oracknows | May 21, 2008Here's how not to allow personalized stamps to be produced:
BERLIN -- German neo-Nazis used a personalized stamp service offered by Deutsche Post to create a 55-cent stamp carrying a portrait of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, the company said Wednesday.
The latest newsletter of the far-right National Democratic Party gloated about being able to slip the stamp past Deutsche Post's quality control personnel.
"The Hess stamp is out there," wrote Hannes Natter in the May edition of Deutsche Stimme, or German Voice.
Deutsche Post spokesman Dirk Klasen confirmed that someone managed to slip an order…
oracknows | May 21, 2008"Early detection of cancer saves lives."
How many times have you heard this statement or something resembling it? It's a common assumption (indeed, a seemingly common sense assumption) that detecting cancer early is always a Very Good Thing. Why wouldn't it be, after all? For many cancers, such as breast cancer and colon cancer, there's little doubt that early detection at the very least makes the job of treating the cancer easier. Also, the cancer is detected at an earlier stage almost by definition. But does earlier detection save lives? Does finding more disease before surgery that wouldn…
oracknows | May 20, 2008ERV asks: What happens when a PI holding an NIH grant dies, given that PIs support post-docs, graduate students, and technicians in his or her lab?
In other words:
Or what would happen to me if Bossman got hit by a bus or got brain cancer.
Does the NIH have some sort of protocol for what to do when a PI dies? Do they just take the grant back and recycle it into a different award? Do they try to transfer it to someone else at the Uni who can do similar work?
Hell, screw the money, what happens to the ideas?? Thats what horrified me during our scare-- We were helping this fellow with a really…
oracknows | May 20, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an amazingly ignorant antivaccination screed published in the Winona Daily News. In the comments, I was made aware of another antivaccination screed in the form of a letter to the editor to the Winona Post. (Unfortunately, I am unable to locate it online.) Now, today, I find that there are people in Winona who are trying to outdo Jim and Laurie Jenkinson (the authors of the first article) in serious stupidity in the form of a letter to the editor published in the Winona Daily News entitled It Is Important to Learn More About Vaccinations.
I'd normally agree…
oracknows | May 20, 2008I hate it when I fall behind in my journal reading. Of course, it happens all the time, as you might expect, with my time sandwiched between running my lab, writing grants, seeing patients, and operating. Sometimes, though, I get a chance to try to catch up a bit. Such was the case the other day, but unfortunately I came across an article that almost made me wish I hadn't. It was a study published in the February issue of Annals of Surgery1 and it showed that the situation is much worse than I expected. it also shows that I may be a rarer bird than I thought I was, and not just because of my…
oracknows | May 19, 2008I've written a lot about the legal thuggery perpetrated against autism blogger Kathleen Seidel by an unethical lawyer named Clifford Shoemaker, who issued a subpoena against her based on dubious conspiratorial thinking about her supposedly being a shill for big pharma. Shoemaker, in case you didn't know, is a lawyer who represents litigants suing vaccine manufacturers for "vaccine injury." In this case, he represented Reverend Lisa Sykes and her husband as they sued Bayer for alleged vaccine injury, and Kathleen Seidel had done a long post about Shoemaker's activities shortly before he issued…
oracknows | May 19, 2008I realize that I've been very, very remiss in attending to a task that I've been meaning to get to since late January. There are several reasons, albeit not excuses, for why I have failed to do this task. Perhaps the most powerful impediment to my overcoming my inertia and just diving in and doing what needs to be done is that it depresses me to no end to contemplate what needs to be contemplated to complete this task. Moreover, although I have completed a great deal, I sense that I have barely even scratched the surface of what needs to be done to complete the task, which also continuously…
oracknows | May 18, 2008What better thing to do than to do a little Sunday afternoon YouTube action with my all time favorite artist, David Bowie? This time, it's one of the best songs in Bowie's entire catalog.
oracknows | May 18, 2008Yesterday's post sucked all the blogging life out of me for the moment, so here's a quickie. If there's anyone who deserves a Darwin Award, it's this guy here:
AUBURN -- A man talking on a cell phone while walking Wednesday on railroad tracks was hit by a train and killed. He was the second person in the area to be killed by a train while talking on a cell phone in the past two weeks.
Auburn Police spokesman Scott Near said the man killed just after noon was walking on the tracks between the 1200 and 1400 blocks of C Street Northwest, where the rails parallel the street and there are no signs…
oracknows | May 17, 2008Believe it or not, even I, Orac, sometimes get tired of blogging about antivaccination idiocy. Indeed, this week was just such a time. I hope you can't blame me. After all, the last few months have been so chock-full of some of the most bizarre and annoying antics of antivaccinationists at such a frequent clip that there was just no way I could even keep up with it, and trying was starting to burn me out. (I guess there's only so much that the stupid can burn before even Orac's nearly indestructible clear plastic case can handle before he needs a break.) Truth be told, not wanting Respectful…
oracknows | May 16, 2008This is too hilarious for words. It's priceless.
It's Chris Matthews applying a little history smackdown--I mean lesson--to an ignorant right wing talk radio host named Kevin James, who was overjoyed at President Bush's use of the Neville Chamberlain gambit the other day and wanted to take the opportunity to throw the same gambit around too about the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular. Bad idea:
My only complaint is that Matthews didn't deliver what would have been the perfect coup de grâce. That would have been to ask (1) what did Neville Chamberlain do in March 1939…
oracknows | May 16, 2008This week was difficult.
No, it wasn't difficult because I had hit one of my periodic woo writer's blocks that I whine about, no doubt to the occasional annoyance of my readers, even though I have one of the greatest hobbies in the world. I mean, I get to do something that I love (writing and blogging) and even get paid a nominal sum for doing it. Even better, this whole Respectful Insolence⢠thing has grown far beyond my wildest imaginings when more than three years ago, on winter's day in a deep and dark December, I experimented with Blogger on a whim and created the first incarnation of…
oracknows | May 15, 2008
Jake and Elwood hated Illinois Nazis. I hate Michigan Nazis. Actually, I hate all Nazis, but I especially detest Nazis from states I've lived in, such as Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois. But worst of all are Michigan Nazis, because it's my home state, and even worse than that are Detroit Nazis, because that's my home town. I was born there and lived there until I was around 10. I will always have an affinity for the city, no matter how down and out it is.
And there's a Nazi in Detroit now trying to take advantage of the crappy economy to recruit to his hate cause:
On a dead-end street along…
oracknows | May 15, 2008Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions held about cancer among lay people is that it is one disease. We often hear non-physicians talk about "curing cancer" as though it were a single disease. Sometimes, we even hear physicians, who should know better, using the same sort of fuzzy thinking and language about "curing cancer" as well. But cancer is not a single disease. Indeed, it's a collection of dozens of different diseases, with different cell types of origin, pathophysiologies, behaviors, and treatments. True, there are a fair number of commonalities between cancers in terms of…
oracknows | May 14, 2008...because the author of the book that fueled the rise of the mercury militia in 2005, that indefatigable purveyor of bad science, logical fallacies and bizarre speculations, that useful idiot that antivaccinationists all know and love, is coming to the U.K next month.
Yes, I'm talking about David Kirby. Credulous blogger Ginger of Adventures in Autism has informed me that, thanks to "support" from antivaccinationist groups Generation Rescue and the National Autism Association, Autism Research Institute, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, David Kirby will be traveling to…
oracknows | May 14, 2008Regular readers here are probably most familiar with the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" therapy known as chelation therapy in the context of its use, or, more specifically, its misuse in "treating" autistic children, a misuse that has resulted in at least one death, a five-year-old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama. However, before the profit potential of chelating nonexistent mercury in autistic children was even a gleam in Dr. Roy Kerry's eye, there was another equally dubious use of chelation therapy: to treat atherosclerotic coronary artery and peripheral…
oracknows | May 13, 2008...which Presidential candidate would make the best companion for which Doctor.
I have to agree with Phil, though, in that McCain is probably too old. In the show, the Doctor's companions are nearly always younger-appearing than the Doctor. McCain looks way older than the Doctor--and I'm talking about the Doctor's real age.
oracknows | May 13, 2008Last week, I wrote about factors that lead to the premature adoption of surgical technologies and procedures, the "bandwagon" or "fad" effect among surgeons, if you will. By "premature," I am referring to widespread adoption "in the trenches," so to speak, of a procedure before good quality evidence from science and clinical trials show it to be superior in some way to previously used procedures, either in terms of efficacy, cost, time to recover, or other measurable parameters. As I pointed out before, laparoscopic cholecystectomy definitely fell into that category. The popularity of the…
oracknows | May 12, 2008And I thought, whatever his other faults and whatever my disagreements with his politics,, that Bill Clinton was incredibly smart. Apparently I was wrong:
"You do not want to bring your children into the world where we go on with the number of children who are born with autism tripling every 20 years, and nobody knows why," he said.
Even if the true prevalence of autism is increasing (which is highly debatable), it is not tripling every 20 years--nowhere near it. Again, the apparent increase in prevalence observed over the last two decades can be explained largely by increased awareness and…
oracknows | May 12, 2008Oh, no! Phil Plait did a great post on why vaccines do not cause autism. What's his reward?
To be invaded by antivaccinationists!
I think you all know what to do. Please, go lend Phil some tactical air support, and I'll be grateful.