choofnagle | February 8, 2008Obama has created a lot of excitement among young people. On Tuesday, young people waiving Obama signs were all over the Berkeley campus and downtown San Francisco. Hillary's supporters were rarely seen, it seemed.
You'll note that I didn't call these supporters "young voters."
Why?
Because young people don't vote. What's my evidence of this (well-established) rule?
Even Obama Girl, the young woman who has spent the last year making videos about Obama's campaign, didn't vote! So sad.
choofnagle | February 8, 2008Suzanne Sataline reports in today's Journal about the intense spotlight that has been focused on the Mormon church as a result of the Romney campaign. The criticism has been so intense that the church has hired a public relations firm to battle it, and has encouraged young Mormons to blog about their religion. Perhaps what's most interesting is this poll:
This is somewhat surprising, and I think good news. It's about time that deciding in adulthood to be a member of a cult brings one more criticism than being born a certain sex or race!
choofnagle | February 7, 2008I came across this statistic the other day while doing some research on marketing fraud:
In recent years, despite the creation of a national "do not call" registry, the legitimate telemarketing industry has grown, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Callers pitching insurance plans, subscriptions and precooked meals collected more than $177 billion in 2006, an increase of $4.5 billion since the federal do-not-call restrictions were put in place three years ago.
This all sounds very unlikely. And I recall from years of working on telemarketing regulation that the DMA used…
denialism | February 4, 2008
Having been busy and a bit out of the loop for the past month, I think it's time I stop and point out what a great job Chris Mooney and other have done in generating a real movement behind making this happen. In particular note the supportive essay from the Editor-in-Chief of Science and the addition of the AAAS to the list of supporters that we've seen in the last week.
This is a gratifying turn of events because it shows me a few things. For one, I think it shows blogs like the Scienceblogs can make a huge difference in the real world. Second it shows that enough people care about…
denialism | February 4, 2008I've just completed my first month of my surgical rotation and still find almost every day fascinating. I just finished a 4-week rotation in the hepatobiliary service (liver, biliary and pancreatic surgeries mostly) and now go on to thoracic for 2 weeks, and then trauma for 2 weeks to complete the core requirement. I'll also be doing orthopedic trauma and neurosurgical rotations before I'm done in March and I'll be sure to write about those as well.
Friday night we had the medical student pimp-off AKA surgical jeopardy. For the uninitiated, pimping refers to the practice of quizzing…
choofnagle | February 2, 2008Check it out--for a mere 12 Euro, you can buy, Wo bitte geht's zu Gott?, fragte das kleine Ferkel, a book that is reportedly causing a stir for its depiction of the world's major religions. This children's book is pitched to atheists who wish to indoctrinate/inoculate their children against religion:
The book tells the story of a piglet and a hedgehog, who discover a poster attached to their house that says: "If you do not know God, you are missing something!"
This frightens them because they had never suspected at all that anything was missing in their lives. Thus they set out to look for…
denialism | January 28, 2008For the benefit of Teresa and her son, here's a description of a day in the life. This may not be all medstudents on the surgical rotation, but at the moment it's what I'm doing.
I wake up around 4AM, put on scrubs (usually, but on clinic day you dress nice), and go to work. I spend about an hour going over labs, checking vitals from overnight, in and outs as they say, and visiting with patients to ask them how their night was as well as performing a brief physical exam. I then round with my team for about half an hour, and for the patients I track, I try to present them to the residents…
denialism | January 25, 2008Surely no one can be pissed at me for pointing out that surgeons have some of the coolest tools, so I think I'll describe a few of them that I've seen used a great deal in general surgery.
The one most frequently in use is referred to simply as "the Bovie" and it is used for electrocautery. Named for William Bovie it was first used by the famous surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing almost a century ago. The patient in the OR is laying on a large conductive pad that grounds them, and the Bovie device, which resembles a little plastic pencil with a flat, rounded metal tip, generates an…
denialism | January 24, 2008Here I thought I was the only one but apparently photic sneezing has received enough attention to get researchers interested in it. Apparently it's an ancient problem:
Aristotle mused about why one sneezes more after looking at the sun in The Book of Problems: "Why does the heat of the sun provoke sneezing?" He surmised that the heat of the sun on the nose was probably responsible.
Some 2 ,000 years later, in the early 17th century, English philosopher Francis Bacon neatly refuted that idea by stepping into the sun with his eyes closed--the heat was still there, but the sneeze was not (a…
choofnagle | January 21, 2008Those of you on my snail mail list receive holiday cards from me every December, but this year was so hectic that I never got to one. So, today (really tomorrow), I'm mailing my MLK Day cards, which will include A is for Abandonable, Chris' Abecedarium of Dysphemisms (PDF). Use these words liberally to spice us your scienceblog!
choofnagle | January 21, 2008Bob Sullivan reports at MSNBC on the early developments of a medical privacy score by Fair Issac, the same company that invented the credit score for lenders. This is somewhat scary, because the entire point of credit scores is to make decision making easier, so easy that people very low on the totem pole can make decisions about you without really thinking, and because it is a number, it is imbued with an air of legitimacy. Credit scores arose after Congress forced consumer reporting agencies to open up their files; scoring allowed companies to put their analysis back into a black box so…
choofnagle | January 18, 2008I'm willing to bet that you weren't at Explo '72, the "Christian Woodstock," which received an encomium in today's Journal by John Turner:
In 1972, Mike Huckabee -- still in high school -- followed the example of thousands of other young Americans. He went to a weeklong festival, waded through mud and listened to rock music. But the throng of students he was a part of was different from the youthful gatherings more often associated with the late 1960s and early 1970s. These young people were in Dallas for Campus Crusade for Christ's "Explo '72" -- at "Godstock" rather than Woodstock.
It was…
choofnagle | January 18, 2008The Wall Street Journal's Alexandra Alter reports on the newest reason not to spend your money and time at church: shunning has returned, meaning that years of devotion to your religious institution can be cut off if you do something like gossip or dare to question the grand panjandrum:
On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. "And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P…
denialism | January 17, 2008This week's circle is at skeptical surfer's blog. Although I think Christian has made an error or two in his evaluation of the latest NHANES studies and what they say about obesity. For one, obesity has always been 30+ BMI, overweight was changed from 27 to 25 by one government agency responsible for surveillance of disease (CDC) to conform with other agencies' metrics. Further as I explained, the NHANES studies are hardly single variable, and don't take into account a change in medical culture towards better secondary prevention of comorbidity in the overweight and obese. It's all good…
denialism | January 17, 2008Despite the best attempts of the New York Times Wellness Blog to get me fired, I'm still here and doing fine. Somehow a post about how impressed I was with surgery, the professionals that practice it, and how many of my preconceptions about surgeons were incorrect, got all turned around into some "peak behind the curtain" into the secrets of the medical profession. This is terribly absurd and the article made a hash out of what I was trying to say. I was trying to relate some of the shock one experiences going from an academic setting into a clinical one for the first time, as a reminder…
denialism | January 13, 2008One only has to be minimally involved in a surgical procedure to understand the appeal of this profession. It is instantly gratifying and very rewarding to be able to just fix something. That, working under time pressure and mixture of physical and mental skill make it a very exciting way to practice medicine.
So after a week of this, and just getting off call around 1:00 this AM after scrubbing in on a liver transplant I'll tell you what has surprised me about surgery so far, and some of the things I didn't realize going in.
Surgeons are famous for having little traditions and quirks…
choofnagle | January 11, 2008No, the Denialism Blog is not my personal travel blog, although it might seem that way lately. I was in Guatemala last month, where I encountered dirty hippies and woo, and learned about a new religion called new age.
This week, I was at the Consumer Electronics Show doing a consulting gig for a large software company. CES is amazing--140,000 attendees, 2,700 exhibits. It's like being at the biggest Best Buy evar. I saw a 150" HD plasma television, with pandas on the screen, the smallest bluetooth headsets imaginable, neat location-aware devices, etc.
Perhaps the most difficult…
denialism | January 9, 2008Eight hours standing in a single spot, how do surgeons do it? I'm hoping my endurance will build, especially knowing that some of the procedures I'm going to see in the next few weeks such as the "Whipple" or pancreaticoduodenectomy may take twice as long.
The good news is that I have lucked into working with great people - the misbehavior of surgeons is greatly exaggerated - and have learned lots of interesting things. The coolest yet was running the camera on a laparoscopic or "keyhole" surgery - it looked something like this.
Although what we did was more complicated (and harder to…
denialism | January 9, 2008 This time the Ask a Scienceblogger Challenge is to explain why a male contraceptive pill does not exist.
Good question! It's because medical researchers are all sexist bastards. Didn't you know?
Actually that's only part of the reason. Research into hormonal or pharmaceutical contraception for men is a hot topic. Male hormonal contraception is actually fairly effective. Using a combination of testosterone and other hormones to suppress the secretion of luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) from the pituitary you can, after several months, prevent men from making…