revere | October 17, 2008Living on a big ranch outside a city in a state with wide open spaces can be wonderful but it can also be a problem if you depend on modern telecommunications systems like cell phone service. If you are the only one around for miles and miles, it isn't that likely you will be supplied with a cell phone base station. Unless you are a presidential candidate and powerful Senator and senior member of a Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over telecommunications policy. Then even telecom giants are more than happy to accommodate you. Free of charge:
Early in 2007, just as her husband launched…
revere | October 17, 2008If Mrs. R. is typical, it's a good thing there are no atomic bug bombs or thermonuclear mouse traps or our neighborhood would be a radioactive dead zone. In our case her malevolent vibrations are sufficient to sterilize the area of vermin (that and our dog) but many people resort to chemical bug bombs, called total release foggers (TRFs). These are canisters that release enough pesticide to fill a living area with chemical fog that kills bugs like cockroaches, fleas and flying insects. The pesticides are usually relatively non-toxic to humans, primarily pyrethrins, derived from chrysanthemums…
revere | October 16, 2008By now everyone knows that Sarah Palin abused her power as Governor of Alaska in trying to settle a personal score with her ex-brother-in-law. Despite the fact that the official bipartisan legislative investigation cited chapter and verse of her unethical conduct and violation of Alaskan ethics statutes she has brazenly trumpeted her version that the reported absolved her of all guilt. Black is white. War is Peace. And this is 1984. There's a persistent pattern of hypocrisy and lying worthy of the present Vice President.
Even her accusations against the brother-in-law now are in question.…
revere | October 16, 2008
A piece online in The Scientist is an example of silly handwringing by science educators. James Williams, who describes himself as a science educator who trains science graduates to become science teachers, despairs because most trainee teachers he teaches don't have a clue about what makes science "science." He has been surveying them and reports:
Over the past two years I've surveyed their understanding of key terminology and my findings reveal a serious problem. Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor…
revere | October 15, 2008It's become a campaign issue that one of the Presidential candidates has been close with a domestic terrorist. So let's look at the facts.
G. Gordon Liddy is a convicted burglar and domestic terrorist. He was also the host, in his home, for a 1998 fundraiser for John McCain's Senate re-election campaign. McCain was on Liddy's radio show in May 2007, where he praised Liddy's values and proclaimed himself proud of Liddy and his "adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great":
During the same period that Bill Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, Gordon Liddy…
revere | October 15, 2008I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a new Foreword written in the 1990s he noted that it has never gone out of print since its publication more than 50 years ago, mainly because every decade or two we have a new stock market crisis to renew interest. Since 1929 these crises have all been harbingers of recession, not depression. It isn't…
revere | October 14, 2008The fatuousness of the McCain-Palin campaign's attack on ACORN, a national organization that fights for the rights of low income citizens is matched only by its hypocrisy. McCain has been a past supporter of ACORN and McCain was a keynoter at a recent ACORN sponsored conference. McCain has no quarrel with ACORN. It is just another tactic in his desperate battle to win the election and he doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he gains. Classic McCain. Unprincipled, dishonest and dishonorable. Not new but a pattern that goes back to his youth.
For years, including years when McCain was an…
revere | October 14, 2008 I run a fairly large research program at my University. My NIH grant, which runs in the tens of millions, pays for a lot of things, including a portion of my salary. But as Director, my salary is (alas) only a tiny portion of this complex operation, which has many senior principal investigators and core facilities, labs, research groups, post docs, students, research staff, etc., etc. The whole operation has to fit together and work. We're big but not huge. So $5 million, while accounting noise in Wall Street bailout terms, is a pretty big deal and not because of the paltry half salary I…
revere | October 13, 2008This weekend we passed a milestone. George W. Bush, the current incumbent of the White House, has less than 100 days left in his ill-starred Presidency. In 22 days we'll find out if we will have to suffer through four more years of the same thing under a McCain-Palin (or Palin - ?) administration. Heaven forbid (just a saying, not a religious statement). Bush is near historic approval lows in the Gallup poll (25%) and has been below 30% longer than any President in Presidential polling history. He is irrelevant to most people and has turned the government over to President Paulson. Notice…
revere | October 13, 2008Food poisoning can be a miserable experience and sometimes you feel like you want to die rather than endure another minute of the agony, but people rarely die from food poisoning. At least for most causes of food poisoning. The exceptions are the exceedingly rare cases of botulism and the much more common occurrence of listeriosis, infection with the organism Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria is a really nasty bug and serious cases are often fatal. The most at risk are the elderly, the immunocompromised, and pregnant women, biologically immune altered, and their fetuses and neonates. Listeria…
revere | October 12, 2008I am still trying to retrieve my lower jaw from the floor, where it fell after reading this:
When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it "the nuttiest thing" he'd ever heard.
Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism."
The reason:…
revere | October 11, 2008A lot of pundits seem dismayed and surprised at the moral depths to which Dishonest John McCain's campaign has sunk in the last week. I have to disagree. There is nothing surprising about it. This is his MO: do whatever he thinks is necessary. McCain has a long history of lack of principle and probity, whether it is in his personal life (a vile and abusive temper, disloyalty to his first wife) or his public life (corrupt behavior in the Savings and Loan scandal, chicanery on behalf of gaming interests and much more). Where I do agree with his new found critics is the frightening nature of his…
revere | October 11, 2008The US government response to the bogus war on terrorism is a mixture of the stupid, the super stupid and the evil. Taking off our shoes at the airport isn't evil but it is probably super stupid. So is the 3 oz. liquid ban. On reflection, maybe there are only two categories: super stupid and evil. In the evil category are the pseudoscientific "datamining" and "behavior detection" scams. Data mining is my favorite, since I use one of its techniques in my research work (Association Rule Mining) and I'm familiar with a number of other techniques. Familiar enough to not be surprised that when the…
revere | October 10, 2008John McCain's white hot anger is legendary among those who know him and among his colleagues (the real reason he won't win the Miss Congeniality Award), but the public still hasn't seen it boil over. So it's useful to have the accounts of those who have. Yesterday in HuffPo Nico Pitney pointed us to a piece by Michael Kinsley, recounting a gambling trip McCain took with Jeff Dearth, former publisher of the New Republic (now an investment banker!). McCain and Dearth were at a magazine industry junket (not clear who paid for it) in Puerto Rico in 2005 and here's what transpired (according to…
revere | October 10, 2008The health concerns about bisphenol-A (BPA), a component of hard polycarbonate plastic, has been extended once again (see here, here, here for previous posts on BPA). BPA, a ubiquitous contaminant of human bodies, leaches from water and baby bottles, the lining of tin cans, dental sealants and many other sources. BPA also looks a lot like potent hormones, like estradiol and the synthetic estrogenic agent, diethylstilbesterol (DES), the cause of transplacental carcinogenesis in humans. So there have been plausible concerns that BPA might increase the risk of cancer in humans, especially in…
revere | October 9, 2008Until his botched grandstanding over the financial crisis last week, John McCain hadn't set foot in the US Senate since last April. That doesn't mean he wasn't doing business as usual, though:
The Bush administration is currently in discussions to send $6 billion in arms to Taiwan. Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) sent a letter to President Bush, urging him to "add more submarines and new fighter jets to the package" as Taiwan had requested:
"The package will not include submarines or new F-16 aircraft. I urge the administration to reconsider this decision, in light of its previous…
revere | October 9, 2008Every parent's or grandparent's nightmare is to have their darling little one suddenly carried off by illness. Flu isn't on the radar screen of most parents but in recent years the public health community is taking notice. The first alarm occurred in the bad flu season of 2003 - 2004 when a retrospective tally showed over 150 pediatric deaths associated with flu. That was more than half again as much as we thought were occurring, although data was not very good. So a new pediatric surveillance system was put in place. One of the things it is showing is that methicillin resistant…
revere | October 8, 2008Here I am watching 20% of my retirement savings going down the toilet and John McCain tells me he will be doing me a favor over the next ten years by cutting $1.3 trillion from the Medicare and Medicaid budgets. $1.3 trillion. I'm on Medicare and I am not too happy about this. He needs to do this to pay for his health care plan. I'm all in favor of catastrophic health insurance but I don't want health insurance plans that are catastrophes, and that's what Dishonest John is offering me. He wants to give me a $2500 tax credit for health insurance that will cost me much more. Meanwhile my…
revere | October 8, 2008Early yesterday morning I received an email from my publisher that the journal for which I am co-editor in chief has been sold. Our journal is one of 180 published by BioMedCentral (BMC), the largest open access scientific publisher. The business model of BMC and other open access publishers is to charge the author, not the reader. BMC journals are online only (there are one or two exceptions) and hence have no page limitations. Charges are for a single article, whatever the length. Color photos, movies and supplementary files are all included in the charge (it is not a page charge,…