to our notion of a free society. It is
comparable to warrantless wiretapping, or suspension of habeas corpus.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/us/15inmates.html?ei=5090&en=2044af625fc663bd&ex=1321246800…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2006I've quietly worried about this for a few years, but now I have
company. Increased temperatures, combined with increased
climate variability, could have a significant effect on human health
worldwide.
href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CLIMATE_HEALTH">Diseases
Appear on Rise With Temperature
Nov 14, 5:51 PM EST
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- A warmer world already seems to be producing a
sicker world, health experts reported Tuesday, citing surges in Kenya,
China and Europe of such diseases as malaria, heart ailments and dengue…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2006The Union of Concerned Scientists is concerned again. This
time,
they are concerned the possibility that a fourth-generation
cephalosporin,
href="http://www.intervet.co.uk/Products_Public/Cephaguard_Injection/090_Product_Datasheet.asp">cefquinome,
could be approved for use in animal feed.
It seems obvious that this could lead to more problems with antibiotic
resistance. If bacteria are exposed to these antibiotics in
sublethal amounts, in animals, those bacteria probably would develop
resistance to the antibiotics. If those same bacteria later
cause
infection in humans, the…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2006First there was Alternative Medicine, then there was Complimentary and
Alternative Medicine, and now there is Integrative, Complimentary and
Alternative Medicine.
I guess the natural cynic in me becomes suspicious when I see acronyms
undergoing hypertrophy.
So is this growing collection of concepts worthwhile? Do we
really need to create a terminology? Or does the acronym
creep indicate that the concepts are to vague, too ill-defined, to
merit the creation of a term?
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/11/the_future_of_american_medicine_woo_1.php">Orac,
href="http://…