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How well do we understand sore throat?

He looked sick---really sick. He was sitting on a stretcher in an ER bay, flushed, breathing a bit quickly, but his youth seemed to compensate for the acuity of his illness, and he didn't feel nearly as bad has he looked. His fever was 104, his systolic blood pressure was in the 90s, his heart was racing. He'd had a sore throat recently, and rather than getting better started to feel weak, tired, and feverish. His mom finally dragged him in when he wouldn't stop shivering. His blood work was not normal, and his chest X-ray looked as if he'd inhaled a box full of cotton balls…

Unscientific America: When being right isn't enough

If you've dipped even one toe into the science blogosphere lately, you've seen discussion of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book, Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future. I have very little interest in the arguments currently raging but not because I don't care. The book makes interesting arguments, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't. More important, however, is that the authors have a track record of being listened to (cf The Republican War on Science). In a crisis that involves communication (i.e. of scientific knowledge), it…

"Porn isn't violence, and if you try to take it from me I'll slap you"

I'm not sure what to write about this, but I feel a need to write something. There has been an interesting and infuriating discussion going on at Jason and Zuska's blogs. Jason, whose posts on learning and cognition rock, started the discussion with an examination of a small amount of scientific literature on pornography. He's young, so he might not be aware of the extensive literature going back at least 25 years, including writings of Dworkin, MacKinnon, and many others. There's a lot of it, some of which I've read, but not for a very long time. He starts by wading into a deep swamp…

Erasing an Invention

Seed is disseminating questions to its bloggers (I guess a la www.edge.org) so this week the question is: If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why? The invention I would choose to uninvent? I spent the weekend asking some friends. Some answers were machine guns, the atomic bomb, spam, cars ... Cars did strike something deep in me. Along the lines of Heathcote Williams' Autogeddon: If an Alien Visitor were to hover a few hundred yards above the planet It could be forgiven for thinking That cars were the dominant…

Interview with a sub-pilot : John Hocevar

Part three of four in a series about Greenpeace recent manned submersible expedition to two of the largest submarine canyons in the world, the Pribilof and Zhemchug Canyons in the Bering Sea off the west coast of Alaska. The following exclusive interview was conducted by Deep Sea News over email with John Hocevar, ocean specialist for the Greenpeace organization, and a sub-pilot for the 2007 Bering Witness Expedition. 1. What is Greenpeace hoping to accomplish on this Bering Sea Expedition? This expedition was about increasing our collective understanding of Bering Sea canyons. Policy makers…

One Scientist Whose Research DOES NOT Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares

As I was catching up on all of my favorites blogs, I noticed that James Hrynyshyn at The Island of Doubt posted about the recent oddness at the Heartland Institute. To catch you up to speed the DeSmogBlog notes... Dozens of scientists are demanding that their names be removed from a widely distributed Heartland Institute article entitled 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares. The article, by Hudson Institute director and Heartland "Senior Fellow" Dennis T. Avery, purports to list scientists whose work contradicts the overwhelming scientific agreement that…

Veteran's Day Memories: Long-Term Consequences

I spent part of today visiting with an elderly relative who fought in the Korean War. That time in his life was clearly on his mind, as, when I stopped in to see him, he had been looking over some old photos from that era, including some of him in uniform. He recounted some of his experiences to me. One near-death experience came about as a result of him being assigned to be the driver for an officer, "the worst job in the world" according to him. He said that although he had been driving all sorts of vehicles all over the place ever since he'd been in the Army, including tanks, he was…

Waste

Shamelessly stolen from Nitpicker. For those who don't know, Terry was a soldier in Afghanistan, where he organized a drive for people to send pens to Afghan kids. He wrote this in response to Barack Obama's apology for saying lives have been wasted in Iraq, but it's apt after John McCain sort of apologized for saying the same thing: A closer look, however, reveals that Malkin's childish fuming is just another version of Bush's spin point: That only by "winning" the war in Iraq can we "honor" the service members already killed in his war. When you consider this logical result of this…

How many Iraqi deaths?

The Lancet has published a study of mortality in Iraq, a followup to a similar study from a year ago. In this study, they estimated that over 650,000 more people died in Iraq during the US occupation than would have died otherwise. The Questionable Authority has some objections. I'll start off by pointing out that he isn't disputing the basic conclusion. Mike writes: even if I am correct, and all of these errors result in overestimates of the total number of deaths, the number is still going to be much higher than the "official" totals. The population of Iraq is being harmed by this war,…

AIDS testing

Reposted from the old TfK. Two recent comments on the 25th anniversary of AIDS took up a similar call, one in the New England Journal of Medicine, the other from Scienceblogger Tara Smith. Both essentially argue for the broadening of HIV testing in American society. The NEJM piece largely recycles the history of debates about testing for HIV in the general population, and state limitations on what testing can be mandated. Tara explains: Currently, the testing paradigm in most areas is patient-instituted, and involves the three C's: consent, confidentiality, and counseling (generally before…

Mercedes Roll

Here is a commercial for some Mercedes car. The first part is quite boring, but check out the stunt at around 2:00 minutes into the video. I haven't bothered to check if this is officially fake or not. Instead, I will do what I do - see if this is even feasible. The common question people ask when they see something like this is: "how does the car defy gravity?" Well, it doesn't. Why doesn't it fall? In a sense it does. This is essentially the same as spinning a bucket of water over your head. Maybe a diagram of the car at the top of the tunnel will help. I tried to make the car stand…

The physics of Michael Jackson's moonwalk

Was the moonwalk fake? No, not the Apollo landings. I am talking about Michael Jackson's moonwalk. You got to admit, he had a big impact on a lot of stuff and this is my way to give him respect - physics. I am sure you know about the moonwalk. Maybe you can even do the dance move yourself, but how does it work? First, here is a clip of MJ doing his stuff. As a side note, I can't remember where I saw it but there was a great discussion of the history of the moonwalk. If I recall correctly, some were saying Michael didn't create this move. One thing is for sure, he made it popular. Now…

On corruption

Many innocent electrons have been spilt in discussions of John McCain's apparent dalliance with a lobbyist from Paxson Communication. The discourse has largely focused on whether he had an affair (probably), and whether the New York Times and Washington Post did the right thing in reporting on it (definitely). I say he probably had an affair not only because of what the Times and Post reported, but because McCain's two wives look quite similar to each other (and to the lobbyist), and because his first marriage ended because of an affair with his second wife. In 1979, Steve Benen reminds us…

Do not drive near creationists

At Bill Dembski's blog, crandaddy applies intelligent design to driving: you don’t go about searching for design by looking for designers; you infer its presence from the explanatory inadequecy of epistemic nondesign processes (chance and necessity). This is the heuristic procedure for design inferences at all levels–animal, human, ET, God, or whatever. If naturalistic nondesign explanations are the only type allowed at the biological and cosmological levels, then why not impose the same restriction on scientific explanations at the human level? Are the drivers of the automobiles I pass on…

The Psychology of Genocide

Stalin famously said that "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Sadly, it turns out that Stalin's observation is psychologically accurate. That, at least, is the conclusion of Paul Slovic, a scientist at the University of Oregon. Slovic set out to answer a tragically simple question: Why do good people ignore mass murder and genocide? The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It's not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human…

The Personality Paradox

David Brooks has written yet another wonderful column on the mind. This time he explores the nagging gap between our intuitions about personality - we each express a particular set of character traits, which can be traced back to our early childhood - and the scientific facts, which suggest that the vague personality traits measured by the Myers-Briggs are too vague to mean much of anything. Here's Brooks: In Homer's poetry, every hero has a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning. And so was born one picture of character and conduct. In this view, what you might call the philosopher's…

Daydreaming and Booze

What happens to the brain when we drink alcohol? In recent years, scientists have discovered that booze works by binding to and potentiating a specific GABA receptor subtype. (GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain, which means it helps to regulate and quiet cellular activity.) While it remains unclear how, exactly, these chemical tweaks produce the psychological changes triggered by a beer or bourbon, a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (along with Jonathan Schooler, at UCSB) have found one intriguing new side-effect of alcohol: it makes…

This statement is not a tautology

In honor of MarkCC's latest effort to explain to the deeply egnorant Michael Egnor why the fact that any inferentially true set of statements – including scientific theories – can be reformulated as a tautology, I thought I'd crack open Elliot Sober's excellent Philosophy of Biology, in which he discusses the relevance of the "tautology" objection to evolution. But before doing that, I have to take exception to something Egnor said. I actually take exception to nearly everything he says, but I'd rather not bog down in the details. Egnor tries to summarize natural selection as "survivors…

Bullets of Interest (as the number of open Firefox tabs approaches infinity).

You know the thing about holiday weekends and kids? You end up feeling like you need some kind of vacation -- and here's the work week again. Wheeee! Here are some of the things I've been reading and thinking about while trying to piece together enough continguous space-time bits to craft a proper blog post: At Crooked Timber, Ezster Hargittai wonders about the sociological research that seems to draw broad conclusions based on surveys of smallish samples of traditional aged college students. She writes: There are several fields that base a good chunk of their empirical research on…

The difference between political activism and what I'd like to be doing.

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention's heartening attention to matters scientific: The good news is: science! Thanks largely to DarkSyde's efforts, there was a substantial presence of science bloggers at YearlyKos. A "Science Bloggers Caucus" on Thursday night, which I expected to collect a dozen or so misplaced souls who weren't interested in the gatherings sponsored by some of the big political blogs, instead packed a room to overflowing with over fifty energetic participants from a wide cross-…

I want to…DANCE!

But I can't. I am quite possibly the worst dancer in our galaxy (notice the nod to my self-esteem: I can acknowledge that there might be an entity worse at dancing somewhere in the universe). But still, this announcement spoke to my inner Balanchine. Who said scientists can't dance? The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is proud to announce the third annual "Dance Your Ph.D." interpretative dance video contest. The contest, which is open to anyone with a Ph.D. or pursuing a Ph.D. in a science-related field, asks scientists to transform their research into an…

A volcanic cruise through the Mariana Islands: Part 2

Our tour of the Marianas begins SW of Guam. In this area the volcanoes are submerged and make up a region known as the Southern Seamount Province. Our first stop is Tracey Seamount, which lies 30 km west of Guam. Tracey is a ~2 km tall cone and volume of ~45 km3 It is one of the smaller volcanoes in the Mariana arc; Pagan, contains about 2200 km3 of material (Bloomer et al., 1989). It has a sector collapse on its western flank and resembles a submarine Mt. St. Helens. It was investigated by the ROV Hyper-Dolphin from the R/V Natsushima in Feb. 2009, which revealed that the cone is map up of…

Evangelicals and the nonreligious don't differ in science literacy

Sociologist John Evans talks about his research on evangelical attitudes toward science. Writing for the LA Times, he says: I recently conducted survey research comparing the most conservative of Protestants â those who identify with a conservative Protestant denomination, attend church regularly and take the Bible literally, or about 11% of the population in my analysis â with those who do not participate in any religion. The conservative Protestants are equally likely to understand scientific methods, to know scientific facts and to claim knowledge of science. They are as likely as the…

Islamophobia and its malcontents

If unhinged wingnuts can be believed, your own TfK is responsible for Rep. Peter King dropping plans to invite Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak at his anti-Muslim hearings. Also, a bunch of clergy have asked him not to pursue his race-baiting hearings, as did a Congressman once interned by the US government because of his parents' nationality. While Rep. King's hearings are still seen by sane people as designed "to cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia," his changes to the lineup have begun to frustrate the sort of people who can…

On healthcare

I've never been more ashamed of the Democratic party than I am right now, watching the idiots in Congress piss away the opportunity to expand insurance coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans, to protect the insurance coverage of people who have preexisting conditions, to save Medicare by reducing the rate of medical inflation, and to lay the groundwork for a greater expansion of progressive policies down the road. The election of Scott Brown changes nothing in the House, and very little in the Senate. House and Senate negotiators were working on merging the different health care bills,…

Undermining the troops to make us all sicker

Steve Benen reminds me about the GOP effort to block a defense spending bill to delay health-care reform: Senate Republicans said Thursday that they would try to filibuster a massive Pentagon bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unusual move that several acknowledged was an effort to delay President Obama's health-care legislation. ⦠"I don't want health care," Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) said in explaining his support of a filibuster. He is a member of the Appropriations Committee, which crafted the Pentagon funding bill. Brownback is running for Governor of Kansas next…

Hypertension, race, class & Puerto Rico!

Update: Author comments below. PLoS ONE has an interesting paper out, Genetic Ancestry, Social Classification, and Racial Inequalities in Blood Pressure in Southeastern Puerto Rico. They're exploring the topic of African ancestry and hypertension, which seems to have a positive correlation, but where there is dispute as to whether that correlation is driven only by genes, or environment, or a combination. Puerto Rico is characterized by a wide range in admixture between Europeans & Africans (with a minor but significant amount of Amerindian). Additionally, because most variance in…

Being oveweight as a function of region & race

Tyler Cowen linked to a Time article on the phenomenon of Southern Americans being relatively overweight vis-a-vis Americans from other regions of the country. Several reasons are offered, from the lower per capita income of Southern states, to the fact that Southern food tends to be fried and less healthful. But the article doesn't mention one very salient fact: black Americans are heavier than white Americans, and are disproportionately concentrated in Southern states. What is a regional disparity could be accounted for by underlying differences in the distribution of races. State Health…

Swedish stereotypes, true & false

Sweden Says No to Saving Saab: Which makes it all the more wrenching that the Swedish government has responded to Saab's desperate financial situation by saying, essentially, tough luck. Or, as the enterprise minister, Maud Olofsson, put it recently, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories." Such a view might seem jarring, coming as it does from a country with a reputation for a paternalistic view of workers and companies. The "Swedish model" for dealing with a banking crisis -- nationalizing the banks, recapitalizing them and selling them -- has been much debated lately in…

Creationist drivel from a (sob) Computer Science Professor

Much to my professional shame, PZ recently pointed out David Plaisted, a Computer Science professor at the University of North Carolina, who has href="http://www.cs.unc.edu/%7Eplaisted/ce/challenge8.html">an anti-evolution screed on his university website. Worse, it's typical creationist drivel, which anyone with half a brain should know is utter rubbish. But worst of all, this computer scientist's article is chock full of bad math. And it's deliberately bad math: this guy works in automated theorem proving and rewrite systems - there's no way that he doesn't know what utter drivel his…

Chaos in the classroom and how to replace it with learning

Can we replace Classroom Chaos with Learning-Centered Education? K–12 education can be better. One of the most effective changes that could be made is to reduce the amount of chaos in the classroom and replace it with learning. I spend several hours a year in various schools giving presentations on Anthropology, Evolution, Brainzz, and other topics. Plus, I know some teachers and have taught seminars specifically for teachers. For these reasons I have a sense of what happens in high school (and to a lesser extent middle school and elementary school) classrooms. What I am about to describe…

Guest Column: Looking Over the Cliffs of Dover

Ed. note: This is a guest post on the ACLU lawsuit filed against the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania by Dan Ray. Dan is an attorney and the director of the Paralegal Studies Program at Eastern Michigan University. He studied in law school under the esteemed Jack Balkin of the Yale Law School. Looking Over the Cliffs of Dover by Dan Ray Like all those who are interested in science, education, and the separation of church and state, I've been watching the developments in Dover very closely over the past several months. It has been fascinating on many different levels: religious and…

The "triumph" of New Age medicine? The Atlantic strikes again

Note added 6/16/2011: The author of the target--I mean subject--of this piece of insolence has responded in the comments. Note added 6/17/2011: Steve Novella has also commented. He is unusually harsh (for him). What is it with The Atlantic lately? It used to be one of my favorite magazines. In fact, I was a subscriber for something like 20 or 25 years. Then, back in 2009 at the height of the H1N1 frenzy, The Atlantic published what can only be described as an execrable bit of journalism lionizing the brave maverick doctor Tom Jefferson and arguing, in essence, that vaccinating against H1N1…

Zika virus and microcephaly: The conspiracy theories flow fast and furious

It's an oft-stated cliche that our children our our future. That's the reason stories involving dire threats to children are considered so terrifying. It's why, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End resonated so creepily. After all, as part of the end of civilization, a frightening change came over the children, who became far superior in abilities and mental power to their parents. Another example includes Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, whose plot involves the human race being plagued by a new disease called "Herod's Flu," which causes pregnant women to spontaneously abort their…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Enhance your molecules!

I had considered putting Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus this week. It seemed rather superfluous. After all, for whatever reason, whatever confluence of strangeness, this blog has read like Your Friday Dose of Woo for nearly the entire week. I mean, come on. I started out fisking that über-woo Deepak Chopra on Monday, and then, not satisfied with one deconstruction of Choprawoo, I took him on again on Tuesday! Then, not content that enough woo had been dealt with on the blog this week, for whatever reason, yesterday I decided to write about what is arguably the ultimate in woo (at least in…

The Cancer Blog goes woo

I used to like The Cancer Blog. I really did. It was one of the first medical blogs I discovered many months ago when I first dipped my toe into the blogosphere. Indeed, less than two months after I started blogging, one of The Cancer Blog's bloggers then, Dr. Leonardo Faoro, even invited me to join him as one of its bloggers. Although as a new blogger I was very flattered by the attention and offer, I nonetheless reluctantly turned the offer down because at the time I didn't know whether this whole blogging thing would work out and was afraid of being tied down and obligated to provide a…

Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants: Hot or Not?

Following the news about the damage and explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plants has been distressing and confusing. Major news media outlets report high levels of released radiation, while nuclear engineers have a different opinion. Who's right? According to The New York Times report (Mar. 15): {my emphasis} At least 750 workers evacuated on Tuesday morning after a separate explosion ruptured the inner containment building at reactor No. 2 at the Daiichi plant, which was crippled by Friday's earthquake and tsunami. The explosion released a surge of radiation 800 times more…

Pumping autistic children full of an industrial chelator (revisited)

Remember Boyd Haley? He's the Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky whose formerly respectable career tanked because he fell into pseudoscience. For whatever reason, a while back he became enamored first of dental amalgam quackery to the point where he became involved in organizations like Consumers for Dental Choice (a.k.a. "Toxic Teeth"), whose expressed raison d'etre is to "work to abolish mercury dental fillings"). From that position, he promoted the idea that mercury-containing dental amalgams are horrifically toxic, helping to spread…

Did the “CDC whistleblower” William W. Thompson apologize to Andrew Wakefield in a text message? A hilarious challenge is issued!

Two months ago, one of the strangest stories ever to be flogged by antivaccine activists was insinuating its way throughout social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and everywhere else, where antivaccine activists were engaged in a frantic effort to get the attention of mainstream media regarding their belief that there was a "CDC whistleblower" who had revealed a "cover up" that results from a CDC study looking at age of receiving MMR vaccination was studied as a potential risk factor for autism had shown that African-American boys showed a more than three-fold increased risk due to MMR…

After five years, Bill Maher lets his antivaccine freak flag fly again

Note added 2/10/2015: I've posted a followup in response to the skeptics who defend Bill Maher. A couple of weeks ago, I noted the return of the antivaccine wingnut side of Bill Maher, after a (relative) absence of several years, dating back, most likely, to the thorough spanking he endured for spouting off his antivaccine pseudoscience during the H1N1 pandemic. This well-deserved mockery included Bob Costas taunting him on his own show with a sarcastic, "Oh, come on, Superman!" in response to his apparent belief that diet and lifestyle alone would protect him from the flu, as well as Chris…

Germ theory denialism and antivaccination myths on Medscape

I've lamented time and time again how much woo has managed to infiltrate academic medicine, even to the point where prestigious medical schools such as Harvard and Yale have fallen under its sway. I've even gone so far as to lament that resistance is futile when it comes to the rising tide of woo threatening to wash over academic medicine, although lately I've been in a more pugnacious mood. But what good is a pugnacious mood when denialist pseudoscience starts popping up credulously reported in news sources tailored for physicians and other health care professionals? That's exactly what…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting

Alright, I give up. I'm getting out the popcorn. It's a Friday night, and it's on, baby! It's so on that I'm breaking one of my blogging rules and writing up a blog post on Friday night, which is when I usually try to relax. I suppose that it helps that I'm working tonight anyway, with a grant deadline coming, something I usually don't do on a Friday night either if I can help it, and could use a brief entertainment break. Besides, right now I'm watching my favorite guilty pleasure Spartacus:War of the Damned, and wasn't going to be working while I watched anyway. So off we go! The reason is…

Raging Bullsh*t: Robert De Niro is the latest celebrity antivaccinationist to spew pseudoscientific nonsense to the world

Celebrities who support pseudoscience and quackery are worse than regular, run-of-the-mill believers because they have a much larger soapbox than any of us do. I have a pretty healthy blog traffic for a medical blog, but even I don’t reach more than maybe 10,000 people a day. Even at my not-so-super-secret other blog, we only reach four or five times that in a day on average. Compared to the millions that someone like, for example, Oprah Winfrey used to reach on a daily basis or that someone like Dr. Mehmet Oz reaches on a daily basis today, the reach of the entire science blogosphere is…

The 'Religious Right': Cynics for Jesus

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from Hanna Rosen's God's Harvard which is about Patrick Henry College, which can be thought of as theopolitical conservative training facility. Before I get to a mindboggling display of cynicism, I want to make one thing: if someone wants to believe this lunacy, that's fine, but the moment it becomes a political agenda for governing our country, it's fair game. Onto the cynicism: "I read that President Bush is coming to speak for Kilgore." "Yes, well, that can be a sign that the campaign is in trouble," Shant pointed out. ''And last time Bush came,…

(The Iraq) War Is a Force That Gives Us Them Meaning

Yes, I've cribbed the title from Chris Hedges' superb, must-read book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. But Josh Marshall stumbles across a great insight about the Iraq War and Occupation, but doesn't quite carry through all the way. So the Mad Biologist will. Marshall writes about President Bush (italics mine): And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq. By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on.…

Please, Republicans, Nominate Giuliani

(from here) "He hit me." Having lived in the NYC area for a few years, I kept reasonably close tabs on the doings of NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. But over at the Group News Blog, there's a brilliant roundup of all the awful crap Giuliani has done. My favorite part: The ex-wife, and former local news anchor Donna Hanover. Now, ain't nobody a saint in this miserable world. And you can best believe that if as rumored, Giuliani's hired some of Rove's people to work for him, they've spoken to every store clerk Hanover's ever cut an eye at or loudly "harrumph"-ed. But Hanover's ability to sink Rudy…

The Office for Human Research Protections Wants to Kill 30,000 People Annually...

...and scuttle one of the best efforts going to reduce the problem of antibiotic resistance. I discussed before how the antibiotic resistance problem is, in the context of hospital infections, an infection control problem: One of the hidden stories in the rise in the frequency of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains is that this has also been accompanied by an absolute increase in the number of infections. In other words, it's not the case that you used to have 90 sensitive infections and 10 resistant infections per year in your hospital, and now, you have 50 sensitive and 50 resistant…

The Surveillance State: Everything Changed After 1/20/2007...

...not 9/11. The Bush Administration spied on American citizens without court orders before Sept. 11, 2001. And it didn't stop the attacks (italics mine): In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order. While Qwest's refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.'s request were not. The agency, those…

This Is No Way to Choose a President...

...or run an empire. Paul Waldman, in a fit of coastal pique, critiqued the myth of the informed Iowa voter as a reason to switch the primary calendar. But what's really bothered me about the Iowa primary is the entire caucus process. While I'm not a believer in the idea that a different political voting process would yield dramatically better governance, the Iowa caucus procedure is so stupid that I'm willing to make an exception (italics mine): Unlike the Republican caucuses in Iowa, which are fairly simple, akin to a straw poll, the Democratic caucuses are arcane, rule-bound Party…

"Pfizer Head Dismisses Link Between Drug Costs and Heavy R&D Investment"

I'm at a meeting in D.C. about antibiotic resistance, so I've left the Blogerator 9000 to fire up this post from the archives about a drug company executive's explanation of how drugs are priced. It's remarkable--and frustrating--that nobody has picked up on the basic message: drug prices are consumer driven, not R&D expenditure driven. This is a headline from the June 1st, 2005 edition of ScripNews (subscription only; so I'm a little behind in my reading-what scientist isn't?). Here's the punchline for lazy stupids that don't like to read: the head of Pfizer has admitted that the cost…