oracknows | October 5, 2006Over the last week or so, several of my fellow ScienceBloggers made predictions about who would win the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology. The prize, as we know now, was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for their discovery of RNA interference (known as RNAi, for short). I also share some of Jake's questioning as to why Greg Hannon or Tom Tuschl, both of whom played a role in discovering RNAi and making the early advances in the field, were shut out. Whatever the reasons, this particular award is of great interest to me because it's the first Nobel Prize awarded for a discovery that was…
oracknows | October 5, 2006Apparently not. The Westboro Baptist Church is at it again:
A Kansas church group that planned to demonstrate at the funerals of five Amish girls killed in an attack on their one-room schoolhouse has dropped the picket plans, a reversal that came hours after Pennsylvania's governor offered the Amish police protection.
Members of the Westboro Baptist Church issued a statement saying a representative will appear on a nationally syndicated radio talk show hosted by Mike Gallagher instead of picketing the funerals.
Gallagher's website indicated the group was offered an hour of airtime in exchange…
oracknows | October 4, 2006Change of Shift, the nursing blog carnival, has beenposted at Emergiblog.
oracknows | October 4, 2006Pareidolia is everywhere, as you know. We see Jesus or Mary on trees, pieces of toast, and on sheet metal.
Finally, though, through the wonder of science, we finally see some Jesus pareidolia in a molecular biology lab!
Are you ready for Jesus on a polyacrylimide gel used to separate proteins?
I consider it a most holy sign that Alex's next attempt at an immunoprecipitation will be a success.
oracknows | October 4, 2006The other day, in the midst of a discussion about one of my posts about Holocaust denial, an anti-Semite posting as "bernarda" demanded:
Then I read books like Norman Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry and understood that it [the Holocaust] has just become a propaganda tool to create a permanent guilt complex, even on Americans who had nothing to do with it. Why are there several holocaust museums in the U.S. but no slavery museum?
The answer is pretty simple: Because the U.S. did not perpetrate the Holocaust. It helped to end the Holocaust. In contrast, the U.S. did perpetrate slavery. That's…
oracknows | October 3, 2006Getting back to politics one last time, founder and fellow RINO The Commissar is jumping ship from the Republican Party this fall. Read why here.
Although I'm a fair bit closer to the center than The Commissar, his thoughts echo mine to a large extent. Personally, I'm a big fan of divided government. The checks and balances work far better when no one party is in control of the legislative and executive branches, and legislation has to have broad bipartisan support to pass. Whenever one party controls both Houses of Congress for too long, it inevitably becomes corrupt, leading to the…
oracknows | October 3, 2006Abel explains, in the first part of a promised series.
This is a topic I've been meaning to write about for a long time but somehow never got around to it. Abel explains nicely the barriers to drug absorption, distribution, and activity and why it's very bad science for alties to try to extrapolate from studies of cells cultured in dishes to humans. In fact, toxicity to cultured cancer cells correlates only weakly with efficacy in an actual human, thanks to many of the factors Abel explains.
I would also point out that I'm involved as a coinvestigator in the evaluation of a drug that actually…
oracknows | October 3, 2006I knew there was a reason that I don't often blog about politics, and yesterday reminded me of it. Maybe I should have just launched another enthusiastic debunking of the distortions and outright false information put out by antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler. Instead, I thought it might be educational to return to a topic that I haven't revisited in a while, so-called HIV/AIDS "dissidents." These cranks resemble antivaxers in their fast-and-loose approach to and cherry-picking of the data, along with some outright misrepresentations of studies.
They're at it again.
This time around…
oracknows | October 2, 2006The latest History Carnival has been posted at Old is the New New. Enjoy!
oracknows | October 2, 2006Although I think Bora is being overly alarmist when he declares that we are now officially living in a fascist state, that doesn't mean that I don't find the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which authorizes military tribunals for "enemy combatants," a category that, given the murky language of the act, is not clearly limited to noncitizens, to be a deeply disturbing turn of events. What I find the most strange about the whole exercise is how little Republicans seem to have thought this whole law through. Do they realize what they've done? Sure, they trust President Bush to…
oracknows | October 2, 2006While I happen to be on the topic of free speech and neo-Nazis today, here's something that came to me via Holocaust Controversies, a Holocaust denier comments about Sergey's post about the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre:
So is this the so-called "massacre" where kikes were supposedly massacred? God, but were it only so. Thus the volk who seek freedom fm Judaic oppression need merely review the proper historical dialectic.
He then goes off on a standard anti-Jew rant, citing arch anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman III.
As you can see, this "Apollonian" is the variety…
oracknows | October 2, 2006As much as I oppose Holocaust denial, fascism, and neo-Nazis, you might recall that I am very much in favor of free speech. Indeed, I tend to take as broad an interpretation of the First Amendment as possible, and remain very grateful to our Founding Fathers for enshrining this freedom in the Constitution, where it's much more difficult to tamper with. But what happens when a distinctly anti-freedom of speech ban is enshrined in a nation's Constitution?
This is what:
A Stuttgart court fined a German company that specializes in anti-fascist paraphernalia adorned with swastikas for using the…
oracknows | October 1, 2006I have a weakness for kitschy and campy stuff, and album covers are a particularly fertile ground for tacky and silly stuff. Fortunately, thanks to Dennis Catron, I get to indulge my enjoyment of such things with his lovely collection of camp album covers. Most of them come from the 1950's and 1960's, but there are a few more recent than that.
Here are but a couple of examples:
And what collection of cheesy album covers would be complete without an inner sleeve with Satanic imagery:
Geez, that last one looks like it came from a Spinal Tap gatefold. And what band is it? Believe it or not,…
oracknows | September 30, 2006Today is just the kind of day when these lyrics speak to me:
And you run, you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
From Time by Pink Floyd
oracknows | September 29, 2006Here he is on Extras, providing a little impromptu song:
What an honor, to be dissed by Bowie in song, and a song that rather sounds like some of his really old stuff.
You know, it'd be really cool if Bowie were to record this tune. Speaking of which, it's been three years since his last album. Yes, I know that he suffered a small MI and had to undergo angioplasty, but that was a couple of years ago. He's due to get back in the studio.
Come on, David, we want new material!
oracknows | September 29, 2006Earlier this week, I thought that I had identified this week's woo target. I told myself that this was it, that this was the one for this week. I even started writing it the other day, because, as much as I try to get this thing done early, somehow I always seem to be writing it at 11 PM Thursday nights. I thought this week would be different.
I was mistaken.
The reason that I was wrong was because I came across a link that was so amusing, so full of outrageously concentrated woo, that I just couldn't restrain myself from throwing my old topic to the wayside (well, not exactly; I can always…
oracknows | September 28, 2006If you think I'm hardcore when it comes to my disgust at antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler, you should check out House, M.D.:
[House walks away. Cut to the clinic and House is in an exam room with a young mother and her baby.]
Young Mother: No formula, just mommy's healthy natural breast milk.
House: Yummy.
Young Mother: Her whole face just got swollen like this overnight.
House: Mmhmm. No fever, glands normal, missing her vaccination dates.
Young Mother: We're not vaccinating.
Young Mother: [Takes a toy frog and starts to make frog sounds] Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit. [Giggles]
[Baby…
oracknows | September 28, 2006It was a late night in the O.R. last night; so I didn't get to spend my usual quality blogging time. However, it occurred to me. In honor of being called a "pharma moron" on Whale.to, coupled with all the antivaccination lunacy that's been infesting the comments of this blog, only to be tirelessly countered by certain regulars here, I thought I'd repost a blast from the past that I somehow missed reposting when I was on vacation last month. Yes, it's my piece about the "pharma shill" gambit. It appeared originally on August 11, 2005. I think its reappearance now is particularly appropriate,…