gregladen | June 8, 2010... is an award-winning journalist and author and a recovering newspaper reporter. She writes about public health, medicine and food policy, and finds emerging diseases strangely exciting.
Visit Superbug, the latest Scienceblogs.com blog,and read her books: Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA and Beating Back the Devil
gregladen | June 8, 2010Who voted for this guy?
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gregladen | June 8, 2010As expected.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | June 7, 2010A new intelligence test is out, and the results are in some cases quite expected, and in other cases somewhat surprising.
Briefly, the results indicate that women are smarter than men, people of retired age are smarter than 20 year olds, self declared "Republicans", "Democrats" and "Conservatives" are all about equally stupid, but "Moderates" are really dumb and "Liberals" are extraordinarily smart.
In a somewhat less rigorous version of the test, more differences are revealed: In this version, "Republicans" and "Conservatives" are morons, there is a reversal by age categories and the old…
gregladen | June 7, 2010A court in the Indian city of Bhopal has sentenced eight people to two years each in jail over a gas plant leak that killed thousands of people in 1984.
The convictions are the first since the disaster at the Union Carbide plant - the world's worst industrial accident.
The eight Indians, all former plant employees, were convicted of "death by negligence". One had already died - the others are expected to appeal.
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gregladen | June 7, 2010Just so you know .. BP, the oil company (not the dating scheme) makes an interesting appearance in The Corporation. Which we've talked about on this blog, so I just thought I'd remind us.
gregladen | June 7, 2010Remember Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh Killings Video? Remember how Wikileaks is a major security threat?
Well, now, there's this: U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe:
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by…
gregladen | June 6, 2010Whenever I sat at Joseph and Mary's dinner table, Mary showed a great deal of interest in my work. In between her frequent forays away from the dining room table to get this or that food item, or to issue instructions to a servant, or whatever, she would sit at the table across from me and ask questions.
"So, have you found anything interesting?" which is a standard question to which the answer was always "no" ... we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. "So, what to the Pygmies think of your research." And so on.
I remember that during…
gregladen | June 6, 2010Joseph and Mary, and Little Joe and Mary, and Grinker and I, sat around the table where most of the dinner had been laid out. Additional bits and pieces of the dinner would be brought out as needed shortly, but now it was time to pray.
So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
"We have a new tradition we…
gregladen | June 6, 2010 Actual missionaries As you may have noticed, I have written a series of posts about missionaries in eastern Zaire in the 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on my own personal experiences. These seven posts represent only a small number of these experiences, but they are more or less representative. They are meant to underscore the down side of missionary activities in Central Africa. To some extent, the negatives you may see in these essays are part of the reason for missionary activity being illegal in many countries (although the reasons for those laws varies considerably). It is my…
gregladen | June 6, 2010As I've mentioned previously, the study site I worked in was beyond the Peace Corps Line. It was beyond the Blender Line. And it was beyond the Beer Line. Out here in this arguably very remote area, we were never short of remoteness. Every year the study site become more and more remote, as roads deteriorated, air strips grew over, bridges became more and more questionable. Over the previous decades there had been more of a missionary presence in this area, but the missionaries had withdrawn and now only passed occasionally down the ribbon of mud we laughingly referred to as the "road…
gregladen | June 5, 2010It was a rare day that I was at the Ngodingodi research station at all ... usually I was off in the forest with the Efe Pygmies, up the road excavating an archaeological site. It was also rare that Grinker, my cultural anthropologist colleague, was at the research station. He was spending most of his time in the villages learning language and waiting around for the other shoe to drop (he studied conflict, so on the average day ... not much conflict).
But then an even rarer thing happened.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
As we sat, being rare and chatting about the…
gregladen | June 5, 2010A couple of "missionary" posts back, I intimated that we got to stay at the missionary stations while visiting various cities or en route between points in return for our work giving out medicine and such at our research camp. In truth, the arrangement was a bit more complex and subtle than this, and in fact, I think the arrangement and its nature changed over time. The various missionary entities that existed in the Ituri Forest and nearby cites that would be used as jumping off points were actually hospitable to us for three reasons. 1) Almost everybody is almost always hospitable to…
gregladen | June 5, 2010Near the end of the earth there are lines one might not cross for fear of falling off.
OK, you won't really fall off, but you will become scared and lost.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
The area of my research in the Ituri was, by many standards, one of those places near the end of the earth, with the lines that have consequences if you cross them. This region of Africa, with complex and important topography, was the last to be figured out by Western explorers and geographers. As recently as 1889, Europeans thought that the Semliki River flowed from the Rwenzori…