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Papers please

Many years ago, when fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen was riding a wave of racist sentiment in France, I was a young student out with friends on a perfect spring evening along the Seine. There was at that time always a vigorous national police presence in Paris. The CRS with their sub-machine guns were visible outside government buildings and patrolling the streets. Racism was a palpable presence in Paris. A popular deli, Jo Goldenberg's, had been bombed a few years earlier, and the nearby Holocaust museum had bullet holes in one of its glass walls. One time when I tried to order coffee at a…

Update on fake diseases

I've been a bit busy lately and haven't been able to update you on some important developments in the field of imaginary diseases. Update 1: Chronic Lyme Disease So-called "chronic Lyme disease" (CLD) is a diverse constellation of symptoms which are often attributed to Lyme disease, but without objective evidence of infection with the organism that causes Lyme disease. Patient advocacy have been very active in insisting that reality conform to their beliefs, going so far as convincing the Connecticut Attorney General to investigate the Infectious Disease Society of America. As part of an…

Platelet rich plasma

Several months ago, Dr. Val Jones wrote about a growing fad in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders. The therapy, called platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection, involves taking a small amount of blood from a patient, spinning it down in a centrifuge, and then injecting the plasma component into...somewhere. This treatment is becoming increasingly popular, and can be very lucrative for doctors. But does it work? Blood platelets are very biologically active particles and plasma is not a bland fluid. Platelets and plasma contain many biologically active molecules, some of which may be…

Saturday miscellania

It's a cold day here in Lake Woebegone southeast Michigan. I'm looking out the kitchen window at the thermometer: +11 F, which is apparently the same -11 C. From my kitchen table, I can see the neighbors let out the dog, who seems unfazed by the cold. He's some sort of little fuzzy white dog and he's currently sniffing happily. It's not quite cold enough for the air to have that extra clarity you see when it gets really cold, but I'm still not rushing outside. It's pretty cold upstairs. We probably need to replace more of the windows, and I'm not so sure about our insulation, so we were…

McKitrick update

McKitrick has added a correction his page describing his paper that purports to find economic signals that I posted on here. McKitrick admits to mixing up degrees and radians but claims: There was a small error in the calculation of regression coefficients in our paper. Our conclusions were not affected by this problem As I noted in my post, correcting the error halves the size of the economic signal in the warming trend, reducing it from 0.16 (out of 0.27) to 0.09. McKitrick's correction states: Outside the dry/cold regions the measured temperature change is…

The anti-vaccination movement is morally bankrupt

A hat-tip to my buddy Abel over at TerraSig for keeping this story alive and inspiring me to chime in.  --PalMD It's no secret that I find the anti-vaccination crowd to be abhorrent. The public's health is the first victim, followed closely by individual patients and parents struggling with individual health decisions. I cannot fault patients for making bad decisions---the anti-vaccination movement has a very effective propaganda arm. Folks like Jenny McCarthy have a large audience and make no secret of their desire to see infectious diseases increase in others: I do believe sadly it's…

Swine flu in my home state--grim news

Michigan has suffered enough. We've been devastated by economic and manufacturing changes, leading to mass unemployment, poverty, and poor education. That last one is really killing us. According to news reports, more than half of Michiganders plan to forgo vaccination, mostly for reasons that betray a lack of education. This is at a time when schools across the state are closing their doors because of the flu. They aren't closing their doors out of irrational fears, or for quarantine or isolation purposes, but because so many people are sick that it's not worth it to keep the doors open…

Open Letter to Fred the Pool Nazi

Dear Fred: First, I'd like to thank you for guarding the integrity of the swimming pool in my folks' neighborhood. I know they feel safer because of you. On that proud day twenty years ago, the day they handed you the thin cotton t-shirt with the banded collar and sleeves that reads "Pool Monitor", who could have known the proud years of service that would follow? I know I couldn't have because I was in college writing a paper on The Authoritarian Personality (classic Adorno, you should read it). Your recent service is to be especially praised. When my wife fell asleep in the sun by the…

Intuitive Scamming for Health--HuffPo does it again

Just when you think the Huffington Post can't get any more inane and idiotic, just when you think your synapses might be starting to heal, they come out with another post that simply makes your ears bleed. Sure, HuffPo regularly comes down on the side of superstition, for example in the vaccine manufactroversy; and sure, they sometimes veer into the lane of deceptive medical infomercials. But I sort of held out hope that they wouldn't resort to hosting potential fraud. Fraud, you say? Well, not clearly. But, just as we in the Midwest know that when the sky turns that certain shade of…

NAS responds to Lottâs attack

The NAS has responded to Lott's attack on their panel on firearms research. I'm posting their whole letter: A Lott of misinformation The recent column by John Lott about the National Research Council's project and report on improving scientific information and data on firearms ["Mountain of evidence shows gun control doesn't work," commentary, Jan. 8] contained significant errors. The NRC is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. In composing the committee, the NRC ensured that all areas of relevant scientific expertise for the…

The LA Times sucks

Not content with printing op-eds by John Lott, the LA Times has published a piece of disinformation by Nick Schultz. The LA Times fails to disclose that Schultz works for a public relations company that has ExxonMobil as a client. The central message of Schultz's piece is that science will never resolve the question of climate change: At some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming. Climate change is complex, with scores of variables and time-frame considerations of decades and even centuries. Both sides have substantial data…

Are all the opinion polls in the US rigged?

Steven den Beste has looked at a graph of polls of voting intentions and decided: In September, I think there was a deliberate attempt to depress Kerry's numbers, so as to set up an "October comeback". Of course, the goal was to engineer a bandwagon. This seems rather implausible to me. There are very many organizations do the polling. If all the polls are rigged, a huge number of people would have to know about it, and surely one of them would have leaked the information by now. It also seems unlikely that every single poller (including, for example,…

We need to fix Medicare NOW!

Medicare is the government health care program for the elderly. For internists such as me, Medicare patients make up around half our practice. Because of historical budget tools, every year Congress goes through the motion of watching our reimbursement cut, and quickly fixing it. It's a terrible system. As a small business, my costs are pretty much fixed: rent, employee pay, health insurance, supplies, etc. Every year, a Medicare pay cut goes into effect, and then our checks are held while Congress puts together a temporary fix. This year, the pay cut is 21%. That means that I will…

Blame Comcast, Xfinity, or whatever it is it's calling itself these days!

I have an unfortunate announcement today. Because the most craptastic of all broadband services, Comcast (since rebranded as Xfinity) let me down last night, going out for several hours and only deigning to start working again a couple of hours ago, there's no blog post this morning other than this rather annoyed announcement. So, if you're jones-ing for your daily dose of Insolence, be it Respectful or Not-So-Respectful (and my original intention for this morning was Not-So-Respectful, which is always more entertaining, although too much of it gives the haters an opening to become tone…

Mr. Michael Dochniak, meet Prometheus

A while back I wrote a brief, snarky post about a bizarre hypothesis that I considered so risible as not to be worth applying my usual 1,500 to 3,000 words of not-so-Respectful Insolence to. My original post was in response to a press release announcing a book by Michael J. Dochniak and Denise H. Dunn entitled Vaccine Delivery and Autism (The Latex Connection). Basically, the book posits a ridiculous hypothesis that the Latex in some vaccine delivery systems is a cause of autism. Not long after I posted it, Mr. Dochniak himself showed up in my comments, and hilarity ensued. Boy, did it ever!…

Socializing them right into the hate camp

Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it's facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here's one of the more outrageous comments: Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley…

RNA decay particles

Flipping through the latest issue of Cell: Ujwal Sheth from Roy Parker's lab details the molecular mechanism that targets RNAs with premature stop codons to processing-bodies (or p-bodies) via the non-sense mediated decay (NMD) pathway. P-bodies are dense cytoplasmic granule-like structures that serve as sites of mRNA storage/degradation. P-bodies contain decapping enzymes, RNAses, and many other proteins of unkown function. In this paper the authors demonstrate that the NMD component, and RNA helicase, Upf1p, targets aberrant mRNA to granules. Upf1p's ATPase activity is then required to…

Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo

Well if some Americans say soccer is boring, it's because they clearly weren't watch today's games. This group which was called by some the group of death (I guess all disputes about this title are resolved after today's games). So here the wrap up: Ghana vs. Czech Rep. The Czechs (rank #2 by FIFA) went into the game as clear favorites, while the Ghanaians who have been called the Brazilians of Africa played well but failed to score against Italy in their last match. What happened? It was a near slaughter. The Ghanaians have incredible individual talent, but unlike in their previous game (and…

Update from Life Science Industry

Last night I was at another party in Cambridge, a good friend of mine is leaving Boston to go work for Pfizer in NYC. (Aside - why does it seem like anyone in Cambridge who is not a student or a professor, works for Biotech, Pharma or an IT start up?) In any case I had an interesting conversation with XXXX who works for a Venture Capital Firm that specializes in funding new biotech startups. We got into an interesting conversation about the current status of the pharmaceutical industry in the US and overseas. Apparently the pharmaceutical market is in a weird state. Venture Capitalists are…

WildAid Is Badass

I'm back. After a two month hiatus from posting due to the grand opening of Bullitt, my second bar in San Francisco, I have finally adjusted my schedule to accommodate posting, and I'm pumped. First on my list: I have been looking for years for the best endangered species group to put my support behind. I think I've found it, WildAid. Do you know about them? If you live in Asia, then you have. If you live in the states, then maybe not. WildAid is, in my mind, the most badass endangered species preservation group in the world today. Started by wildlife investigators who were fed up with…

The War On Arctic Terror

Hat tip goes to Kiki, who pointed out a recent article in Wired, U.S. Readies for Polar Warfare (Updated). There you have it...Canada is amping up its military presence in the Arctic and so is the U.S. In an recent announcement titled Technologies for Persistent Operations in High LAtitude Regions (POLAR), Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for new technology and operation concepts that would give our forces the advantage. The article also points to the 2001 symposium report Naval Operations in an Ice Free Arctic that you can download as handy pdf. The obvious…

I'm Blogging At Sea Baby! Pt. 2

It is very early in the morning. Yes I know its only a little after 7am but I really am not a morning person. Like most mornings leaving the dock in Moss Landing it is foggy and relatively cold. I'm not whining its just cold for a southern boy. I will be on the Pt. Lobos today, affectionately referred to by some as the Pt. Puke for its high draft and odd roll but I love her anyway.  We will be using the ROV Ventana to visit the ocean floor at approximately 850m. We have an approximate 2 hour steam and subsequent 1-2 hour wait for the Ventana to reach our seafloor sampling site in…

What I taught in the development lab today

After our disastrous chick lab — it turns out that getting fertilized chicken eggs shipped to remote Morris, Minnesota during a blizzard is a formula for generating dead embryos — the final developmental biology lab for the semester is an easy one. I lectured the students on structuralism and how there are more to cells then genes (there's also cytoplasm and membranes and environment) earlier today. This afternnon I've given them recipes for soap bubble solution and told them to play. They're supposedly making little model multicellular organisms by chaining soap bubbles together, and…

From The Desk of Zelnio: New Geophysical Study May Point The Direction To New Vent Discoveries

    Perspective view of East Pacific Rise and the seismic velocity structure of the underlying mantle. Surprisingly, regions of magma storage in the mantle (shown as orange and red colors) are in many places not centered beneath the plate plate boundary. Courtesy Douglas Toomey  [Note from Craig: I have asked Kevin Zelnio, a graduate student with preeminent deep-sea biologist Chuck Fisher, to guest post. I am excited by the addition of Kevin as this should add breadth to DSN in the realm of chemosynthetic communities.] Current thought about the formation of vents is that mantle upwells…

Just Science #2: Science and Industry Collaboration in Deep-Sea Research

Just Science Entry #2 [For the second day of Just Science, I asked Henry Ruhl, fellow MBARI'ian and deep-sea ecologist to discuss a new project he is involved with] Much of what we know about temporal variability in deep-sea ecology comes from only a few locations and most timeseries studies extend back less than two decades. Comprehensive understanding of both natural variability and anthropogenic impacts will require longer datasets. Providing some certainty about the spatial extent of any observed trends will require the inclusion of currently under-sampled locations such as the…

Just call us eco-daredevils

Modern ocean prophet Wallace J Nichols presented the first ever Ecodaredevil Award to Duke University graduate student Elliott Hazen this past April 22nd, on Earth Day. Elliott received the award for on-campus activism at Duke Marine Lab, co-founding GreenWave, a student led sustainability movement, and introducing a class "Green by Design" that brought experts from business, and fisheries to speak about sustainability. Elliott does great research, too. J Nichols is on the left in the picture below, while Elliott Hazen proudly dons his brand new helmet-slash-environmental award.…

You Should Fear and Respect the Radula

Jim has decided that he will join the darkside for the Invertebrate Battle Royale. That's fine! We wouldn't want someone with such poor cognitive processes on our team. Jim's attack centers on the idea that the Aristotle's Lantern is cooler than the radula. Now I just cannot stand for this. Especially after reading about how the molluscan radula is deemed one of the reasons this phylum is so cool compared to the echinodermata. I'm sorry, but Craig must not be thinking clearly. The radula? A spiky ribbon makes molluscs cool? Please. Don't waste your time, Craig. If we're going to be…

Humor, Men, and Women: The Film.

As a belated follow-on to my rant on ol' Hissy Chrissy Hitchies' contention that women aren't funny, I offer this film clip via LiveScience: Humor and the Sexes. Be forewarned that you must suffer through a Yahoo ad in the beginning which pokes gentle fun at Incompetent Men and Their Tools, a subject that is always a knee-slappper. In the meat of the film, Allan Reiss discusses the tantalizing observations that men's and women's brains respond differently to humor. From Hitchen's Vanity Fair article: The researchers found that men and women (10 each - Doc Bushwell) share much of the same…

Is This Good?

I live in the 24th Congressional District of New York State. For over 20 years we were represented by Sherwood Boehlert, a moderate Republican (a real moderate, that is). Congressman Boehlert decided to retire this year and we now have what is considered to be one of the hottest races in the country; the Republicans trying to keep the seat with Ray Meier, a NY state senator and in my opinion no way comparable to to Boehlert, and the Democrats trying to tip the balance in their favor with Oneida County DA Michael Arcuri. I have mentioned elsewhere that I feel Mr. Meier is a poor choice,…

Beach Wheelchair Update

Two years ago I wrote about taking my mother to Cape Hatteras, and how great it was to have the use of a beach wheelchair that allowed my sister and I to take her right onto the beach. I wanted to call your attention to a comment recently left on that post by Jerry Nasello: We thought you might like to know about how our little motorized beach wheelchair company is doing. We opened for business in April of this year. We rented a grand total of one motorized beach wheelchair in the month of April. However, in the month of May we were booked solid for almost the entire month. In April we had a…

Why, oh why, are we ruled by this hack?

Via ThinkProgress, Dick Cheney tells ABCNews: I think there’s an emerging consensus that we do have global warming. You can look at the data on that, and I think clearly we’re in a period of warming. Where there does not appear to be a consensus, where it begins to break down, is the extent to which that’s part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man, greenhouse gases, et cetera. Cheney is understating both points. The IPCC SPM does not say that there is an emerging consensus on global warming, it says "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident…

Conventional wisdom

For whatever reason, there is some sort of conventional wisdom that, in 2006, Nancy Boyda "didn't win, the district, Ryun lost the district." That quote comes from Duke University's David Rohde, and here is the Wichita Eagle's comment on Boyda's choice not to accept DCCC support: This will make 2008 not only a retest of her grassroots campaign style and a referendum on her already controversial record, but also a test of the theory that she didn’t so much win in November as Jim Ryun lost -- because his conservative base stayed home. The idea that the conservative base just doesn't seem to…

The ideology of a cancer cell

Ed Abbey, in a great essay on development in Arizona (anthologized in One Life at a Time, Please), commented that "the religion of endless growth – like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason – is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease. And the one disease to which the growth mania bears an exact analogical resemblance is cancer. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell. Cancer has no purpose but growth; but it does have another result – the death of the host." Sebastian Mallaby made me think of this when he writes: Modern societies worship…

Jana Shaver's agenda

As new Board of Ed candidate Shaver prepares to take office, she is laying out a pretty sound agenda: Shaver said priority number one would be to hire a new commissioner of education after former commissioner Bob Corkins resigned recently. Shaver said she thought the new commissioner would need experience in education and managing large groups of people, along with communication and financial skills. After that, Shaver said there are several key issues to work on. "When I was out campaigning and talking to folks, parents, teachers, everybody is concerned about No Child Left Behind and the…

Red, blue, and purple

Kansas is a divided state, at war between red and blue and purple. Even setting aside the battle between K-State and KU, there's a war between conservatives, Democrats, and moderate voters who used to think of themselves as moderates. While the New York Times can only find time to mention that 6 year-old Nebraskans love Dick Cheney, and couldn't find time to mention that he was in Kansas not to "feel the love," but to shore up a faltering Congressman in Red America, others are seeing a shift in purple Kansas. The Cook Political Report just moved the Kansas 2nd from "Solid Republican" to "…

I hate Traditional Chinese Medicine

Quacks, every one, and monsters promoting destruction of the unique and precious. Look what they've done in the name of giving impotent, tiny-dicked ignoramuses a magic potion: Poachers have butchered the last adult rhinoceros at a South African game reserve, cutting off her horn and letting her bleed to death, the chief game ranger says. Rhino horns are just large lumps of keratin, nothing more. They do nothing to make men attractive, they don't enhance an erection, they don't increase desire. You might as well make a pill from ground-up fingernail clippings, it is the same thing. But…

Frightening Fungi, Amorous Slugs, and Armored Mammals

It might be a bit tenuous to base a post on something I saw in a cheesy 80's monster movie (complete with a synthesizer- and drum machine-driven montage), but the film Monster Squad got me thinking about science education. In an early scene, two monster-obsessed young boys are called into the main office, their principal extolling the virtues of science over adolescent interest in fantastic creatures. The principal, of course, comes off as a nerd and the overall impression is that science is utterly boring. While creatures of myth and legend can be pretty interesting, nature provides an array…

Don't be hatin'

Michael Lemonick hates science bloggers, or actually is maybe just a little jealous of how awesome we are. In the past, great popular science communicators like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan brought science to the public in an understandable (and perhaps more importantly, enjoyable) way, but with the growing popularity and profusion of blogs more and more scientists are taking on the mantle of "popularizer" and bringing science to whomever has an interest. Indeed, there is something of a vicious myth that scientists are inherently bad communicators, but the existence of so many growing…

Laelaps movie of the week: The Loch Ness Horror

A monster in Loch Ness, crazy old Scots, and Nazis; what else could you want? Well, a coherent movie, of course, but The Loch Ness Horror is so full of rolled "r"s and movie cheese that fun all the same. The movie starts off with Nessie spotting some Nazi activity over the lake, the information she anonymously leaked helping Allied forces during the closing days of the war. The fact that the monster breathes air and constantly is sculling about on the surface while still being referred to as an elusive legend must mean that she was under some sort of government witness protection program.…

Possible Consequences of Inbreeding in Amur Leopards

A male Amur Leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) at the Philadelphia Zoo. To the best of my knowledge this animal is not involved in any breeding or conservation programs. According to LiveScience, a female Amur Leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) was captured, examined, and released by WCS workers this week. The leopards, being among the most endangered of big cats and estimated to number less than 40 individuals in the wild, are most likely inbreeding to continue their population, a problem that could have devastating long-term repercussions. While it is not clear whether the problem is…

A few blogs

I would just like to take this post and use it to promote some relatively new blogs that I like. Speaking of blogs, I think I have classified blog posts into 3 different kinds. Link aggregators. Chad at Uncertain Principles does this with his Links posts. These kind of blog posts are the glue of the internet. It actually turns out to be important for people to somehow determine what is worthwhile and what is not. The problem is that any old fool can put stuff on the internet and sometimes only an expert would know it is crap. Link posters may not always be experts, but as a whole they…

What could you do with 54,000 watts?

I already looked at ESPN's Sport Science episode where they calculate that Marshawn Lynch produces 54,000 watts when pulling some tires. Yes, that is way too high. However, what would happen if some was actually that powerful? What could that person do? How fast could they run 100 meters? That is what I am going to calculate. First, I am going to assume that Marshawn has a mass of about 100 kg. Also, let me say that he can produce 54,000 watts no matter what his speed. Take a short time interval. During this time, Marshawn will increase his speed from say v1 to v2 this would be a…

Physics Textbook

The following is a collection of some of my posts that can be put into a simple and quick textbook-type thingy. I am not really sure you would call this a textbook, but maybe you would. This does not include everything you would normally find in a traditional textbook, but clearly it is not traditional. I tried to keep it to just the fundamental ideas. As I write more stuff that is appropriate, I will add it. In terms of the level of this material, I would think it would be appropriate for advanced high school physics or introductory college-level physics. I plan to update this list with…

ROYGBIV and Newton

This comes up everytime I teach physics for elementary education majors. The curriculum I use (Physics for Everyday Thinking - which is awesome) says that the colors in white light are ROYGBV (Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet). Typically, I will get a student that says "Hey! What about indigo? Shouldn't it be ROYGBIV?" My first reaction to this was "huh?" Really, does it matter? Here is the spectrum you would see looking at a white light source. You could break this into as many or as few colors as you like. So, it doesn't really matter. But this leads to a great question: Who…

More pandering, please

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds - New York Times: More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.… The report shows, for example, that every religion is…

Morality and Materialism

Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this: What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory (as are other kinds of reasoning). Will Wilkinson offers up an astute reply: This is a stupefyingly widespread view that flows from an…

Medical Salaries

Here's your medical factoid of the day: As of 2003, the average income of a French physician was estimated at $55,000; in the U.S. the comparable number was $194,000. Personally, I'm a little frightened by the idea of my doctor not being highly paid. I don't want my surgeon to be a member of the middle class. I hope that anybody who's holding my heart in his hands is a highly trained professional, worthy of a ridiculously high salary. Medicine is labor intensive and high doctor salaries are inseparable from high health insurance premiums. But I'd rather invest in a better doctor than some…

Henry Gee is probably chortling happily right now

He's tweaked the noses of those 'New Atheists', for sure! One of Gee's roles is as the editor of the Futures science fiction section in Nature, and he's proud to have published a story by Shelly Li, which actually is a well-written short dystopian fantasy, titled The End of God. Gee really detests those obnoxious atheists, though, so I think one of the reasons he picked it was that it so perfectly conformed to his idea of militant atheists as fascists. The story is about a future in which satellites can somehow pick up on activity in the parietal lobe of the brain in individuals — amazing…

Some basic questions to support my point

I am getting ready for classes. One class I am teaching is a physics course for elementary education majors. I really enjoy this class. There is hardly any math and the students learn by doing some experiments and then creating models. These models are then shared and discussed among the class. The basic points of the class are: Help students learn the nature of science by doing sciency things. Learn some science content by doing stuff (instead of listening to me talk about stuff) Learn about how to teach science in elementary schools. Explore the nature of learning. I didn't really…

Poker Face

I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with professional poker players while writing How We Decide. For the most part, these players have exquisite control over their facial expressions, so that those micro-muscles around the eyes and mouth rarely betrayed their inner thoughts. (The players reacted with the same look of unflappable boredom to a pair of aces and a hand with mismatched number cards.) But I was always amused by their insistence on wearing opaque sunglasses inside the dimly lit casino. What relevant information did they think their eyeballs would betray? (Most muttered…