From the Valley of Heart's Despair

That shack costs how much? Oh, that's just the garage—I am often asked why I left a home in a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz mountains of California for modest little Baltimore. Well, besides having a nice job offer, there was an even more serious reason. We didn’t own that house and there was no chance in hell we could afford one there. House prices in Northern California—around Silicon Valley—long since went beyond the ridiculous, passed the obscene, to the upspeakable. We bought an entire house in a wonderful neighborhood in Baltimore for the down-payment on a fixer-upper in Palo Alto, and that was six years ago. And therein lies an interesting story.

Until recently it was the case that Silicon Valley—the area south of San Francisco, mostly Santa Clara County between San Jose and Palo Alto—thrived because the industries there could attract the best and the brightest engineers and scientists. It had perfect weather and great physical beauty. When William Shockley, who grew up in Palo Alto, built what was to be the ancestor of all Silicon Valley electronic companies there, the attractiveness of the place was key. Given a choice of where they wanted to live, very bright people would choose the Santa Clara Valley (its real geographic name). Jack London called it the “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” but that was before the orchards were stripped and replaced with shopping malls and bungalows and the fragrant air blew away. San Francisco, one of the world’s great cities, is an hour away. When I was science writer at Stanford, I’d give lectures to people from other parts of the country who wanted to grab some of the local economy for their areas and wanted to know why they were having trouble. Well, I’d tell them, you are in Michigan and the weather sucks and it’s flat and boring, and we are in Palo Alto and we have coeds running around in halter tops and shorts in December and we are within two hours of the Sierra for skiing and one hour from surfing beaches and we can pick lemons off the trees from our bicycles when we peddle to work and eat fresh vegetables all year around and....

What brings this up is a survey done by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the local business group in San Jose. They matched the San Jose area with seven other areas known for high-tech research and discovered that in terms of good places to live, Silicon Valley now comes in last. Dead last. The change has been a well-kept secret for years; I’m hardly the only refugee. Stanford has a helluva time trying to get faculty, junior or senior, because candidates come to visit, take one look at real estate prices and break out in laughter. Then they go home. Subsidizing housing helps only a little; even Stanford is not that rich. The only people who can afford a house in California already own a house in California. Real estate isn’t the only problem. Try traffic. Proposition 13, which limits real estate taxes, long ago destroyed the school system. Prices for everything are higher, and while salaries also are elevated, it doesn't make up the difference.

Reports the San Jose Mercury News, the hometown paper:

The report, called ``Daring To Compete: A Region-to-Region Reality Check,'' will be officially released Wednesday. The leadership group compared Silicon Valley to Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Fairfax, Va.; Boston; Seattle; Austin; Portland, Ore.; and San Diego.

Among the findings:

• In the seven categories examined, Silicon Valley ranked no higher than six. When it came to housing affordability, only San Diego did worse.

• Raleigh-Durham ranks first among the eight regions overall, thanks to its low cost of housing, easy commutes, good schools, and low unemployment and taxes.

• While all the tech regions were hit hard by the downturn, Silicon Valley continues to struggle with the highest unemployment rate.

• While Silicon Valley eighth-grade students have some of the best math test scores in California, the state as a whole ranks last in the list.

• Silicon Valley still has the second-highest tax rates, tied with San Diego and behind only Boston.

While all the issues are considered important, housing that workers can afford remains easily the most vexing problem for the valley -- and the most intractable, [Carl] Guardino [president and CEO of the group] said.

If we could afford it, we’d move back because it is a lovely place to live. My wife was heartbroken when we left (she's there visiting now). But we can’t. You can’t either. None of us can. They fucked up a good thing.

Drug companies and hurricanes--it's just one disaster after another

You can run but FEMA will find you--Oklahoma and Kansas have tornados, which is why it's called Tornado Alley. We certainly know the dangers of living in Florida and the Gulf Coast, forgetting the ugliness of the place. You get floods and blizzards in the Dakotas, and California gets earthquakes, mudslides, monsoons and actors as governors. So where do you go to hide from Mother Nature? Slate did some number crunching and concluded that good old southern New England--specifically Rhode Island and Connecticut--is the safest place to live in the U.S. To be really specific, enroll in the University of Connecticut or teach there because it's in Storrs, perhaps the safest city. It's a nice area, very pretty and pleasant to live in, but very pricey. Surrounding New England is relatively safe too, but there is that coastline and major storms. Storrs is 50 miles from major bodies of water. It's even a blue state. Since the area does not have a lot of poor people, you can expect the government will respond quickly. What more could you ask for?


The voices you hear are the pharmaceutical companies assuring you they have only your best interests at heart, the dears--If you are, God forbid, schizophrenic, you run into two hardships in life, besides the schizophrenia. One is the price of the drugs, which can run upwards to $600 a month! The other is the notion that if you are having a psychotic attack, it is because you are not taking your medicine like a good boy. A new federally funded study from the National Institute of Mental Health suggests both burdens are unnecessary and the drug makers are responsible. The new, expensive drugs turn out to be not generally better than the older, cheaper ones, including at least one generic drug. That doesn't mean that for some people, the new drugs aren't more beneficial--the study measures the effects in the population as a whole. It will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the study itself cost $44 million. Since Americans spent $10 billion on the newer antipsychotic drugs last year (Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seroquel and Geodon), it may prove to be a good investment. An older now-generic drug, perphenazine works apparently just as well and is a tenth the cost. The new drugs, marketed as having fewer side-effects, now have 90% percent of the market, and indeed, have their own collection of side-effects. They also don't always work, and if a patient is having a psychotic episode it does not mean they haven't taken their medicine. They may well have done so. It just isn't working. And they--or somebody--will have paid too damned much.

The clack of keystrokes as passwords fly

Gone phishing, clickety-clack--You may have noticed that you are getting some really clever e-mails that look exactly like messages from banks or payment websites notifying you that your account is in trouble and you need to log onto a URL and fix it. In almost all cases, that’s phishing, phony messages designed to get private information people can use to do you harm. Much of the time you can dismiss it with a laugh, especially when you get notice from a bank you never had an account with. Sometimes you are not so sure. The latest ones are visually indistinguishable from real messages. The best thing to do is ignore the message or contact the website through the usual method and check support. I just did that with three phish messages from “PayPal,” which Paypal never sent. Last month it was “EBay.” Most of these sites have e-mail addresses you can forward messages to to check out, for instance, spoof@paypal.com. Also, it appears, enough people are catching on that the number of phishing expeditions has dropped 90% in August, but that is still 1.84 million messages. I’ve had about a dozen.

Some sites will now send the last several letters of your account in legitimate mail, something phishers wouldn’t know. Others will tell you what language they use in real messages and what to look for. It seems to be working.

So, we can worry about something else [SJ Mercury-News, registration required] like someone tuning into the sound of your keystrokes while you punch in your password. Actually, the government has long had the ability to do that to some extent, but now a researcher at Berkeley has made it available to one and all. Plug a $10 microphone into a laptop running speech recognition software and a spellchecker, and you are in business. Li Zhuang, a grad student in computer science, and her teammate were able to associate the sound of individual keys on a keyboard with specific letters and figure out what was being written with 95% accuracy. Zhuang got her idea from research being done at IBM, which was able to decipher the sounds of single keystrokes on the same keyboard by the same typist. She wanted to see if that would work in general. Apparently so.

It’s not clear why the sound of my typing a b on my keyboard is different from my typing an n, but it is. How serious is all this? Some experts point out there are lot easier ways of getting someone’s password. Also, with the right software, you don’t actually need to put in your password through the keyboard. For instance, on a Mac, once you type in a password it is stored in a program called Keychain and whenever you call up a website requiring a password, it enters it without any typing. I do it with my bank daily. I suspect there are similar systems for Windows.

I wonder if loud music works?

Google censors, organic chemistry rules, and don't believe a word of it

Searching for the real Paris Hilton--Did you know that Google filters its searches so as to not offend the offendable? It’s an option most people don’t know exists called SafeSearch. You set it on your Google Preferences. You can do moderate filtering, which excludes most explicit images (presumably including Paris Hilton’s reason for fame--she apparently is not big on the missionary position), strict monitoring (which guarantees you get noting of interest) or turn it off and go with the flow, which trust me, you don't want to do). The problem with the filtering is that no filtering system is perfect and most aren’t very good. You get false positives; it filters out things you really want because this is just a machine, after all. It is possible, for instance, to filter out some breast cancer sites that you might want because the damned program thinks its dirty. So, to the rescue we have Google UnSafeSearch for those of you who want to make sure you don’t miss anything important but don’t want to have gynecological adventures in your web searches. (It also lets you filter when kids are on the computer and still not miss what you want when you recover the computer). It cleverly grabs the first 100 results of a filtered Google search and the first 100 results of an unfiltered search and compares the two. It then shows only those results which appeared soley in the unfiltered search so you can see what the filtered search filtered. It’s here. We aim to please, (and thank you Jonathan. Again.)


What’s with this organic chemistry?--Having described who the most cited clinical scientists are in the world, what about the rest of science? Which are the most cited papers in each country in all the sciences? ISI Essential Science Indicators has an answer. In the U.S., the paper cited most often in the last 10 years was “Gapped Blast and PSI-Blast, a New Generation of protein Database Search Programs,” published in Nucleic Acids Research (I have a copy by my bed-stand) by Stephen Altschul et al at the National Institutes of Health. It has been cited--and is still being cited--13,478 times. I have not the faintest idea what it is about but it smells of organic chemistry and I try to avoid such things. The country with the second most cited papers is England and the winner there is "Specificity Of Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Signaling - Transient Versus Sustained Extracellular Signal-Regulated Kinase Activation" by C. J. Marshall in Cell in 1995. It’s been cited 2,544 times and I don’t understand that one either. Too bad the authors don’t get residuals.


Look, I had a grant. I had to say something--And then there is the possibility that most of those papers--indeed most scientific papers--are wrong. A Greek-American physician, writing in the Public Library of Science, has proposed just such a thing. You’ve seen it happen: coffee is bad for you; no it’s good for you; wait a minute, it will take years off your life. Vitamin E will prevent cancer. No, vitamin E will not only not stop cancer it can cause a heart attack. Make up your minds. John P. A. Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine and Tufts, says the truth in a science paper depends on how many other papers on that subject have been published and the “ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed,” although I’m not sure what that means. Here’s Ioannidis:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.

What he says.

[The picture above is the Piltdown man, one of science's most famous frauds. He probably wouldn't have liked the missionary position either].

Terrific scientists, missing cats and conservatives with feathers

Well, at least there are no emergencies in dermatology--So who are the country’s tops clinical scientists? How the hell can we tell? One way is to keep track of whose papers are cited the most. If you write a paper and no one cares enough to cite it—and scientists will throw in all kinds of citations to make their papers look authoritative—you might consider a career change. But if you publish it and they come in droves.… According to the ISI Essential Science Indicators, the numero uno of the clinical set over the last 10 years is Meir Stampfer, chair of the department of immunology at Harvard. He has published 376 papers cited a total of 30,739 times. His speciality is the etiology of chronic diseases and has done work on breast cancer, prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease. Harvard takes second place too, with Walter Willett (516 papers, 29,311 citations), a specialist in diabetes, among other things. Then comes Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins (118 papers, 25,516 citations), who works on the genetics of cancer, especially colorectal. Another Hopkins researcher, Kenneth Kinzler comes next (105 papers, 24,310 citations). He also works on the genetics of cancer. Then there is Charles Hennekens at the University of Miami (aspirin in cardiovascular disease); John C. Reed at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla (aptosis); Graham Colditz, Harvard (breast cancer); the Cleveland Clinic’s Eric Topol (cardiovascular disease, and Robert Califf at Duke (cardiovascular disease). You can see where the action is these days.

No column is complete without at least one cuddly animal—For those of you keeping score on the extinction list, the very rare—like 60 in the whole world—Asiatic cheetah has been spotted and photographed in Iran. Using a remote camera, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists, along with colleagues from the Iran Department of Environment (yes, they have one) photographed a mother and four cubs in the Dar-e Anjir Wildlife Refuge (yes, they have one). They were lounging under the shade of a tree. The species once ranged from the Red Sea to India but now there are only a few dozen left in the wild, mostly in Iran. They are extinct elsewhere.

Neoconservative penguins point to American politicians as role models if you don’t mind skin instead of feathers—Conservatives are weird. Down below, we did a small piece on the French documentary, The March of the Penguins, which incidentally is the second highest-grossing documentary ever. Only Michael Moore beat the birds. We pointed out it was beautifully photographed under extraordinary conditions, and is good fun if you manage to ignore that it glosses over a good bit of nature. It turns out that according to the New York Times, conservative and religious groups have embraced the film and the penguins as role models—if don’t mind feathers instead of skin. They are monogamous (to a fault), are supposed to be good examples of the truth of Intelligent Design (bosh), and they are passionate about child rearing (oh boy, are they). Conservative film critic and court Jew Michael Medved (I’m allowed to say that) called the film passionately affirming. Of course the producers, no fools they, managed to avoid such touchy topics as evolution and global warming, and turned their cameras away when the cute little critters were providing lunch by the thousands for attacking skuas, or being dragged off the ice by leopard seals, and to the best of our knowledge, none are Christians, but if Medved’s affirmed, does it matter? "In the harshest place on earth, love finds a way." Still, go see it.

The Lord is my Archeologist, I shall not want

Bathsheva, call your agent--One of the bitterest fights between religion and science is the fight between believing Jews on one hand, and a new generation of Biblical archeologists over the historical accuracy of the Torah, particularly about the kings of ancient Israel, David and Solomon. Where they really, as the Bible says, great kings over a rich kingdom that ruled a vast area of the Middle East, or were they insignificant rulers of a pip-squeak monarchy in the armpit of some other major kingdoms. Was Jerusalem a major capital or a backwater in the last days of the Bronze Age? The Biblical archeologists are, as you can imagine, not terribly popular among believing Jews and the fact that most of them are Israeli makes the battle nastier. The fact is that the archeological evidence for many of the events in the Bible or Torah is not plentiful.

Enter the archeologist Eilat Mazar, of the Shalem Center and Hebrew University, who is digging in what is called the City of David slope in Jerusalem. She has uncovered what is apparently a very large building, possibly even a palace. Pottery found in the ruins she dates to the Jebusite period, which immediately predates the reign of David, 11th or 12th century BCE. The building itself is later, probably 10th or 11th century BCE, about David's time. She is working a strip 10 meters wide and 30 meters long and the building is bigger than that. How much bigger, she doesn’t yet know.

The building’s foundation consists of huge stones placed on an earthen landfill. Because of the size, she guesses it has to be a palace, temple or fortress, probably the first.

"For years, there have been those who contended there was no evidence of public construction in 10th century BCE Jerusalem," says Mazar. "Based on this, they claim that David and Solomon were not important rulers, as described in the Bible. Now there is evidence of such construction, and those who minimize the importance of David and Solomon have to deal with the facts. Because in an out-of-the-way and remote settlement you would not find a structure like this, the construction of which required abundant resources and a great capacity to plan and execute."

II Samuel 5 descibes David conquering the city and then building a palace outside the boundaries of the city, a new building, not one constructed on the ruins of an old one. Mazar says there is no evidence of anything under the ruins she’s uncovered. The construction itself is complex and was probably very expensive, the kind of thing a new ruler would want to throw up to impress the people he just conquered.

Not everyone, of course is convinced. Two Jews, three opinions. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, the leading critic of the Torah’s historical accuracy, is not impressed. He’s visited the site and thinks the dating is a “stretch.”

"Once every few years, they find something in Jerusalem that seems to confirm the biblical description of the magnitude of the kingdom in the time of David. After a while, it turns out that there is no real substance to the findings, and the excitement subsides, until the next outburst," he says, "and the excitement subsides, until the next outburst."

Obladi Oblada

I am the walrus, see me die--Well, you can’t. The walrus camera project, which shows live camera shots of the Walrus Island State Game Sanctuary in Alaska on the Internet, will be turned off for a few weeks while the natives do a subsistence hunt. To be fair, it is a subsistence hunt, not a bunch of guys going off to demonstrate the size of their genitals by blowing away mammals. And, also to be fair, nothing is changed. The cameras on the island have had power problems and at the moment, aren’t working anyhow. Because of the weather and lack of funding, the site would probably go down about now as well. You can go here and see for yourself. The natives are worried that the scenes of the slaughter would be going out on the net around the world and a lot of people--especially those living down the street from a Safeway--might get upset. “When you go deer hunting you don’t want a camera shining on you,” one told the AP. The cameras went on line about a month ago and the websie has had thousands of hits, sometimes so many it crashed the server. The hunt begins Friday and the beach camera will be removed tonight. The natives are allowed to take as many as 20 of the beasts. The walruses represent a major food source for the Yupik and Inupiaq communities. Bones become art objects and walrus skins provide clothing.

Think of the guilt

But you got her the same flowers you got me on Mother's Day--British authorities have given permission for doctors at the Newcastle University to transfer genetic material created when an egg and sperm fuse into a second woman’s egg. In other words, the embryo would have two mothers. The procedure is designed to see if it is possible to prevent mothers from passing mitochondrial diseases to their offspring. Mitochondria are responsible for producing energy in the cells and come with their own DNA, inherited down the female line. If that DNA contains errors, there is no cure for the diseases it can produce, which includes a form of multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Researchers think that if they can take the good DNA from an egg and insert it into an egg with good mitochondrial DNA, they can eliminate the chances of mitochondrial diseases in the embryo. In 2001, researchers at St. Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey tried the experiment in reverse—injecting the mitochondrial DNA from one woman into the egg of a woman with the disease—and have produced 15 healthy children, free of their mothers’ disease. In the Newcastle experiment, the resulting egg will not be allowed to develop into a baby; they are just testing the theory. (And how, you ask, would such a baby turn out if they did permit it to develop? Since mitochondrial DNA does not contain the genetic material that gives us our individuality, any baby would resemble it’s biological mother and father).

Finks and nincompoops—glory days in technology--UPDATED

Remember the days when those terrific kids in Silicon Valley promised they would do things differently? —For Yahoo, this is apparently the Year of the Rat [and thank you, John Paczkowsky for that line—I couldn’t think of a better one]. It turns out that in order to do business in China you have to sign something called the “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Market." It means that if anyone misbehaves, like expressing an opinion contrary to the offiicial state line or criticizing the country, you have to cooperate with authorities in tracking the miscreant down. OK, you want to do business, you sign the damn thing and then forget it. Not Yahoo. According to Reporters Without Borders, a Chinese journalist, Chi Tao, sent out a message warning people that there could be social destabilization on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. That, the government said, was a “state secret” and damaging to the country. The government demanded information from Yahoo to track down the evil-doer. Yahoo, to it’s great shame, turned him over to the authorities. He is now in jail. Apparently, profit trumps morality even for the young Silicon Valley set. I don’t often quote the New Testament, but in the words of Paul, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” I’m thinking of changing my Yahoo accounts.

UPDATE--The story finally made it out of the blog world and is in this morning's New York Times.

Look, unless you are really dumb, FEMA can't help you—OK, you are trapped in a house in New Orleans or in Pas Christian or one of those unhappy places left desolate by Hurricane Katrina. You need some information fast. You turn on your Mac (or if you are really a nerd, your Linux computer) and dial up the website for those splendid folks at FEMA. Sorry, can’t help you. The FEMA website, which should know a disaster when they see one, will only work for Windows computers using Explorer 6. Go away. So unless you use Windows and are really stupid (you use Explorer? defense rests), you can’t get any help from FEMA. Don't believe me? Click here.

By the way, Macintouch says you can usually fool the website if you use Opera, the Norwegian web browser that can pretend it is Explorer. And for more, there is always Good Morning Silicon Valley, a wonderful website run out of the San Jose Mercury News.

Cotton candy in space

What’s soft as a pillow, cold as hell and just got smacked in the face?—Earlier this summer, when things were sunnier and merrier—give or take a war or two—NASA chased down a comet, Tempel 1, and blasted it to see what flew out. The answer was a lot of the stuff that created the early solar system, which is just what everyone seemed to expect. But that’s good; it’s nice when things work out that way.

The dust contained soot-like hydrocarbons, the stuff you find in limestone and crystalline silicates, scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab told reporters prior to publication in Science. They also found aluminum sulfides and iron sulfides, the stuff of the earth's crust. The comet also contained a lot of carbon, the building block of carbon-based life forms like us. That also fits the theory, which holds that comets contain the material of the solar system’s beginnings frozen in time and place. It is from that mix that the sun and its planets accreted. While the solar system’s bodies were being formed, the comets were sailing around in the Oort Cloud, untouched. “It’s a missing link between what we’ve seen around these younger, baby stars and solar systems and what we now see around our own,” said Carey Lisse, a member of the Deep Impact team at Hopkins.

The outer layer of Tempel 1 is soft as a pillow, consisting of very fine, grainy material, very fragile in nature, and marked with craters.

NASA launched the project, Deep Impact, in January, sending it 268-million miles to intercept the comet on the Fourth of July. A copper bullet, weighing about 820 pounds, was shot off to intercept the comet while something like 80 observatories watched to see what blew out. Now we know.

Just put your theories together and blow

Correlation does not equal causation, unless politics are involved—Is the intensity of Hurricane Katrina and the other serious storms of the last decade the result of global warming? Despite the political posturing—particularly of envirnonmentalists—the honest answer is, we don’t know. It most certainly could be, but the kind of data you need to make that conclusion doesn’t exist.

The theory goes this way. Hurricanes and storms like typhoons are generated over the ocean and the higher the temperature of the water, the more intense the storm is likely to become. Raise ocean temperatures two degrees and you have a storm on steroids. And, the ocean temperatures are rising, the result, almost every scientist believes, of global warming due to increased greenhouse gasses. Add to that the perceived increase in intensity of recent storms (Katrina comes after a summer of unusually high temperatures in the northern hemisphere) and you have the usual suspects.

The idea isn’t new. There is a long list of computer models showing this was certainly a possible conclusion. In 1998, researchers at NOAA in Princeton reported in Science that they used a “regional, high-resolution, hurricane prediction model” comparing 51 storms in the Pacific under present conditions with 51 storms in a world with higher CO2 concentrations. The result: more intense hurricanes. In 2001, NOAA scientists in Miami measured the number of Atlantic hurricanes between 1995 and 2000, and found that the overall activity doubled in that time compared to the previous 24 years. The increase was, they reported, the result of sea-surface temperature increases. “The present level of hurricane activity is likely to persist for an additional 10-24 years. The shift in climate calls for a reevaluation of preparedness and mitigation strategies." Good luck.

But the most important paper came in July in Nature on-line. MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel concluded that the destructive power of hurricanes (duration and highest wind speeds) had increased 50% over the last half a century and that a rise in surface temperatures was likely to be at least part of the reason. He studied both typhoons in the Pacific and hurricanes in the Atlantic, essentially the same phenomenon. He doesn’t say it is the only reason; it could be just one variable, but it appears real.

NOAA data shows that hurricane activity has been higher than normal in nine of the last 11 years and it has forecast 21 tropical storms this season, which runs into late fall. That would make it one of the most dangerous hurricane seasons in history. Indeed.

On the other hand, hurricanes run in 20-30 year cycles and this could be just one of those up-cycles. It could also just be a statistical blip. It also is true that the data for most parts of the world is not complete and that would make analyses very difficult. The few remaining scientists who don’t believe in global warming (who of course must be quoted in every news story on global warming), scoff at all that, but they are in a lonely little world all their own. Emanuel’s research is the first to claim a link between global warming and hurricane intensity, and as they say in science, it needs more study. And funding. And we damned near better do it.

Remarkable journalism

The New Orleans Times-Picayune's remarkable series on the threat to the city from hurricanes, which even predicted the horror of the Superdome, can be found here. Next time you hear someone from Washington say they could not predict this disaster, remember this.

Your obedient servant

The reporters' revolt

I am a long-time and persistent critic of the news media, of which I once was a member, and particularly of television news, which I have described as something other than journalism. Last night I was forced to change my mind, at least temporarily. If you did not see the reporter's revolt on Fox, you missed one of broadcast journalism's great moments. The "anchors" and talking heads in the air conditioned studios tried to put "perspective"--read an administration spin--on what the reporters and producers were showing. At which point their own reporters chopped their heads off. Shepard Smith and--would you believe--Geraldo Rivera (in tears--and I believe the tears) would take no crap from the airheads. The people at the Superdome and the Convention Center were locked in by government officials and kept from leaving. Kept from leaving! Rivera asked how that could happen and Smith described a check point in which the government blocked escape Why are they doing that? Smith paused, shrugged, and said quietly "I don't know."

"I want to get perspective here..." Sean Hannity started.
"That's all the perspective you need!"
Hannity said Fox had been showing the convoys entering the city, suggested that the reporters tell them what wonderful difference it made. Smith and Rivera wouldn't stand for it.
"Look at the face of the baby," said Rivera in tears. "Let them go. Let them out of here. Let them walk over the interstate and get out of here."

Hannity couldn't break away fast enough.

If you'd like to see the video--and by all means do, it will make your day--go to the video feed at Crooks & Liars.

Meanwhile, Jack Shafer at Slate has noticed the same thing. He calls it the revolt of the talking heads. Everytime a reporter talks to a politician they spend all their time congratulating each other on the swell job they're doing. The reporters are having none of it. It is the greatest fiaco in the histor of the country and the folks suffering in the South, and those of us appalled at the incompetence of the various governments apparently don't believe a word of it.

As Bill Maher said on HBO, maybe we got our media back.

Drowned Worlds

Four days later and they are still picking people off roof tops! People are without water, food and civilization now for four days! In America!

Those of us who are fans of the British novelist J.G. Ballard are not surprised at what is happening in New Orleans. We knew it would turn out this way.

Ballard, who is best known for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, which Steven Spielberg turned into a movie, makes his living writing environmental disaster fantasies, including The Drowned World. (He actually goes both ways: another novel is called Drought.) It is what happens when an environmental disaster peels off the thin veneer of civilization that covers us all, what happens when the social contract breaks down. See New Orleans 2005. A city in America.

A few thoughts:

President Bush told ABC no one expected the levees to break. Nonsense.

FEMA 2001
Louisiana State University and FEMA 2004
New Orleans Times-Picayune 2004-2005
U.S. News & World Report 2005
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for years

One wonders if he is a liar or is really so out of touch with reality.

Watching too many hours of television news. The difference between CNN's coverage and Fox is interesting. CNN's version is that things are pretty bad and getting worse. Fox's version is that things are pretty bad but help is on the way. I wondered if CNN, particularly Wolf Blitzer, was over-emphasizing the civil unrest but it appears, from seeing other media, that CNN was more accurate. And only Fox would broadcast a preacher blaming this all on a government that drives prayer out of schools. (If God was so pissed off at liberals why did He send the hurricane to Louisiana and Mississippi.)

Both networks rose to the occasion with heroic journalism but by far the best I have seen was NBC (I have not watched the other two networks so I can't comment). It was some of the most graphic and emotional broadcast journalism I can remember and done under extraordinary circumstances. There are times when I desperately miss not working for a newspaper or a news service. This is one of them.

Question: If CNN can get a producer and cameraperson to the convention center, why can't the U.S. army get there? If NBC can find tourists trapped on the roof of a building in an apartment they took over, why can't the New Orleans police? (The answer to the last question, which brings us back to Ballard, is in a fine story by Douglas Birch in the Baltimore Sun of what happens when the police also are victims when the social contract fails.

Networks are grappling with how graphic to let their pictures become--particularly the dead bodies. They are doing a fair job but I wonder about the question. One journalism professor was quoted as saying "dead is dead," but he is a journalism professor and you expect something like that from them. This is happening in an American city. It is a disgrace of historic proportion (the mayor of New Orleans called the federal response the third disaster) and it must be shown, the American people must see the result of what Washington has done through the years and what the Bush administration is doing now. And dead bodies carry the message.

And finally, the reaction of folks overseas is interesting and disturbing. They are properly appalled. My father used to say you can be incompetent or you can be arrogant. You can't be both.

Where is Jonathan Swift when we need him?

That may explain why they are calling it "Lake George"--New Orleans looks like a scene from a disaster movie. Thousands may have died but we don’t know the real number because much of the area is covered with a fetid, poisonous sea, in effect, the world’s largest toxic waste dump, filled with chemicals, excrement, dead animals and humans, gasoline and oil and a huge collection of bacteria and viruses. It may take half a year to drain. The economies of three of America’s poorest states are now almost non-existent or at least severely hobbled, and one of the world’s most interesting and beautiful cities in uninhabitable and will have to be evacuated--if, however, roaming bands of looters and gangs of armed thieves can be subdued. Water levels in the city are now equal to the water level in Lake Pontchartrain because the city has, in essence, become part of the lake. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless, most of them without food or water. This is not Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, it’s here. Both the regional and federal government was unprepared for a disaster this size although everyone knew one was inevitable. It is what happens when the Yahoos take over.

Knew it was inevitable you say? In 2004 and earlier this year, the New Orleans Times-Picayune [by all means click here] printed a series of stories warning this would happen because federal spending on disaster relief and flood control was cut, largely to fund the Iraq war. You are invited to see Will Bunch’s piece in Editor and Publisher here. Much of the federal dollars for protection against this kind of thing went to the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project but that money was essentially cut off by the Bush administration, the newspaper said, and the Army Corps of Engineers was never shy in giving the war and funding for homeland security as reasons. We might also add the tax cuts. We wouldn’t want the transfer of wealth to the very rich get interrupted. The Times-Picayune, publishing now only on its website because it had to abandon its print facilities, can now add: “No one can say they didn’t see it coming... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.” Maybe. As John Stewart said the other night, President Bush owes his great health to regular exercise and a total disengagement from reality.

Which brings up global warming, a phenomenon that the Yahoos insisted was not real and when finally forced to acknowledge it might be a problem, insisted nothing be done about it. The number and ferocity of hurricanes--which have both increased in recent years--may in fact be attributable to changes in the climate. Keay Davidson, points out in the San Francisco Chronicle that as bad as Katrina may have been, it won’t be the last of the season and the Gulf Coast could be in for an extended period of gigantic storms. The generator, according to some experts: global warming. But the Bush administration has refused to sign the Kyoto agreement or to acknowledge it is serious. That battle continues as the Know-nothings in Congress continue their warfare against scientists who warn against climate shift. See Irene Sege’s story in the Boston Globe about what is happening to a professor at UMass who keeps insisting the climate is warming.


And of course, it is not just the hurricane. At the FDA, the scientist in charge of women’s health issues quit this week because the FDA, putting politics before science, has again delayed approval of the morning-after pill without prescription. The agency’s own scientists and an outside advisory board both concluded that the pill, Plan B, was safe, but the FDA, now run by the Yahoos, despite the promise to make a decision by today, delayed it again. Susan F. Wood, a woman of honor, did the honorable thing and resigned publicly. What is interesting about this argument is that opposition to the pill comes from antiabortionists even though the pill--which does not kill a fetus--actually would reduce the number of abortions.

Where is Jonathan Swift when we need him?

By what I could discover, the YAHOOS appear to be the most unteachable of all animals: their capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry burdens. Yet I am of opinion, this defect arises chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition; for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel.

Just when you thought it was safe to RSS, he’s back!

Watch what you suck, fella. God may be watching--It would be harder to find a better topic to start off the autumn blogging with than circumcision. I knew you’d agree.

There is a minor brouhaha going on in New York City--and I say minor because it involves a small minority of one community and the issue is clear cut--over an ancient and totally discredited practice involving a mohel, the rabbi who performs circumcisions. The issue is not, I emphasize, circumcision--it involves how it is done. Circumcision binds a Jewish male to the covenant with God and is mandated in the Torah, the five books of Moses. It defines a jewish male. Except for a small group of disconnects, the practice is not controversial in the Jewish community, including among those of us who have had one. There also are clear medical benefits.

Mohels are rabbis trained in the practice. Most are Orthodox but that does not limit their practice. Virtually all Jewish families (perhaps as many as 90%) hire a mohel eight days after the birth of a son. The whole family shows up, the mother leaves the room in terror, the baby (usually anesthetized on wine-soaked cotton) cries, and the whole thing is over in a matter of seconds. The food is usually excellent.

Enter Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, 57, a mohel in New York City. Three boys, one in Staten Island and twins in Brooklyn, contracted Type-1 herpes after Fischer did the procedure. Using an ancient technique mentioned in the Talmud, Fischer used oral suction to stop the bleeding of the penis. I don’t have pictures. One of the boys involved died of the infection, which can be lethal to infants. It is possible Fischer had a cold sore when he performed the oral suction and the virus was transmitted through his saliva. The practice has been condemned as unsanitary since the 19th century, has been abandoned by most Orthodox mohels and is rejected by nearly every non-Orthodox authority. Using a tube for suction is now the norm and is endorsed by the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest Orthodox rabbinic association. Use of oral suction now resides exclusively in charedi (ultra-Orthodox) communities such as the Hassidim, where it is considered integral to the procedure. These communities say they have no intention of stopping the practice.

(Keep in mind that endangering the life of a child--or any other human for that matter--is the gravest of sins in Jewish law so these people are several entrees short of a kosher combo plate.)

Since February, Fischer has been under court order not to perform the ritual in the city while the health department investigates.

That would seem to be a slam-dunk, but this is New York City and this is an election year. The charedi community is in high dudgeon over the interference by the city and there are a lot of them in New York, particularly in Brooklyn. So, when they pressured Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who is, of course, Jewish, and is running for reelection) for a meeting, he acceded to their request and afterwards issued a statement that sets new records for pandering:

“We’re going to do a study, and make sure that everybody is safe and at the same time, it is not the government’s business to tell people how to practice their religion.”

Yes, but:

• The study already has been done and was published in the journal Pediatrics. There have been eight neonatal infections all traced to oral suction.

• It most certainly is the business of the government to intervene in religious matters when lives are at stake. If a witch doctor in Queens started practicing unsaniary female circumcision and was endangering the lives of girls in the city, would the government say it couldn’t interfere? Alas, there are few witch doctors who vote in New York City.

• And keep in mind, no matter what the charedi rabbis say, the practice violates basic Jewish law. When they wrote the Talmud they didn't know about viruses.

Then again, it is an election year. He is a very wealthy man, and he got wealthy by character and intelligence. He seems to have parked it when he became a politician.

By the way, Christopher Hitchens, with whom I disagree often but also read often, has a column on this is Slate and he is absolutely correct this time.

Mental Health Week

This here blog will be inactive next week as your humble servant and family make their annual pilgrimage to the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, the Tanglewood Music Festival, Great Barrington (I've always wondered if there is a Less Barrington) and the discount malls of Adams. You are on your own until the 29th or 30th, when action resumes.

Live long and prosper.

JNS

Flying over Kansas

For those of you following the creationism and intelligent design stuff, here is another website worth bookmarking, along with Panda's Thumb. It's here, CSICOP's Creation and Intelligent Design Watch.

If you live in Kansas, you get a discount.

Fetuses, cold soup and the bar at the center of the galaxy

August 18, 2005


Burning to stir up the abortion controversy--Here we go again. A group of Swiss scientists report in Lancet [subscription required] that they have used human fetal cells as a form of bandage to treat serious burns in children. The bandage was derived from the skin cells of an aborted fetus and proved, in the test, far superior in encouraging healing than skin grafts. Keeping in mind that the sample size is very small, eight children, the results still are impressive because of the context. Normally, burns are treated by taking skin from part of the patient that was not burned, and grafting it over the burns. That hurts like hell, often leaves serious scars, and doesn’t always work. In this study, scientists at the University Hospital of Lausanne, took artificial fetal skin, grown from a postage-stamp sized sample of skin from a fetus aborted three years earlier. The goal was to use the artificial skin to cover the wounds, just as a graft would. That’s not what happened. The new skin had to be replaced every several days because it dissolved, but the doctors found that the skin restored the damaged tissue which regenerated and healed the wounds. The experiment needs to be replicated and certainly requires tests on a larger number of patients before any real conclusions can be reached--and those experiments won’t happen in the U.S. They would be illegal.


Waiter, there’s life in my soup--Scientists have long puzzled over the inelegance of the human genome. There’s a lot of junk in it, stuff we don’t seem to need and doesn’t appear to serve any purpose, and it seems unnecessarily complex. A group of British scientists [hey, did you notice, science actually gets done in other countries?] think they have an explanation: life formed in hot soup that eventually cooled down. The theory speaks to a 40-year-old puzzle--why does the DNA vocabulary contain 64-three-letter words (codons), when they translate into only 20 amino acids. Seems sloppy and inefficient. Several codons even translate into the same amino acid. The researchers, from the University of Bath reporting in the Journal of Molecular Evolution [I always have it by my bedside], working on an idea from Francis Crick, suggest that the three-letter code evolved from a simpler two-letter code. The original code involved reading only two of the three letters--the first two or the last two. Two amino acids excluded from the doublet system, glutamine and asparagine, appear to be late comers. Neither can hold their molecules together in high temperatures, so the researcher theorize they formed after the hot soup cooled down, complicating the rise of life.



So set ‘em up Joe, I’ve got a little story I want you to know--The bar at the center of the galaxy sounds like a Douglas Adams sequel but it isn’t. It’s a odd-shaped cluster of stars. Long and narrow (we are using relative terms here), it cuts through the Milky Way and is even bigger than anyone thought. Keep in mind, this is really huge: 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than originally thought. It’s comprised of old and red stars, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison [I thought I’d throw in some American science here so everyone would feel better]. It sits at a 45-degree angle between our sun and the center of the galaxy and is a structure considered fairly rare in the known universe. It was found by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope. Most astronomers thought the center of the galaxy was spiral. Nope. There’s a bar there. Don’t panic.

That's Schroedinger's cat mewing on the porch

August 14, 2005

I'll take a vowel, Vanna, and then I'll know less--What if I gave you information that would result in your knowing less than you did before I gave it to you--negative information? Can there be such a thing? Well, yes, in the quantum world, anything is possible.

Jonathan Oppenheim at Cambridge has a wonderful webpage describing negative information, how you can actually reduce knowledge by adding to it. It's great fun--if you believe in quantum mechanics or existentialism.

Oppenheim points out that in information theory, “this dude Claude Shannon” pointed out that understanding information is less important than understanding how much there is. Give an information theorist a copy of War and Peace, and she would say, “gosh, that’s a lot of information.” [Woody Allen once said he took a speed-reading coure and read Moby Dick in 15 minutes. It’s about a whale.] A message with 10 letters doesn’t transmit a lot, so Shannon defined information as the minimum amount of letters needed to convey a message, irrespective of how it is delivered.

Think of the television show “Wheel of Fortune,” in which you have to guess a sentence as letters are added to a matrix. Once you have the meaning of the sentence, the rest of the letters are irrelevant. "Wheel of Fortune" uses information theory. Now consider there is something called prior information--knowing some of the letters before the game began--and partial information--the number of letters you need before you know the sentence. Got it?

OK, but the quantum world is different. It is, you should pardon the expression, existential. In Erwin Schroedinger’s wonderful quantum cat mind exercise, the answer to the question, is the cat alive or dead, is yes. Is an object here or there? Yes. It could also be neither here nor there. Einstein found that notion repulsive, but generally, that’s what physicists think is the nature of nature when dealing with very small objects. Feynman (stealing from von Neumann), is rumored to have said that "you don't understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it." Also keep in mind, that quantum objects are fragile. Look at one, and it stops being quantum. An electron can be pointing up and down simultaneously. The moment you look at it, it is either one or the other, or with Schroedinger’s cat, it is either dead or alive. So, if you decide that an electron pointing up is a 1 and one pointing down is a 0, the first person who looks at the electron removes it from its quantum state and decides it is one or the other. That’s why quantum computing is so difficult.

OK, now negative information. A mythical Bob in Oppenheim’s paper, has some prior information so that when the equally mythical Alice wants to send him a message, we can figure out how much information she must send before he understands the message. That’s tough because Alice doesn’t know what Bob knows, and in the quantum world, Alice doesn’t even know what Alice knows. [Alice is a good choice of names for this exercise]. Oppenheim uses a new adjective to decribe this, "Rumsfeldeque." Love it.

He then points out that the equation used to quantify how much information Alice has to send--how much partial information is required for Bob to understand the message--can produce a negative number. Huh?

Well, you probably are going to have to read this more thoroughly on your own, but here is Oppenheim’s example from his web page.

Information is always information about something. This can be expressed in terms of correlations. If you have either a white or a black ball, and I claim to know the color of your ball, then there is an easy test to figure out whether I really know something. I write the color of your ball on a piece of paper, and you put your ball in a box. Then we give the piece of paper and the box to a referee, who checks whether the color I wrote on the paper is the same as the color of the ball in the box. The referee can determine that I know something about what you have. If we repeat this test over and over again, the fact that I have information about your ball, will manifest itself in the fact that the referee will always find that the color I wrote on the piece of paper will be correlated with the color of the ball you gave her.

Now let us imagine that you give me your ball. Now I still know something, because the color on my piece of paper (and the ball I have), is correlated with your brain, which remembers what the color of the ball was. So by giving me the ball, you haven't changed anything: a referee can still perform a test to determine if I know something. The referee will ask me for the piece of paper, and ask you to write down the color of the ball you sent me. If they match, we have proved to the referee that I know something about what you have (or had).

But if the balls were quantum particles, then it can sometimes be that there is no memory of what color they are. A quantum ball can be completely isolated from anything which might record a memory of its color....

Now let us imagine that you have a quantum ball, which is black or white, and I have a piece of paper where it is written what color the ball is. Then I have some information, because my piece of paper is correlated with your ball. We could convince the referee that I know something about what you have. But if you give me the ball, then I will no longer have any correlations with things external to me. You have no memory of the color of the ball, and so there is no test we can perform with the referee which will prove that I knew something. By giving me the ball (giving me information), I now know less!

And, now, I think, I do too. Well, not really.

While we're on the subject of the weird and fascinating, may I recommend this? Report back.

We're capitalists; we won't hurt you

August 11, 2005

Don’t worry about yourself, think of the cockroaches--The proposed changes by the Environmental Protection Agency to protect human subjects in insecticide studies, is under attack from environmentalists, their own scientists, and Congress. No, not those old proposals. The new ones, the ones that were supposed to correct flaws in the first proposals. Several critics call it a sell-out to the industry, which of course is absurd--government wouldn’t do that, would they? Earlier this year, Congress lambasted the EPA’s proposed guidelines to protect human subjects, noting health risks and ethical lapses in the industry-supported plan. The EPA promised to go back and redo the proposals to take those concerns into consideration. The Baltimore Sun, however, reports today it has a copy of the 76-page draft of the new proposals and the EPA apparently either wasn’t paying attention or decided to ignore the criticism. Although the introduction contains wording say was going to propose tighter rules, the Sun says the text doesn’t come close. Even the agency’s own scientists are appalled. “This is a very important ethical, scientific and clinical issue,” one said, “and they are trying to fool the American public about its intent. It’s a magician’s trick.” [As an aside, the fact that scientist was an unnamed source is a good example of why reporters need to have unnamed sources and protect them]. Environmentalists say the rules have so many loopholes they are essentially meaningless. The proposal came from a congressional study that reviewed 22 EPA-related human studies conducted by the pesticide industry. The study found that in many cases the test subjects didn’t know what they were being exposed to or, in many cases, why the tests were being done. The study also found that some of the tests did not follow accepted ethical standards. Some of the test subjects at risk included pregnant women and children. An EPA spokeswoman said she couldn’t comment as it was only a draft proposal.

"You don't like me! You really don't like me!"--UPDATED

August 10, 2005


Well, they never call me--Too much is made of polling, or at least of individual polls. There is the common tendency to reject the ones that come to conclusions you don’t like or agree with (”the only poll that counts is the one on election day”) and embrace the ones that show you are definitely among the intelligent elite. And then there is the disbelief that you can make 1,500 telephone calls and tell what 300 million people are thinking. [Your humble servant was actually trained to do exactly that at a program at Northwestern University back in the last Nixon year]. Whether you believe individual polls or not, you sometimes run into a meta-analysis of polls--a study of lots of polls asking similar questions--and you come up with some interesting and believable stuff. Mark Blumenthal and his excellent blog, Mystery Pollster, has done just that. His essay was triggered by an op-ed piece in the New York Times by the Pew’s Andrew Kohut and Peter Hoey, that compares public opinion and major events during the first half-year of the second term for Presidents Nixon, Reagan Clinton and Bush. As Blumenthal points out, the graphic that goes with it is amazing. Essentially, it shows that President Bush’s approval rating is the lowest of any president in a second term with the exception of Richard Nixon who was being swallowed by Watergate. It’s down to 44 percent in the Pew poll. If, however, you go and combine all the respected national polls and plot them on one chart, they all--with one exception--show essentially a similar result:

Bush’s approval spiked naturally at 9/11 and quickly began to slide. That’s expected; no one would think any president could keep that high an approval as we moved away from the attack. It took another uptick with the capture of Saddam Hussein. It rose 5-10 points around the election. But the trend throughout Bush’s presidency has been steady and consistent in all but one of the polls--downward. [The exception is the Rasmussen poll, which uses machine voices for interviews in a tracking poll, and neither Blumenthal nor anyone else can explain why it is an outrider, besides the fact is uses robot interviewers. Blumenthal guesses it is because Rasmussen weights his polls by party which doesn’t catch changes in public’s party affiliation. More people are now associating themselves with Democrats then they did several years ago.)

One possible explanation for the downward slide, suggested by Slate’s blogger, Mickey Kaus, is that the polls are simply reflecting the natural approval rating Bush would have if 9/11 never happened. It’s not the war or the economy. It’s Bush. Think, Kaus says, of a baseball hitter who has a hot streak and then regresses back to his natural batting average. Bush has. What he sees it what he gets.

Works for me.

UPDATE: On 8/14, the Rasumussen robots fell into line, making it unanimous.

Steroids and the working man

Guest column
By Jon Shurkin
August 9, 2005

Is that a hypodermic needle in your pocket or are you just coming up to bat?—Thanks to Viagra spokesman Rafael Palmiero’s suspension for using performance enhancement drugs, there’s been a lot of squawking about cheating and illegality in baseball, not to mention the old favorite: "won’t somebody think of the children?" In fact, taking a turn through all the ESPN talking sport pundit shows, they’re all comparing this whole thing to the Black Sox scandal of 1919 or Pete Rose’s cheating on baseball. But is it?

A lot of people don’t know what they’re talking about. It may not be so terrible after all.

Quick, what is a steroid? It’s something you inject into your body to make you beefier and stronger, right? Well, err no. Why would doping be soprevalent in the Olympics in sports like swimming or track, where being beefier would be a hindrance not an advantage? Who were the first players to get busted this year for steroids in baseball? None of them were the body builder types. In fact, one of the things that’s being said repeatedlyabout Palmiero was that he didn’t seem like one because he wasn’t unusually big, strong and muscular so he could crush home run balls. Yet crush them he did.

As you listen to all this steroid kerfuffle, remember this: There are, in fact, over 600 types of
steroids, some of them even used for medicinal purposes. The main ones everyone talks about are those related to testosterone, which has the effect of yes, building muscle mass, but also in tissue building. The infamous "cream" often mentioned in the media does nothing but help people recover faster from an injury or the common aches, pains and tiredness that a full season of sports can bring. Roger Clemens, currently in the midst of one of the greatest seasons in baseball history at the tender age of 43, has been named as a doper by Jose Conseco.
But nobody mentions that when they’re all gushing over Roger, who is not the weight-lifter type at all. And when Ryne Sandberg and Wade Boggs gave their Hall of Fame speeches, everyone admired them because they were definitely not on the juice. But how do we know?
Steroids can do more than just make you big and strong. In the most cases, it’s your
normal, average looking guy who could be using them. The fact that everyone is out with pitchforks looking for the bashers shows once again that most people have no idea what
they’re talking about.

But what about the drug Rafael took, which is one of the big, nasty, bend over and inject type drugs. The reality is that nobody knows for sure what they do. They’re not even sure if all those supposed side effects that we keep on hearing about are from taking the steroids or from taking a particularly crappy steroid, the kind of steroid one gets on the black market because of the illegality of steroids. Don’t try the brown acid, indeed. Jose Canseco, reality TV star and the alleged Dr. Feelgood of baseball even writes in his book that he thinks steroids are good for you and that if administered properly can be completely non-harmful and beneficial to the athlete.

Of course, as everyone knows, there was a huge explosion of home runs over the years. Conspiracy fans would claim that baseball was in trouble after the ‘94 strike and so they souped up the ball, juiced up the players, and cranked up the volume. Sammy and Big Mac go after Roger Maris and fans fall back in deep love with American’s Pastime. True, but that era also included smaller ballparks and expansion. Smaller ballparks and expansion always
mean more home runs. Oh, and the man who some people think is the focus of all this, Barry Bonds? Yeah, he hit more home runs at a later age than he did when he was younger but so did Henry Aaron. And a lot of other great ballplayers. The dude worked out. A lot. Is it entirely possible that good conditioning, supplements (some legal, some not so much), incredible
genetics, and twenty years of baseball experience all came together to create an offensive force baseball hasn’t seen since the Babe was chasing hookers through trains?


But it’s cheating, right? Maybe. But say you have a baseball player who uses it to recover quickly from an injury. What’s the difference between doing that and taking cortisone, also a steroid? Or baseball’s deepest, darkest secret ˜uppers. Why is Jason Giambi considered a villain for taking drugs but not Curt Schilling? Schilling, after all, gained baseball immortality
by donning the bloody sock and pitching with a busted ankle. As studly as his performance was, he was also doped up to the beejesus on pain killers. How do football players survive the completely inhuman physical thrashing they do on a weekly basis? Gobs and gobs of pain pills. Ever see "North Dallas Forty?"

In other words, where do we draw the line? It is entirely possible for an athlete to go in and get lasik surgery to improve their eye sight, even going from normal 20-20 to 20-10. What’s the difference between that steroids? It’s also becoming possible for pitchers to get arm surgery to add muscle to their perfectly normal arm. Why? Because of instead of pitching with their however-old-they-are arm, they can add some unused tissues and muscle fromsomewhere else in the body and add it to their arm, thus fixing a lot of wear and tear on the arm. It’s like putting a new engine into a car; old body but newish firepower. Is that cheating? And at some point were about to see stuff involving genetics that will make using steroids seem like a second graders chem lab experiment.

Sure there’s something not right about steroids. And Rafael Palmiero might be the dumbest man in sports right now. But what we have here is a good old fashioned witch hunt, the kind of thing that happens when you combine a hysterical media, bad information, and politicians in blow-hard mode. The future isonly going to make things more complicated and messier, we haven’t even begun to think about all this.

Mr. Galileo, your table is waiting

August 5, 2005

You mean the earth goes around the sun? Who knew?— It seems that the Roman Catholic Church—or at least much of it—learned some lessons from the Galileo Affair, and the battle with those who didn’t is getting public. The British newspaper, The Independent, is reporting that an American Jesuit (who else) is blasting the Archbishop of Vienna (a long-time friend of Pope Benedict XVI) for an op-ed piece he wrote in the New York Times on evolution [no longer posted]. In the article, Cardinal Shönborn said that it is not possible to believe in random evolution—that the life we see around us is the result of random mutations—and be a believer in "God the Creator." "Evolution," he wrote, "in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not." That would put him right up there with President Bush, who thinks “intelligent design” needs to be taught in school. According to The Independent, Shöborn’s piece was instigated by Mark Ryland of the Discovery Institution, the mouthpiece for intelligent design. Now Father George Coyne, who happens to be the Vatican astronomer, has gone on the offensive in The Tablet [registration required, click headline], Britain’s Catholic weekly. Fr. Coyne said the article has "darkened the waters" of the rapport between Church and science, and says flatly that "life...has evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection and that is compatible with God’s dominion...Why does there seem to be a persistent retreat in the Church from attempts to establish a dialogue with the community of scientists?"

"Even today, disquiet still rumbles over the treatment of Galileo, despite the formation of the Galileo Commission to investigate the treatment of the scientist after John Paul II realised that many in the scientific world still believed there was an intrinsic animosity between the Church and science.," he writes.

"We can only come to know God by analogy. The universe as we know it today through science is one way to derive an analogical knowledge of God. For those who believe modern science does say something to us about God, it provides a challenge, an enriching challenge, to traditional beliefs about God. God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution. He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves. Is such thinking adequate to preserve the special character attributed by religious thought to the emergence not only of life but also of spirit, while avoiding a crude creationism? Only a protracted dialogue will tell. But we should not close off the dialogue and darken the already murky waters by fearing that God will be abandoned if we embrace the best of modern science."

That Fr. Coyne felt it permissible to take after the Archbishop of Vienna is, the newspaper said, “unprecedented.” He probably had to clear the article with his Jesuit superiors.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman in the New York Times, points out that the same technique reactionaries use push forward their agenda with non-science—for example, all those think-tank studies showing that global warming was exaggerated—is being used in the intelligent design debate, trying to foist off non-science as science and then insist there is a controversy when none actually exists. There is no controversy in science over global warming; there is no controversy in science over evolution. Journalists get trapped in the he-said, they-said syndrome in which just because proponents of intelligent design say there is a controversy, they feel obliged to cover it as if there actually was one. There ain’t. Krugman says Irving Kristol (Bill’s father) invented the technique in the 1970s, urging "corporations to make 'philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.”

Decline of Western Civilization Part VI—The Hummer and the Ice Berg

August 4, 2005

Well, at least it didn’t fall on the White House—The Larsen B ice shelf in Antartca collapsed over the austral summer in an event unprecedented in 10,000 years, according to American and Canadian researchers. You would have to go back to the end of the last ice age to find an equal. According to the paper published in Nature [$], the hunk of ice that fell off the Larsen is about the size of Luxembourg. Cause: probably global warming. In five years, the shelf has shrunk by 5,700 square kilometers (3,500 square miles). The conclusions were based on six ice cores taken from the vicinity of the ice shelf. The shelf has been thinning for years, but apparently reached, you should pardon the expression, a tipping point at the end of March when 50 billion tons fell off into the Weddell Sea, creating thousands of large ice bergs. It all happened in 35 days. The ice is floating so by itself, that won’t raise sea levels, but it could speed up the motion of ice on the land toward the sea which will. Remember that great scene in “The Day After Tomorrow” (an otherwise really stupid movie) in which a tsunami attacks Manhattan? That kind of stuff. But what is our government doing about all of this? Read on.




Let’s skip the details and jump right to the evasions—The U.S., Australia, China and India—countries that are unhappy with the Kyoto protocol, have issued a new pact to develop technologies that will combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gasses, thereby actually eliminating the need to do something. It would make it unnecessary to actually make sacrifices and would finesse the Kyoto protocol, which the U.S. and Australia, alone among developing nations, refuse to adopt. Kyoto demands that greenhouse emissions be cut by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008. That would require the world’s largest polluter (us) by far to to take real action rather than pass energy bills like the bill it passed last week, which dumped billions of dollars of tax relief to energy companies who make billions in profits every week and takes no action whatsoever. The U.S.’s criticism is that Kyoto doesn’t include developing nations in its restrictions. For the U.S. to fulfill Kyoto would probably mean putting restrictions on the big SUVs some Americans seem to love (”what, give up my Hummer?”) and the pickup trucks they don’t need, and it would mean putting restrictions on power plants owned by companies that pay millions to Congresspersons as election bribes. Not us.

Clone bitch! Nice doggy

Koreans clone an Afghan and expect to be hounded. August 3, 2005

Can’t we clone them after they are house-broken?— The Korean researchers who seem to be ahead of the rest of the world in cloning mammals now have cloned an Afghan hound. It wasn’t easy. Using the same somatic cell nuclear transfer technique that produced the famous sheep Dolly, the researchers, led by Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University, used 1095 eggs containing the DNA of a three-year-old male Afghan (taken from ear cells) and transferred to 123 canine surrogates. Only three pregnancies resulted; one miscarried. Two clones were born, but one died of pneumonia at 22 days, leaving Snuppy, born of a Labrador retriever bitch. New Scientist reports the researchers are already worried about being inundated with requests from pet owners to clone little Snoopy, but one warned “We are not in the business of cloning pets; we perform nuclear transfer for medical research.” So far, labs have cloned sheep, mice, cats, rats, cows, goats, pigs, horses, rabbits and a mule. They do keep climbing the mammal tree don’t they? Dog eggs are notoriously difficult to work with because they don’t mature readily in labs. Hwang used naturally ovulated egg cells, cells released from the ovaries into the fallopian tubes. Other researchers point out the potential. For instances, there are dog models of human diseases that could be studied by cloning. Pedigreed dogs suffer from multiple genetic diseases, like hip dysplasia, that might be treatable if the genetics could be better understood. The experiment is also a step toward cloning canine stem cells. The real question is: why an Afghan, possibly the world’s dumbest dog? Well, said one researcher, having a distinctive dog means that if we got a dachshund we’d know something funny happened.

Primordial soup with nuts—UPDATED

The green cheese argument
August 2, 2005

The country’s in the very best of hands—Where was Al Capp when we need him. Our Esteemed Leader said yesterday he believes intelligent design (Creationism lite) should be taught in schools along with Darwinian evolution. That’s actually not new; as governor of Texas, George Bush supported creationism in the classroom as well. “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” he said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.” We could, of course, announce the moon was made of green cheese and then demand that be included in a science curriculum so people can be exposed to different ideas, but what the hell. Christian reactionaries are trying to get intelligent design not science classes on grounds it is an equally valid theory to Darwin’s.
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have both concluded that there's no scientific basis for intelligent design and oppose its inclusion in school science classes. "The claim that equity demands balanced treatment of evolutionary theory and special creation in science classrooms reflects a misunderstanding of what science is and how it is conducted," the academy said in 1999. "Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."

UPDATE—No sooner did the media catch up to this story (I was a day earlier, thank you), than the reaction began. The groaning sound you heard early on come from John Marburger, the president's science advisor who said something like, well, he didn't mean it or say anything new. Marburger, an actual scientist, said that "evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology" and "intelligent design i not a scientific concept." He said Bush's comments should be taken to mean that intelligent design should be taken to mean he thinks it should be part of the social context in science classes. Right.

"It's what I've been pushing, it's what a lot of us have been pushing," said Richard Land, the president of the ethics and religious liberties commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Land, who has close ties to the White House, said that evolution "is too often taught as fact," and that "if you're going to teach the Darwinian theory as evolution, teach it as theory. And then teach another theory that has the most support among scientists."

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the president's comments irresponsible, and said that "when it comes to evolution, there is only one school of scientific thought, and that is evolution occurred and is still occurring." Mr. Lynn added that "when it comes to matters of religion and philosophy, they can be discussed objectively in public schools, but not in biology class."

How about this? Everybody has a right to ignorance. Everyone even has a right to pass their ignorance on to their own children, alas. What they don't have the right to do is insist on passing on their ignorance to my children.


For those of you who want to learn more, that wonderful blog The Panda’s Thumb, points out that the Geological Society of America will hold session on creationism at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City in October. See here.
And for a review of scientific efforts to create a tree of life, see this in the American Scientist.

You might also want to try Carl Zimmer's piece in the excellent blog Corante here.