revere | March 22, 2009Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has the ultimate explainer/blamer on the banking meltdown. It ain't pretty and it spares nobody. Nobody:
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of…
revere | March 22, 2009Don't blame me. People aren't becoming atheists because there are atheists on TV, newspapers and the internet. There are atheists on TV, newspapers and the internet because people are becoming atheists:
revere | March 21, 2009There are certain things that go under the rubric "complementary medicine" that also boast they represent the Wisdom of the Ages -- old therapies for currently difficult conditions that turn out to be just as good as our current therapies. Or just as bad. This week the British Medical Journal has a case in point: the use of maggots for wound healing (Dumville et al., "Larval therapy for leg ulcers (VenUS II): randomised controlled trial," BMJ 2009;338:b773 [doi:10.1136/bmj.b773]).
The wounds in this case were the notoriously difficult to treat leg ulcers that develop as a result of impaired…
revere | March 20, 2009If the 1960s film, The Graduate, were to be made today (Graduate, II: The Stimulus), the iconic scene at the party where a friend of the family takes Dustin Hoffman aside and whispers in his ear, "I have only one word for you, Plastics") would be transmogrified into, "I have only three words for you, Health Information Technology." HIT, and its love child with the recently passed stimulus package, the Electronic Medical Record, have all the characteristics of a good idea destined to go bad. One of my vivid memories from my early career was being shown a new kind of quiet printer, called an…
revere | March 19, 2009Papers on biodiversity are not my regular science reading fare and the reason I found my self reading the article "Initial community evenness favours functionality under selective stress" by Wittebolle et al. in Nature from last week isn't very important. But I did find myself reading about the "biodiversity-stability relationship" in a microbial ecosystem, so rather than let all that effort go to waste I decided to write about it here. Like most things that wind up on this page, there is an extra little twist at the end, this time where I come out against biodiversity, but to get there you'…
revere | March 18, 2009The Conflict of Interest talk these days is all about doctors and medical school lecturers who are in bed with Big Pharma, but the bed is pretty crowded. Researchers are there, too. Not that this hasn't been a topic of conversation. And not that researchers aren't conscious of it and frantically trying to distance themselves from it. But it's nice and warm under the covers and its a friendship with benefits, as the younger generation likes to put it:
As accusations of undisclosed financial conflicts among university researchers swirl, drug makers and academics are entering a new stage of…
revere | March 17, 2009President Obama used his weekly radio address last weekend to talk about an urgent matter for all Americans. Which one? It could have been any of a half dozen, but it was one that received essentially no attention from the last administration: food safety. He also officially announced his nominations for the two top spots at FDA, Dr. Margaret (Peggy) Hamburg and Dr. Josh Sharfstein. Both are public health experts and intimately familiar with urban health problems, Hamburg as Commissioner of the New York City health department, Sharfstein as head of the Baltimore health department. Both are…
revere | March 16, 2009There is an attitude toward the prospects of an influenza pandemic and what, or what not, to do about it that I have little patience with. We saw examples a couple of years ago with the writings of Wendy Orent and Marc Siegel and now it is surfacing again from Philip Alcabes, in an op ed in the Washington Post over the weekend. All three are smart and well informed -- but that doesn't prevent them from being wrong headed. The Alcabes piece, ironically entitled "5 Myths About Pandemic Panic" is either built on myths or strawmen, take your pick. Here is my commentary on the "5 Myths":…
revere | March 15, 2009Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the death of peace activist Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by a caterpillar tractor driven by the Israeli Defense Forces in occupied Palestine. She was trying to negotiate with the driver not to destroy the homes of Palestinians being subjected to collective punishment for demonstrating against the occupation (see our posts here, here, here). What makes this year's anniversary even more painful is fresh news: 37 year old Tristan Anderson from Oakland, California, a dedicated pacifist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), is on life-support…
revere | March 15, 2009Every once in a while we use this space for news clips reporting someone sighting the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or Mother Teresa or Michael Steele on a wall or a piece of toast. Like this:
The point is less about the benighted souls whose over active pattern recognition is featured as to point out the collosal drivel dished out by local TV news outlets, the main source for this kind of crap (Fox News seems particularly fond of these stories, but they're all guilty). It's not an aberration, either. The sheer volume is almost as mind numbing as the content. The following compilation of…
revere | March 14, 2009As regular readers know, Albert Einstein was my culture hero when I was a youth (and he still is, although I am no longer a youth). But it's all relative.). Anyway, today is the 130th anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, here's another peek at what's happening in the world of robotics (see here for a previous foray into the world of robots). This one has an Einstein theme:
revere | March 14, 2009There is a good summary by Robert Roos at CIDRAP News about the $420 billion spending bill signed by President Obama this week to cover the next six months. The good news edges out the bad news, so the net is positive, a welcome change from the kind of deeply depressing budget news to which we became accustomed during the Bush years. Bush took a teetering public health system whose decline started with Reagan and continued through Clinton and put it on life support. Now a couple of items in the spending bill have upped the oxygen slightly but don't increase the circulation in all the critical…
revere | March 13, 2009I'm just getting around to reading the Brief Report by Blachere et al., "Measurement of airborne influenza virus i a hospital emergency department" (Clinical Infectious Diseases 2009:48:483-440) but it's quite interesting. We've noted fairly often here that we still don't know for sure what the main modes of transmission of influenza are, something that surprises many people. We "know" that flu can be passed from person to person via the respiratory secretions from runny noses, coughs and sneezes but we often don't think more deeply about this. We know that viral material can remain viable…
revere | March 12, 2009My problem with The Onion is that sometimes their pieces are so good I can't figure out how to extract pull quotes. I just want to reprint the whole damn thing and that's not exactly "fair use." So if want to read it all you'll have to go there (link with pull quote after the jump). Here's a piece that is at once so grotesque and so spot on it's scary:
WASHINGTON—Calling it "perfectly safe for the most part," and "not nearly as destructive or fatal as previously thought," the Food and Drug Administration approved the enterobacteria salmonella for human consumption this week.
FDA director…
revere | March 11, 2009We've all heard stories about how emergency workers (aka first responders) have had trouble communicating at disaster sites because their equipment was not "interoperable," that is, operated at different frequencies or use incompatible methods. But disasters in big cities have other problems, even when the interoperability one is solved. There are so many physical obstacles -- buildings, steel girders, possibly rubble or wreckage -- that create barriers or echoes or other problems that prevent workers from speaking to each other even when they are close by. An article, still in press at IEEE…
revere | March 10, 2009Way back on New Year's Eve of 2005, when we were still hosted over at Blogger, I did one of my more popular posts about how a toilet works. Most people don't know. I'm guessing they have some kind of vague mental image that when you push the toilet handle a trapdoor opens up somewhere and the contents of the toilet bowl fall through to the abyss. But that's not what happens and I felt compelled to explain it. The pretext was a long article from the Wall Street Journal about how toilets are tested. The official testing material is . . . miso (a Japanese fermented soybean paste). I thought of…
revere | March 9, 2009I'm sure it will be years before we have cleaned up all the garbage -- literally and figuratively -- from the Bush administration's Environmental "Protection" Agency. The notoriously conservative DC Appeals Court, in a unanimous decision, did its part recently when it declared the Bush EPA's standards for air particulates “contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking." The language doesn't get much stronger than that. Just a few days before the Supremes refused to hear a challenge to a lower court decision striking down Bush EPA mercury standards from coal-fired power…
revere | March 8, 2009I might be an atheist but I'm glad when the food industry "gets religion." How observant they will be is another question, but for now, they are making noises to suggest they know which side their bread is peanut-buttered:
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) issued the following statement from GMA President and CEO Pam Bailey regarding the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act cosponsored by U.S. Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Additional cosponsors include: Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Christopher J. Dodd of…
revere | March 7, 2009If we had decent substance abuse services in this country instead of criminalizing drug use, addicts like Rush Limbaugh could get treatment for their sociopathic personality disorders. In a spirit of understanding of his affliction, if not bipartisanship, I therefore gladly post John Amato's plea to leave Rush alone: