mikethemadbiologist

In a very interesting NY Times magazine article about wastewater treatment (no, really, it is worth reading), I came across this passage: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10wastewater-t.html?_r=1&ref… And then there are those whose first, and final, reaction is "yuck." "Why the hell…

Here's an image that is...unsettling: REUTERS/Larry Downing (by way of Dependable Renegade) Seriously, I think Bush's image handlers are just mailing it in at this point. A male politician above a certain age should never appear in the same frame as a woman half his age (or younger), particularly…

From FDR's grandson, here's a video that puts Social Security--and its current politics--in proper context: "A disgrace"? Hopefully, Democrats will run that in every ad.

Chris Mooney is worried that the latest turns in the anthrax case are reinforcing the notion of the 'mad scientist' (and what, exactly, is wrong with a Mad Scientist? Just asking): The Bruce Ivins we're hearing about in the media sounds like a mad scientist straight out of Hollywood's most…

This is creepy (italics mine): Pigtailed and smiling, Lin Miaoke, age 9, stood in a red dress and white shoes during Friday's Olympic opening ceremonies and performed "Ode to the Motherland" in what would become one of the evening's most indelible images: a lone child, fireworks blazing overhead,…

This displeases us greatly. I received an email from ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford that Reed Elsevier had excerpted one of my posts. No problem there--I like it when people read my stuff....except for one thing: The fuckers copyrighted my words. MINES!!! Lookee: (click to embiggen) Mike Dunford…

As Jesse at Pandagon notes, even though the presidential race is stagnant in that the numbers aren't shifting much, that's not the same as the race being in a dead heat. This would be obvious, if your typical political reporter wasn't a mathematically illiterate moron. Yes, I know that there's…

Commenting on John Edwards, Joe Klein makes two excellent points: --Just about anyone under the age of 60 who has lived in this permissive society during the past 40 years, has done something that might be unfit for a Hallmark Greeting Card. In fact, I have profound qualms about any would-be…

I realize science is hard and stuff, but there are serious problems with the evidence in the anthrax investigation. I'm not the only who thinks so: ScienceBloglings Tara and Revere think so too, along with most of the commentors. Thankfully, these problems are finally starting to enter the…

This story should, if you care at all about the rule of law, make your blood boil: I, Galloglas, went to vote today and encountered difficuly. And, it is important to point out that this was not the first time I've run onto problems this year. When I voted in Missouri's Presidential primary in…

Any time there's a send up of news anchors, disaster coverage, and George Bush, it's worth watching:

Welcome to the world of virophage--viruses that parasitize other viruses. What's interesting is that the 'host' viruses are the megaviruses which are visible with light microscopy and which have genomes that can be larger than some bacteria. From Science: While examining a new giant amoeba virus…

Yesterday, I mentioned my doubts about there being two anthrax strains used in the 2001 attacks. Thanks to an article identified by reader TomJoe, I'm convinced that there was only one anthrax strain involved, if the only evidence for the existence of two strains is that there is a DNA inversion…

In reading this NY Times story about the anthrax investigation, this statement about how the presence of an inversion (a region of flipped DNA) puzzled me (italics mine): The genome of various stocks of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks were almost identical in all the 5 million…

By way of Matt Yglesias, I came across this post by Tyler Cowen claiming that the dislike towards HMOs is due to "they [patients] could be told they can't get all the care they want." Cowen is wrong: the dislike towards HMOs and for-profit healthcare in general is often a reasonable conclusion…

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Glenn Greenwald asks a lot of good questions about the recent turns in the anthrax case. I'll get to Greenwald's specific questions at the end of the post, but all of Greenwald's questions could have innocuous answers. At this point, however, one would be a fool to, at least, not consider that…

David Gergen this weekend described the Republican strategy towards Obama perfectly: The best dog whistles are the ones most people don't hear. The reason McCain's ad works is because, at the root of it, there are a significant number of whites who see a successful, confident, intelligent black…

Ezra Klein has this to say about the Gang of 500 Mediocrities (also known as our national political press corps): For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base…

Glenn Greenwald's recent post about the botched anthrax investigation reminds me of a colleague who was investigated by the FBI after the anthrax attacks (and check out the letter claiming that Bruce Ivins was yet another scientist wrongfully accused). When I heard that he was under investigation,…

While corn, and particularly corn derivatives such as corn syrup and ethanol additives, is seen as the devil, an excellent exhibit of posters at the Boston Public Library portrays a time when corn products were seen as a really good thing: (from here) The exhibit is open 9-9 Monday through Friday…

More fallout from Bushist apparatchik Monica Goodling. Her political hackery weakened our ability to prosecute terrorists: In one disgraceful example, Goodling refused to hire "one of the leading terrorism prosecutors in the country" because his wife was a Democrat: He was an experienced…

I'm sure you were asking yourself that very question this morning. OK, maybe not. But one of the interesting questions about antibiotic resistance is why a certain antibiotic resistance gene or allele (gene variant) is common and others are rare. Among the beta-lactamases, the TEM-1 allele is the…

With all of the stories about bacterial contamination of food, a recent paper describes one possible way to reduce the virulence--the ability to cause disease--of the bacterium Escherichia coli. Farms are an obvious...input of E. coli--the amount of feces that a single pig produces is staggering,…

Recently, I finished Pretty Vacant which describes the origins of the British punk scene. At one point, the author describes one of the first punk-ish shows ever, and how, even though there were only about 65 people in the audience (a crappy black box hole), those 65 people would go on to have a…

Who woulda thunk it? A recent paper in PLoS One argues that the NIH review process uses far too few reviewers to claim the level of scoring precision that the NIH provides. NIH grants are scored on a scale from 1.0 to 5.0, with 1.0 being the best; reviewers can grade in tenths of a point (i.e., 1…

I recommend Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. In it, she describes one of the most devastating forces to hit modern fundamentalism (yes, that's oxymoronic)... Alcoholics Anonymous. Consider: The single best time to convert an adult has always been when he's down and out. He…

...are stupid morons together. Matt Taibbi, while discussing 9/11 Truthers, describes creationists perfectly (italics mine): Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the…

I've written before about antibiotic resistance in the developing world. Because these poor communities don't have access to many antibiotics, one wouldn't expect high frequencies of resistance to antibiotics. Resistance to ciprofloxacin ('Cipro') is all the more shocking because these…

One of the topics I discuss on this blog is the idiocy surrounding Social Security--despite all of the hype, Social Security is not DOOMED!! (To make a longish explanation short, every year for the last fourteen years, Social Security has been predicted to become insolvent in 32 to 36 years. '…