- More on the ongoing ammunition shortage in the US, as manufacturers are still unable to produce enough to satisfy demand.
- Police at G20 take trophy photo including arrested protester handcuffed and kneeling in front of the group. H/T to Radley Balko.
- Voyeurs rejoice! What sounds like a report from the Journal of Spike TV reveals that a mere 10 minutes of ogling well-endowed women provides as much benefit to men as 30 minutes in the gym, as far as heart disease, high blood pressure and stress are concerned. H/T to Ghost of a Flea.
- New Zealand bans in-vehicle GPS navigation systems . . . but only if they’re running on a mobile phone. Non-phone based systems apparently don’t distract you with directions the way phone-based ones do. Or something.
- Detroit Lions fans love the Washington Redskins.
September 28, 2009
Random links of possible interest
September 23, 2009
A few random links
- Nick Packwood on a reason to be proud of Canada: “Canada’s entire delegation is set to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly chamber when Persian tyrant, Twelver whack job and Holocaust denier/enthusiast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes the podium.”
- Talking down to irresponsible American adults. “Secretary Chu said he didn’t think that the public would throw the same political temper tantrum over climate legislation has has happened with the healthcare debate.”
- “You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality”
- Pimp my . . . bed?
“After years of catering to women, manufacturers are setting their sights on men. The new macho mattresses they’re introducing have “muscle-recovery properties” and cooling technology, on the theory that men are more likely to feel too hot in bed. The bed frames feature built-in TVs, iPod docking stations, wine coolers, safes and other guy-friendly gadgetry.”
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September 10, 2009
More than you probably wanted to know about gender
By way of John Scalzi’s Delicious bookmarks page, a thoughtful explanation of what people mean by ‘gender’ and why it is different from ‘sex’:
I have been asked at various times what people mean by “gender” and why it is different from “sex’. Also I’ve been asked to explain the multitudinous types of “trans” people, and why they often seen to be at each other’s throats. Hopefully I can traverse the various minefields involved without offending too many people, but sadly there are so many different perspectives out there that I’m bound to offend someone. My apologies in advance.
So, gender, what is it? Many people still think that gender and sex are the same thing. People, animals, even objects in many languages, are either male or female, one or the other, a very simple binary choice. Sadly life is never that simple. I’d like you to consider four different ways in which things are viewed as masculine or feminine.
Biological sex
That’s easy, isn’t it? People have one sort of dangly bits or the other. You either have XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. You either produce sperm or eggs. Simple.
Well, no. Biology is a fickle thing. Many people are born with ambiguous biology. I don’t just mean genuine hermaphrodites, though such people do exist. All sorts of things can happen to us in the womb, and thereafter, that make our gender difficult to determine by physical tests. These conditions are known as “intersex”, and there are an enormous number of different ones. The Intersex Society of North America has a fairly comprehensive list of them together with data on how common they are. It is reasonably certain that as many as 1 in 1000 people have an ambiguous biological sex in one way or another, and as people get old and parts of their body wear out that can increase significantly.
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September 8, 2009
John Snow and the start of modern epidemiology
Another “on this date” entry for you: in 1854, John Snow persuaded the local authorities in a London borough to remove the handle from a water pump at the centre of a cholera outbreak. The move was successful, and the death rate dropped immediately. Randy Alfred has the story:
Physician John Snow convinces a London local council to remove the handle from a pump in Soho. A deadly cholera epidemic in the neighborhood comes to an end immediately, though perhaps serendipitously. Snow maps the outbreak to prove his point . . . and launches modern epidemiology.
The Soho neighborhood was not then filled with galleries, clubs, restaurants and other fine urban diversions. Some of it was an unsanitary slum where centuries-old cesspits sat chockablock with the wells that provided drinking water to a crowded populace.
Asiatic cholera had stricken Britain in successive waves since 1831. Snow, an obstetrician who pioneered the use of anesthesia in Britain, published On the Mode of Communication of Cholera in 1849. His hypothesis (and supporting data) held that the scourge was caused by sewage pollution in drinking water and “always commences with disturbances of the functions of the alimentary canal.”
September 2, 2009
August 24, 2009
August 22, 2009
Right wing nutbars, observed
P.J. O’Rourke tries to save readers the effort of reading the Washington Post coverage of recent town hall protests:
So there was Rick Perlstein calling everyone to the right of Nikita Khrushchev a candidate for the state psychiatric ward with Alec MacGillis playing his KGB Bozo sidekick, firing blanks and honking his “End-of-life care eats up a huge slice of spending” airhorn. Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes.
Givhan writes a column called “On Culture,” and this is what passes for culture at the Post: “Of the hundreds of thousands of style guides currently for sale on Amazon, not one . . . was prescient enough to outline the appropriate attire for those public occasions when good citizens decided to behave like raving lunatics and turn lawmakers into punching bags.” Meeting with Givhan’s scorn were “T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm.”
I’ve never seen Robin Givhan. For all I know she dolls herself up like Jackie O. But I have seen other employees of the Washington Post and — with the exception of the elegant and, I dare say, cultured, Roxanne Roberts — they look as if they got dressed in the unlit confines of a Planet Aid clothing-donation bin.
Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn’t catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a “libertarian” wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.” And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson. I myself could point out the absurdity of protestors’ concerns about government euthanasia committees. Federal bureaucracy has never moved fast enough to get to the ill and elderly before natural causes do. And what’s with those “birthers”? Why their obsession with a nonentity like Obama? How about John Adams with his Alien and Sedition Acts choke-hold on the First Amendment? Or Jefferson? He could tell his Monica Lewinsky, “I own you,” and he wasn’t kidding. Or John Quincy Adams, pulling the original Blagojevich, buying the presidency from Henry Clay? Or that backwoods Bolshevik Andrew Jackson? Or William Henry Harrison, too dumb to come in out of the rain? Not one of these scallywags was born in the United States of America — look it up.
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August 21, 2009
QotD: Heroin as a treatment for addiction
Stripped of the medicalese, what the researchers found is that if you give heroin addicts heroin, they will keep coming back for more. They will also be less likely to buy heroin on the street or commit crimes to support their habit. These findings, similar to the results of European studies, are not exactly surprising. The puzzling thing is that we’re asked to pretend that heroin is a “treatment” for heroin addiction. “Study Backs Heroin to Treat Addiction,” says the headline over a New York Times story that begins, “The safest and most effective treatment for hard-core heroin addicts who fail to control their habit using methadone or other treatments may be their drug of choice, in prescription form.”
What the study actually shows is that the problems associated with heroin addiction are largely caused by prohibition, which creates a black market in which prices are artificially high, quality is unreliable, and obtaining the drug means risking arrest and associating with possibly violent criminals. The drug laws also encourage injection by making heroin much more expensive that it would otherwise be and foster unsanitary, disease-spreading injection practices by treating syringes and needles as illegal drug paraphernalia. When you take these dangers out of the equation, regular use of heroin is safe enough that it can qualify as a “treatment” dispensed by men in white coats. That rather startling fact should cause people to question not just current addiction treatment practices but the morality of trying to save people from themselves by making their lives miserable.
Jacob Sullum, “This Just In: Heroin Addicts Like Heroin”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-21
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August 15, 2009
The high cost of coping with Celiac Disease
An article in the New York Times discusses something near and not-particularly-dear to our hearts — Celiac Disease:
Seven years after receiving his diagnosis, Mr. Oram, who is married and has one daughter, is symptom-free, but the cost of staying that way is high. That’s because the treatment for celiac does not come in the form of a pill that will be reimbursed or subsidized by an insurer. The treatment is to avoid eating products containing gluten. And gluten-free versions of products like bread, pizza and crackers are nearly three times as expensive as regular products, according to a study conducted by the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University.
Unfortunately for celiac patients, the extra cost of a special diet is not reimbursed by health care plans. Nor do most policies pay for trips to a dietitian to receive nutritional guidance.
In Britain, by contrast, patients found to have celiac disease are prescribed gluten-free products. In Italy, sufferers are given a stipend to spend on gluten-free food.
Some doctors blame drug makers, in part, for the lack of awareness and the lack of support. “The drug makers have not been interested in celiac because, until very recently, there have been no medications to treat it,” said Dr. Peter Green, director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University. “And since drug makers are responsible for so much of the education that doctors receive, the medical community is largely unaware of the disease.”
Elizabeth has suffered from gluten intolerance for most of her life, so we’re very aware of the difficulty (and added cost) of finding food that doesn’t contain wheat gluten. Wheat is a very cheap way of adding bulk and body to foods that traditionally do not contain it . . . it’s distressing the number of times we’ve discovered that a packaged food that used to be gluten-free has been “improved” . . . and the extent of the improvement has been to add wheat in place of more expensive non-gluten ingredients.
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August 14, 2009
August 12, 2009
August 10, 2009
August 8, 2009
Dieting and obesity
Megan McArdle had an interesting-but-lengthy post earlier this week on obesity and both the scientific and political issues surrounding it:
I don’t agree with Paul Campos about everything, but I do agree with some of his core propositions:
- Study after study shows that most people are unable to lose more than a small percentage of their body weight and keep it off without major surgery
- There is evidence to show that this is physiologic rather than pyschological — it is nearly impossible for very heavy people to simply “eat less and exercise more” to a “normal” weight (given that 2/3 of the country is overweight or obese, normal weights, aren’t.)
- The fact that this often operates through the appetite system does not mean it’s “all in their heads” or a lack of willpower. Appetite is a signal as powerful as thirst or pain. Most people can’t ignore it.
- The largest environmental determinant of this trend is probably simply cheaper, tastier calories, which will be very hard to reverse
[. . .]
This really is a pattern that you see over and over again in obesity research. It’s as if researchers are terrified to say anything that might be viewed as giving people license to get fat. The CDC researcher who sharply revised downward the estimates of deaths from obesity, finding that overweight was actually healthier, fell all over herself proclaiming that of course, this didn’t account for quality of life. Because we know that a woman who weighs 160 pounds couldn’t possibly have a decent quality of life . . . ?
[. . .]
I know, I know . . . it’s for the children! I am very fond of children. But I do not actually think that they are some sort of master race in whose name anything at all can be justified. And if I did, I’d be a lot more worried about, oh, abortion, than McDonalds ads.
Two final points. Everyone likes to focus on their favorite boogeymen. To read a left-wing blog, you’d think that about 95% of the leading cause of obesity was agribusiness, chain restaurants, and automobiles. To read a right-wing paper, it’s all the infamous lack of self-control displayed by the poor.
But in fact, most of the things effecting kids are side effects of other efforts a lot of people are rather fond of. Processed foods and chain restaurants have exploded in the last two decades because Mom spends more time outside the home, generating more market income, and less time for home cooked meals. Kids exercise less not because crime is higher, or even because we’ve become more suburban, but because they’re no longer allowed to operate unsupervised until they’re quite old, and Mom and Dad both work. Schools don’t have P/E because they’re using the time to teach kids to read. Maybe those were bad tradeoffs. But they’re not irrational tradeoffs, and switching them back is not costless.
One thing Megan doesn’t touch on in the post (although she had done in earlier posts on this topic) is that metabolic changes over individuals’ lifetimes can actively sabotage good intentions on maintaining a given weight. Up until my late 20s, I could lose weight just by thinking about it, and then suddenly in my early 30s, I discovered that taking weight off was something that now needed a more conscious effort. Now I’m finding it even tougher to manage my weight (and also harder to make and take advantage of opportunities to get some exercise). My innate laziness and enjoyment of good food and good wine can usuallyalways overwhelm any urge to go do something healthy instead.
And no, I didn’t copy the entire post . . . there’s lots more, and it’s all worth reading.
