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Small family, big family

Like many Jewish families, tracing our history is often a sad and difficult task. Three of my four grandparents escaped Europe to found new families in America, giving me the illusion of having a small family, as Hitler uprooted and burnt the rest of my family tree. But the networks formed by immigrants were close, familial, and geographic, facts that were so obvious to them that they often didn't talk about it. For example, my paternal grandfather comes from a small city in Poland called Ostrow-Mazowiecka. His mother died of cholera shortly after he was born, and he was raised by…

I get questions...

I frequently get questions by email or by comment. If it's simple, I might fire off an answer. If it's about a personal medical problem, I either don't answer, or send a standard disclaimer to seek medical care. If it's a really interesting question, I blog. Today, I blog. The question regarded the ubiquitous commercials for erectile dysfunction treatments (see this excellent post for an overview of the topic of ED drugs). As anyone who has a TV knows, the commercials always have the pleasant warning of "if you have an erection lasting more than four hours, seek immediate medical help…

The stupid continues at Channel 7

Right now, I'm looking out my window to see the spreading pall of burning stupid rising over Channel 7's tower in Southfield. And the stupid isn't just for Steve Wilson anymore. What reporter Carolyn Clifford lacks in adiposity, she easily makes up for in credulity. Her "investigative report" tonight on the HPV vaccine Gardasil is another example of embarrassingly bad health reporting. A few preliminaries: Feel free to read my previous posts on Gardasil for some background, but just to catch you up, almost all of the 11,000 yearly cervical cancers are caused by a series of biological…

No right answers

I take care of my own patients in the hospital. I say that because it is not a given for internists. For a number of reasons, many having to do with time management and money, most internists utilize hospitalists, internal medicine docs who specialize in the care of hospitalized patients. Taking care of patients in the hospital presents some unique challenges. First, they are very, very ill. You have to be pretty sick to get into a hospital these days. You must be willing to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And you have to be able to deal with some rather intractable…

Open letter to the People of the great state of Florida

Dear Floridians, Greetings, and an early "hello"! I'm heading your way at the end of the week to spend my tourist dollars, and I can't wait to see you! But first, some important business. Your representatives in the Florida House have just passed a so-called academic freedom bill. I strongly recommend a deep suspicion on your part regarding this bit of planned government intrusion into your children's academic future. It is up to you, through your elected Senators, to stop this misguided intrusion of politics into science. It would also be wise to reconsider those who voted "aye" when…

Just another cult

My pager went off at about 7 p.m. I had already finished rounding at the hospital, gone home, showered off the day, and sat down with a cup of tea. It was my senior resident. We had admitted a psychotic young woman to the hospital, and her parents were trying to sign her out against medical advice. The young woman had been acting more and more strangely over the past several months. When her parents finally brought her to the hospital after being unable to help her at home, she was completely disconnected from reality. She was hearing voices, screaming, picking at her clothes and skin,…

The Limits of Academic Freedom

First, a disclaimer: I don't know much of anything about this controversy surrounding Guillermo Gonzalez, but I do know a fair amount about academic freedom. I wrote an article several years ago on legal protection for professors' speech. Legally, professors have the same rights as ordinary public employees, and so only a small spectrum of academic speech is protected by the First Amendment. As a result, many institutions have been successful when they decided to fire a professor based on their expression. Of course, most of these disputes never make it to the courts. Internal rules at…

Skeptical science and medical reporting (#Scio13 wrap-up)

Ivan Oransky and I moderated a session last week at ScienceOnline, the yearly conference covering all things at the intersection of science and the internets. We discussed the topic ""How to make sure you're being appropriately skeptical when covering scientific and medical studies." We started out discussing some of the resources we'd put up at the Wiki link. Ivan teaches medical journalism at NYU, and noted that he recommends these criteria when evaluating medical studies. I noted I use similar guidelines, and as a scientist, think about papers in a journal club format before I cover them…

Bad science writing of the day: your gut bacteria make you crave chocolate

I've written a post or two (or a dozen) discussing science journalism--the good, the bad, and, mostly (because they're the most fun), the ugly. There was this story about how blondes "evolved to win cavemen's hearts." Or this one that completely omitted the name of the pathogen they were writing about. Or this one, where a missing "of" completely changed the results being discussed. I ran across another glaring example yesterday, dealing interestingly enough with one of my favorite topics: chocolate, and bringing in an "omics" prospective to it. The news story covered a recent…

Open access publishing is putting you at risk!

Yes, that's actually the argument made by the Orwellian group, PRISM ("Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine"): Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by: * undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it; * opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record; * subjecting the…

What's missing from this picture?

It's been awhile since I picked on the real science journalists (as opposed to we Daily Show-esque "fake news" sites). I don't mean to get down on them too much; I know that there are many out there who do an incredible job, but then there are also ones who write up articles like this one on how "...women in northern Europe evolved with light hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to stand out from the crowd and lure men away from the far more common brunette." Ugh. So especially for you infectious disease types, can you spot a glaring omission in this article: "Meningitis A…

Circumcision and the risk of STDs

Male circumcision is a difficult topic to discuss rationally. At the core, it's a medical procedure, but it's one tinged with centuries of cultural influences, and emotions tend to run high on both the pro- or anti-circumcision side of the discussion. One of the reasons that's been given in favor of circumcision is that it lowers the risk of disease, including diseases transmitted by sexual contact. However, while this data has been fairy unambiguous regarding some diseases (including the reduction in HIV transmission due to circumcision), the effect circumcision has on the spread of…

Well, this is going to tick some people off

The new vaccine against the human papilloma virus is something I've discussed a time or ten here. Reaction to the vaccine by many religious groups has morphed with time, from outright resistance to a more common stance right now that they're accepting of the vaccine, but don't want it to be mandatory. Well... Michigan legislation would require girls to get HPV vaccine Michigan girls entering the sixth grade next year would have to be vaccinated against cervical cancer under legislation backed Tuesday by a bipartisan group of female lawmakers. The legislation is the first of its kind in the…

MSHA Opens Office of Accountability

MSHA's Assistant Secretary announced that he is creating an Office of Accountability to provide "enhanced oversight, at the highest level in the agency, to ensure that we are doing our utmost to enforce safety and health laws in our nation's mines." The announcement came with the release of three internal investigation reports which Asst. Sec. Stickler said "identified a number of deficiencies in our enforcement programs, which I found deeply disturbing." The internal reviews on the Sago (203 pages), Alma (233 pages) and Darby (214 pages) were conducted by MSHA staff who were not involved…

$1.5 Million Fine to Massey Energy for Miners' Deaths

The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) announced a record $1.5 million penalty against Massey Energy Company for violations related to the January 19, 2006 deaths of Ellery Hatfield, 46 and Don Bragg, 33 at the Aracoma Alma #1 Mine in Stollings, WV.  The investigators, led by MSHA district manager Kenny Murray of Pikeville, KY, found more than two dozen violations of MSHA standards.  Twenty-one of the 25 violations were classified as "reckless disregard," the most severe category of negligence under MSHA's penalty structure.  In a prepared statement, the company said…

Americaâs Most Dangerous Factories

By David Michaels Meat factories continue to be among the most dangerous places to work in America. According to a devastating article in the Dallas Morning News, âthousands of illegal immigrants gravitate toward meatpacking plants in places like Cactus, Texasâ where each year more than one out of every ten workers gets injured carving meat on fast moving conveyer belts. The line speed requires exhausted workers wielding the sharpest of knives or hooks to make hundred of cuts an hour. OSHA inspectors are rarely seen in these factories. One worker at the Swift & Co's Cactus, Texas plant…

The dirt on soil and prions

It's been awhile since I've discussed prions on here. (Indeed, so long that the last time was on my old blog, but I imported a few of them that can be found here, here, and some background on prions here). Allow me to copy a bit of that to re-introduce the topic: Prions are, of course, the transmissible agents that cause diseases such as kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans, and related disease such as "mad cow" disease, scrapie, and chronic wasting disease in animals. Though there was initially much controversy about these agents in the early years (most notably, because they did not…

Skepticism/denial and the political spectrum

One final word on all the HIV stuff for now then I'm taking a break to get in some more interesting subject matter. I've started responding to this comment, but it's getting lengthy so I'm going to start it as a new post below the fold. Matt, Regarding being a "left vs. right" issue, who's characterized them as such? Indeed, I mentioned in an interview here that AIDS denial runs the political spectrum. And just because it's a "prevailing paradigm" doesn't mean it's incorrect, or that the left should for some reason rally against it. Aren't progressives supposed to value logic and…

The end of the Alexander Cockburn saga

George Monbiot posts his last reply to Alexander Cockburn. Wisely, Monbiot has chosen not to continue arguing with a crank. At a certain point it's always a lost cause. And considering Cockburn's evidence one would be crazy to continue. It turns out, the sole-source of his rambling diatribe against all global warming science - the papers from Martin "Guy I met on a boat" Hertzburg - turned out not to be papers at all. They were never published, never peer reviewed. The only peer-reviewed literature Cockburn managed to find to agree with him was published in Lyndon Larouche's fake…

Perhaps the weirdest chicks of all

What is this bizarre fuzzy little creature? It's a Black coucal Centropus grillii chick, and what makes it particularly interesting is that it's covered with simple, tubular, unbranched feathers (termed trichoptiles). If you know the literature on the evolutionary development of feathers you will have noticed that trichoptiles look suspiciously similar to the 'stage 1 feathers' hypothesised by Prum and Brush, and yet here they are in a neornithine. They rarely get a mention, despite being described by Shelford (1900), and despite being present elsewhere in cuculiforms and not restricted to…

The Great Goswell Copse Zootoca

The unusual fossil mammal skull posted here yesterday was, of course, that of the astrapotheriid astrapothere Astrapotherium magnum, as many as you said. But I'm a bit surprised that more people didn't get it straight away, given that astrapotheres were covered and covered again at Tet Zoo only a couple of months ago. However, I suppose that reading about something doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to identify its fossils... I'm still planning to post a write-up of the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting here ASAP, but haven't had time to finish it yet. Meanwhile... ... the modern animal…

Richard Lewontin—Genetic Determination and Adaptation: Two Bad Metaphors

It was a fine evening here in Chicago, with all these superstars of evolutionary biology in attendance. It was also an information-dense evening — I tried to keep up on my little laptop, but I know I missed a lot. Fortunately, I'm not alone: Rob Mitchum and Jeremy Manier were also covering the event, and have a play-by-play available. I'll just dump what I've got here tonight. I do have wi-fi passwords so I can get things up a little more promptly tomorrow and Saturday. Richard Lewontin opened up with a few deprecatory comments about the religiosity of our surroundings (the talks were given…

GM/BM Friday: Pathological Programming Languages

In real life, I'm not a mathematician; I'm a computer scientist. Still a math geek, mind you, but what I really do is very much in the realm of applied math, researching how to build systems to help people program. One of my pathological obsessions is programming languages. Since I first got exposed to TRS-80 Model 1 BASIC back in middle school, I've been absolutely nuts programming languages. Last time I counted, I'd learned about 130 different languages; and I've picked up more since then. I've written programs most of them. Like I said, I'm nuts. Anyway, I decided that it would be amusing…

Fractal Woo: Video TransCommunication

This is a short one, but after mentioning this morning how woo-meisters constantly invoke fractals to justify their gibberish, I was reading an article at the 2% company about Allison DuBois, the supposed psychic who the TV show "Medium" is based on. And that led me to a perfect example of how supposed fractals are used to justify some of the most ridiculous woo you can imagine. So, I was reading the article about Ms. DeBois. And since there's nothing more fun than a good smackdown of woo promoted by some slime-drenched liar, so I wound up reading their full series on Ms. DuBois, and found…

Basic Graphs

Let's talk a bit about graphs, being a tad more formal about them. A graph G is a pair (V,E) where V is a non-empty set of *objects* called vertices, and E is a set of pairs of elements of V called edges where a pair x={a,b} means that vertices a and b are *adjacent*. We also say that edge x is *incident on* both a and b. The number of edges that are incident on a vertex is called the *degree* of a vertex. Take any graph G, and take the sum of the degrees of all vertices. That number will be 2×|E| (2 times the cardinality of the set of edges.) This should be pretty obvious: since each edge…

The First Graph Theory Problem

Set theory is, alas, going to need to take a break. I left my books on the train on friday. $200 worth of textbooks down the tubes, unless one of the conductors happened to hang on to them. At least I've got a pre-order already placed for a copy of the new addition of Ferreirós book; between that, and a new copy of Quine, I should be OK. But in the meantime, we'll look at something else. Since I mentioned graph theory on friday, and I've been promising forever to write about it, I figured this is a good time. My favorite introduction to graph theory is stolen from one of my grad school…

Michael Egnor: an Advocate for Dishonest Education

This isn't math, but I felt like commenting anyway. That shining example of an Intelligent Design advocate, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back once again. And this time, his point, such as it is, is to basically fling insults at PZ Myers. What did PZ do to bring on his ire? Well, PZ was annoyed with Time magazine, because for their "Time 100" list, they had Michael Behe write the entry about Richard Dawkins. The passage which Engor took such offense at was the following: The incompetence is stunning. Richard Dawkins makes the Time 100 list, and who do they commission to write up his profile?…

Selective Quoting of Statistics: More Dishonest Quote Mining from DI

When I'm bored, I'll periodically take a look at the blogs published by the bozos at the Discovery Institute. I can generally find something good for a laugh. So I was doing that tonight, and came across yet another example of how they try to distort reality and use slimily dishonest math to try to criticize the evidence for evolution. This time, it's an article by "Logan Gage" called What exactly does genetic similarity demonstrate?. Francix X. Clines, an excellent writer for The City Life and Editorial Observer sections of The New York Times, today (April 23, 2007) repeats what may be…

Neil Shubin—“Major Transitions” in Evolution: Fossils, Genes, and Embryos

Shubin had a tough act to follow, coming after Kingsley's great talk. I'm sure it will be good, though — last night I got a tour of his lab, saw the original Tiktaalik specimens and some new ones, and some of his work in progress (which I won't tell you about until it's published), so I'm confident I'm going to have a happy hour. Darwin pulled together diverse lines of evidence to document his ideas. The different lines all reinforce each other making the argument even stronger, and what we're seeing now is new syntheses, which is the theme of this talk: how do we use different lines of…

Building Towards Homology: Vector Spaces and Modules

One of the more advanced topics in topology that I'd like to get to is homology. Homology is a major topic that goes beyond just algebraic topology, and it's really very interesting. But to understand it, it's useful to have some understandings of some basics that I've never written about. In particular, homology uses chains of modules. Modules, in turn, are a generalization of the idea of a vector space. I've said a little bit about vector spaces when I was writing about the gluing axiom, but I wasn't complete or formal in my description of them. (Not to mention the amount of confusion that…

Big to Small, Small to Big: Topological Properties through Sheaves (part 2)

Continuing from where we left off yesterday... Yesterday, I managed to describe what a *presheaf* was. Today, I'm going to continue on that line, and get to what a full sheaf is. A sheaf is a presheaf with two additional properties. The more interesting of those two properties is something called the *gluing axiom*. Remember when I was talking about manifolds, and described how you could describe manifolds by [*gluing*][glue] other manifolds together? The gluing axiom is the formal underpinnings of that gluing operation: it's the one that justifies *why* gluing manifolds together works. […

Darwin and Evolution talks in North Carolina

I get e-mails about such events, so I thought I'd share, so you can attend some of these talks if you want: NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott will be speaking twice in North Carolina shortly. First, at 7:00 p.m. on January 27, she will be speaking on "Darwin's Legacy in Science and Society" in the Wright Auditorium on the East Carolina University campus in Greenville. "Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 was an extraordinary milestone for science, but it also had profound effects on theology, philosophy, literature, and society in general. Nowhere is…

Memo to self-described sane, rational, science-loving Republicans

You have been Expelled. No, not by me, by your own party. The Republican party is now a clown car. The sane, thoughtful conservatives have left it over the years, some prominent ones quite publicly last year, either more openly by stating they are leaving GOP, or a little more carefully, by endorsing Obama for President. What is left are racist, sexist, homophobic, femiphobic, xenophobic, Creationist, authoritarian, theocratic, cowardly scuzbuckets like Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, Bobby Jindal, Steve Sailer, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Anne Coulter and Joe The Plumber.…

Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out and critics all home in on different aspects of it.... MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme…

Max Planck Society to support publication charges for PLoS journals.

This is big! A new agreement was signed between Max Planck Society and Public Library of Science in which the MPS will pay publication fees for its researchers. Mark Patterson explains: The MPS is one of the world's leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be collaborating with the MPS in this way so that more MPS researchers will be encouraged to publish their work in PLoS journals, and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Paleontologists Study A Remarkably Well-preserved Baby Siberian Mammoth: University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher just returned from Siberia where he spent a week as part of a six-member international team that examined the frozen, nearly intact remains of a 4-month-old female woolly mammoth. Steroids, Not Songs, Spur Growth Of Brain Regions In Sparrows: Neuroscientists are attempting to understand if structural changes in the brain are related to sensory experience or the performance of learned behavior, and now University of Washington researchers have found evidence that one…

Sleep News

More stuff from SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies: Sleep Deprivation Affects Eye-steering Coordination When Driving: Driving a vehicle requires coordination of horizontal eye movements and steering. Recent research finds that even a single night of sleep deprivation can impact a person's ability to coordinate eye movements with steering. Extra Sleep Improves Athletes' Performance: Athletes who get an extra amount of sleep are more likely to improve their performance in a game, according to recent research. Going To Bed Late May Affect The…

New and Exciting in PLoS Community Journals

There are some interesting articles published in PLoS Genetics, Computational Biology, Pathogens and Neglected Tropical Diseases and these got my attention at the first glance - you look around for stuff you may be interested in: Comparing Patterns of Natural Selection across Species Using Selective Signatures: Natural selection promotes the survival of the fittest individuals within a species. Over many generations, this may result in the maintenance of ancestral traits (conservation through purifying selection), or the emergence of newly beneficial traits (adaptation through positive…

New and Exciting in PLoS Community Journals

New articles in PLoS Pathogens, PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Genetics were published on Friday. My picks for this week are: Influenza Virus Transmission Is Dependent on Relative Humidity and Temperature: In temperate regions influenza epidemics recur with marked seasonality: in the northern hemisphere the influenza season spans November to March, while in the southern hemisphere epidemics last from May until September. Although seasonality is one of the most familiar features of influenza, it is also one of the least understood. Indoor crowding during cold weather, seasonal…

SICB Posters, Part 2: Birds

Following (below the fold) are a few of the bird posters that I saw yesterday at SICB. Class. Substantial data exists on the behavioral endocrinology of temperate-zone birds, yet ornithologists are just beginning to examine and compare tropical birds to temperate zone birds. In a recent comparative study, tropical birds had lower mean peak testosterone levels on average than temperate birds. However, several tropical species in the study had comparable or higher peak testosterone levels than temperate species. In contrast, in a study of peak testosterone levels in three species of the…

Ask A Science Blogger: Which parts of the human body could you design better?

tags: Ask a Science Blogger, vertebrate eye, molluscan eye Image: Wikipedia. [larger view]. The newest "Ask a Science Blogger" question is; Which parts of the human body could you design better? Since I have only 500 words or so to explain, I will discuss only one anatomical feature: I would choose to redesign the vertebrate eye so the microscopic structure of the retina more closely resembles that of the molluscan eye. On causal observation, the vertebrate eye appears to be similar to the cephalopod eye (cephalopods are often thought of as the "classical" mollusc), however, a more…

Best posts on Media, (Science) Journalism and Blogging at A Blog Around The Clock

As this blog is getting close to having 10,000 posts, and my Archives/Categories are getting unweildy (and pretty useless), I need to get some of the collections of useful posts together, mainly to make it easier for myself to find them. I did that by collecting my best Biology posts a couple of weeks ago. Today, I am collecting my best posts from the categories of Media, Science Reporting, Framing Science and Blogging. There are thousands of posts in these categories combined, most with excellent links or videos, but here are some of the posts that have substantial proportion of my own…

Big love among the ostracods

How can anyone resist an article titled "Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode"? You can't, I tell you. It's like a giant brain magnet, you open the journal to the index, and there's that title, and you must read it before you can even consider continuing on to anything else. Some organisms have evolved immensely long sperm tails — Drosophila bifurca, for instance, has sperm cells that are about 60mm long, or 20 times longer than the length of the entire adult body. The excessively long sperm tail is obviously not a structure that has evolved for better swimming;…

Segmented 4m space telescopes

Who ordered that? A couple of years ago, Prof Buzasi at the US Air Force Academy, mentioned he had acquired a new toy... "The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs has obtained a 4m-diameter, lightweight telescope from the discontinued Space Based Laser project. Originally designed and constructed for space, this segmented telescope is being reconfigured for use in a ground-based facility. The current optical design is an afocal Mersenne configuration with an extremely thin (17mm) glass primary. The telescope has 312 fine figure actuators for active shaping of the…

Science Debate 2008

The US Presidential candidates ought to have a debate with a topic focus of Science and Technology For me, the US Presidential primaries and elections are a spectator sport. I live here, I am politically moderately aware and interested. I pay taxes, lots and lots of taxes; for which I receive less than I like, and I do understand it is a trade-off, I would accept more services for higher taxes, if delivered with some efficiency and honesty. I don't get to vote (hey, that's not fair... ). I am also a recipient of federal science funding (well, mostly as a conduit to well deserving graduate…

Hubble Trouble

Total failure of Control Unit/Science Data Formatter - side A on saturday, no data being downlinked. Attempt to switch to untested side B soon, which could restore functionality. Also considering emergency repair as part of SM4, SM-4 is delayed. The failure is in an electronics module. The failure precludes science data communication to the ground or retrieval from onboard storage. Module has redundant backup which is untested. It may be necessary to do emergency replacement of the module if possible, on the next servicing mission, SM4. SM4 is postponed while the backup module is tested and…

Blogs as a Knowledge Management Tool in the Classroom

Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via). Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…

Be afraid

Everyone must read this article about ‘Joel's Army’ and be afraid. It's a movement by radical Dominionists to build an informal paramilitary organization (at this time, it seems to be more attitude than organization) to prepare to fight to impose a kind of Christian fascism on the world. It may be a group small in number (but not that small, I fear), but they have a lot of fanaticism and lunacy to amplify their power. Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-…

The Shocking Courtship of Electric Fish

tags: electric fish, Brienomyrus brachyistius, mormyrids, fish, behavior, evolution Image: JEB Biologists As they swim through their muddy riverine homes in east Africa, the African elephantfishes use a special organ at the base of their tail to produce weak electrical pulses that enable them to sense their surroundings, detect prey, communicate with each other and, as it was recently discovered, to find a mate. Surprisingly, after listening to their electrical "buzzes", scientists discovered that these fishes engage in behavior that is remarkably similar to the courtship duets that…

A Podiatrist's Nightmare

tags: foot binding, China, social behavior, fashion psychology, streaming video A friend sent these images depicting foot-binding in China. To say the least, I knew this practice was painful and caused permanent malformations, but seeing the damage makes my own feet scream in agony. How did such a strange and harmful behavior like this ever become a cultural fashion/fad/fetish? An elderly Chinese woman who was one of the countless victims of foot-binding. She can barely stand or walk, even with assistance. Gee, I wonder why? An elderly Chinese woman, one of countless millions of female…