Our Seed overlords demand a response: Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies? Ooh, boy. That's a loaded question that depends a lot on how you interpret it. My first reaction was similar to that of Razib, PZ, Dave, John, and GrrlScientist; i.e., no way, because the public doesn't have a clue what constitutes good scientific research. Ah, heck, my second reaction was the same, too, and it led me to ramble on way longer than the 300 words that our…

Watch how a Holocaust denier (in this case, the President of Iran) dances around the question "Did the Holocaust happen?" You can see the very same techniques when a denier like David Irving or Ernst Zundel is questioned about the Holocaust: SPIEGEL: It concerned your remarks about the Holocaust. It was inevitable that the Iranian president's denial of the systematic murder of the Jews by the Germans would trigger outrage. Ahmadinejad: I don't exactly understand the connection. SPIEGEL: First you make your remarks about the Holocaust. Then comes the news that you may travel to Germany -- this…

Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 36 has been posted at Kidney Notes. Go forth and check out the best medical blogging from the last week. Geez, I was so busy last week on call that I forgot to submit an entry. While we're at it, here's a belated plug for a special Memorial Day edition of RINO Sightings.

Finally. My week on call, including the entire holiday weekend, is over. It started out pretty bad and didn't get all that much better. I suppose I should be grateful that at least I was getting sleep again by this weekend. In any case, I thought that one particular day was almost worth of a 24-style treatment. OK, it's not as exciting as watching Jack Bauer kick terrorist butt, but, given that Jack isn't coming back until January, it'll have to do. So, without further ado, I present select episodes from: 24: The On Call Edition (a.k.a. a bad day in the life of an academic surgeon) (Note:…

In the U.S., today is Memorial Day. Although we often forget about it in our rush to head out to the beach or relax over the course of a three day weekend, it is the day set aside to remember those who have died fighting for our nation in its wars. I was debating about what to post today, when I remembered that, last year, I happened to be in Bethesda for a conference sponsored by the NIH. Because of my interest in World War II history and because I had a few hours and hadn't seen the new World War II Memorial before (which had been dedicated on Memorial Day weekend 2004), I decided to take…

I'm a pretty big computer geek most of the time, and I do love gadgets. However, even I can sympathize with the consumers in this story: OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the Internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work. "I want a phone that is tough and easy to use," said Bales, 30. "I don…

OK, PZ, Grrlscientist, and John have all done it. They've used a cool little applet to show their blogs as graphs. I figured I'd give it a try, too. Why not? (Click on the image to see the graph construct itself.) Basically, the applet shows the tree structure of a web page in a rather interesting way. The key is below: blue: for links (the A tag) red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags) green: for the DIV tag violet: for images (the IMG tag) yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags) orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags) black: the HTML…

Worried about ghosts bothering you? What about demons possessing you? Or aliens abducting you for all sorts of strange experiments, complete with anal probes? Well, fear no more! I've discovered just the thing. You need a Paranormal Restraining Order! Feel like sinning and don't want to be subject to the Lord's wrath? This is just the thing! Tell the Big Guy to stay away and leave you alone! Here are some handy guidelines that you might be in an abusive relationship with a paranormal entity and hence need a restraining order: You frequently worry about how they will react to things you say…

It's the middle of a long holiday weekend (well, here in the U.S., anyway). What better time to do a silly Internet quiz to pass the time while waiting to round? (Yes, I'm working all weekend.) What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die? You will be smothered under a rug. You're a little anti-social, and may want to start gaining new social skills by making prank phone calls.Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code Hmmm. Sounds about right. I wonder what horrible Edward Gorey way others will die...

Hilarious. It incorporates what we know now from the prequels into what might have happened when Darth Vader had to tell the Emperor what happened at the end of the first Star Wars movie:

It's the Memorial Day weekend, and many of you will be taking off for various recreational activities over the three day weekend. Sadly, I'll be on call and thus working the entire weekend, having drawn the short straw for this particular holiday. However, to console myself with the fact that it could be worse, I'll remember that I could be spending time at what is probably the worst amusement park in the world.

This is just too rich. As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did the same thing for Ayurvedic medicines and found some of them also contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, concluding: If taken as recommended by the manufacturers, each of these 14 could result in heavy metal intakes above published regulatory standards Indeed, in the compounds that tested postive for…

I've commented before on some of Pat Robertson's loonier statements. Given the sheer fundie religious nuttery that he regularly spouts, it takes something related to my regular blogging interests for him to catch my attention. I know it's amazing, but somehow he managed to do just that. First, a little anti-Semitism: When you think of Jewish people, you think of successful businessmen. You think of people that are very wise in finance and who are prosperous. And when you think of poor countries around the world, you'd never would consider the nation of Israel. But in parts of the Jewish…

You know, sometimes medicine sucks, particularly oncology. Oh, it's not so bad for surgeons, particularly breast surgeons, because we can cure many of the patients we operate on. But for solid tumor oncologists, who deal with diseases that current medicine can't cure but only palliate day in and day out can, if you don't get adequate rewards for it, be soul-crushing. (That's one reason that I ultimately went into surgical oncology rather than medical oncology; I found I just wasn't cut out to deal with the kinds of patients medical oncologists do.) Those of us in academics do it for a lot…

It's been an interesting week for this week's host of the Skeptics' Circle, Skeptico. He had a creationist appropriate his name, create a Blogspot blog, and actually post comments on other people's blogs under the name "Skeptico." Not good. Fortunately, no one was fooled, and it was the False Skeptico's posting creationist tripe on other blogs that brought him to the attention of Skeptico himself, then to me, and then to PZ. Fortunately, for the 35th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, Skeptico has decided to have a little fun with his doppleganger, and the result is yet another fine edition of…

Here's a scary error, reported by Abel Pharmboy: David Douglas of Reuters Health reported last Friday on the publication of a clinical trial revealing that a one-week trial of Benadryl (diphenhydramine HCl) was superior to Clarinex (desloratadine) in managing symptoms of moderate-to-severe allergic rhinitis, or hay fever. The article was published in the April 2006 issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (2006;96:606-614) You can read the results here but Douglas misprinted the Benadryl dose as 500 mg! three times daily. The actual dose, 50 mg, t.i.d., is already high enough to…

One annoying thing about the blogosphere for someone like me is that a lot of things that I want to write about pop up during the day, when I'm at work. Blogging is all about immediacy and time. Wait too long to write about a topic, and the moment's passed. For me, by the time I get home in the evening, even though someone may have e-mailed me an article that they thought I'd like to comment on, I often find myself refraining from jumping into the fray, simply because so many have already commented on it already. This problem is magnified (for me, at least) by belonging to ScienceBlogs,…

It seems a reasonable question to ask, given my propensity for it. Unfortunately that's not what our Seed overlords asked this week. This week, they ask: If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be? Predictably, some ScienceBloggers answered: evolution and what it really means, not the parody of evolution presented by creationists or the simplistic version of it that is often taught in school or discussed in the mainstream media. I can't argue with that answer, but I'm a physician; so my answer will be different: If I could get the public to…

Wow, I wish I had the balls to make this retort to prisoners that used to be brought to the E.R. when I was still a resident. I just hope he had a security guard like the one we used to have at our county hospital when I was a resident. This guy was close to 7 feet tall and built like a tank. Whenever such patients got a bit frisky, we'd just have him stand in the doorway. It usually calmed them right down.

Here's the reason why: An atrocity is unleashed today. The Chairman is rolling over in his grave. Hell, he's probably doing backflips. I'm guessing that they're lowering the flags to half mast in Hoboken as we speak.