1. 
   Curse of the Monkey God?

   To say that religious mythology is not entirely consistent is like observing that the ocean can be rather humid at times. Christians may have Saint James buried in several places, one of which is called Campo Stella, and associated with the miraculous appearance of a star on the field of battle. (Secular historians may wonder if compostella, or burial ground, was retroactively corrupted into...

   anciendaze, Jul 6, 2012
2. 
   The Purloined Virus

   Edgar Allen Poe is often credited with the origin of the modern detective story. His first such was The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The idea of murders in a place where dead bodies might be expected gives some insight into his thinking, though he did not capitalize on that at once. (He must certainly have been aware that the Paris morgue was something of a public attraction where the general...

   anciendaze, Jun 10, 2012
3. 
   Blank Spots on the Map

   Joseph Conrad spent much of an adventurous life seeking out the blank spots on maps. What he found in one of them formed the shattering message of Heart of Darkness. He had gone looking for strange and exotic aspects of the non-European world. What he found was pathological behavior by Europeans outside the constraints imposed by civilization, and by Africans whose traditional cultures were...

   anciendaze, Jun 9, 2012
4. 
   A plea for broad leukemia virus research

   A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects....

   anciendaze, Jun 5, 2012
5. 
   Trust

   Three items in today's news prompted thoughts about trusting pharmaceuticals. The first is pretty obviously connected. If one-third of drugs you obtain are not what they claim to be what confidence can you place in treatment with them? Of course one can say that this is not a problem in countries where drugs are well-regulated, though the costs this imposes are substantial. (By the way, the...

   anciendaze, May 22, 2012
6. 
   Footprints in the Sand

   For impressionable antediluvians who grew up prior to television the passage in Robinson Crusoe where the protagonist finds footprints in the sand might raise hair on the back of the neck. It was not necessary for him to meet these visitors to know that he had company. (Probably just as well, since his visitors turned out to be cannibals. I remember being properly horrified by this, somehow...

   anciendaze, Mar 10, 2012
7. 
   Eurozone fiscal compact

   Recent news indicates that the Eurozone will keep a functioning banking system, hardly surprising in light of the alternative. What a new fiscal treaty will do for economic recovery is far less certain. Leaders have demonstrated a commitment, but the size of this commitment remains unknown. This is business as usual in the politics of money. Still, this measure only addresses one aspect of...

   anciendaze, Mar 2, 2012
8. 
   Subversive Literature

   People who complain that my last post was overly mysterious should know that I just read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. They should be thankful to have escaped references to Faustian bargains, Gnostic Christianity and comparative demonology. These pieces of misdirection make sense in Bulgakov's case, because he was writing a highly subversive novel in Stalin's Moscow during the...

   anciendaze, Feb 28, 2012
9. 
   Domesticated Dragons

   Previously, I've described endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) as sleeping dragons, even if they sometimes exhibit surprising activity. These genetic sequences, and their poor relations, retrotransposons, are found very widely, not just in humans, or mammals, or even animals. They exhibit similar characteristics in very different genomes. This prompts questions about why these pathogenic insertions...

   anciendaze, Feb 23, 2012
10. 
    A Tale of Two Studies

    Last year there were two studies of MRI scans of CFS patients: one in Australia and one in the U.K. Both used a technique called "voxel-based morphometry" (if you can say that several times quickly, you must be sober) to detect changes in both gray matter and white matter. Both concluded there are systematic changes in patients with ME/CFS indicating shrinkage. Now, the big...

    anciendaze, Jan 27, 2012
11. 
    Ne mors quidem est malum

    My title is a quote from Cicero concerning the immortality of the soul, not an exhortation to suicide. As usual I have a new twist on an old saying. For all the ink that has been spilled in disputes over the organic nature of ME/CFS, over a period of half a century, there has been one major oversight -- autopsies of deceased sufferers. (If you don't believe that time span, check the date...

    anciendaze, Jan 18, 2012
12. 
    Out of sight, out of mind

    This common epigram can be traced to 1562 in English. Idiomatic ambiguity between distinct meanings, forgotten and insane, renders translation into other languages tricky. Even before computers became involved there was a claim of a student translation into Chinese as "unseen idiot". The relation between selective attention and personal or organizational insanity runs much deeper. In the...

    anciendaze, Jan 8, 2012
13. 
    They might NOT be giants.

    Enrico Fermi was asked at least once what characteristics Nobel Prize winners in physics had in common. His reply is revealing, "I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence." I hasten to add that this judgment should not be limited to either physicists or Nobel Prize winners. Intelligence is not an essential requirement for successful scientists. Some have it, some don't....

    anciendaze, Dec 26, 2011
14. 
    Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

    When we consider medical triumphs of virology, we have to mention smallpox, rabies, yellow fever and poliomyelitis. Vaccination for smallpox was discovered in the 18th century, and refined and improved throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1979 the World Health Organization declared that a massive global vaccination program had made smallpox extinct in the wild. This still appears to be...

    anciendaze, Dec 12, 2011
15. 
    Defining Moment

    Today's news tells me the Eurozone has reached an agreement on closer fiscal integration, minus the U.K. There are other, more ominous, signs, though they may not accurately reflect response to this. Time will tell. The important point is that EU leaders have agreed to give up significant aspects of fiscal sovereignty without waiting for public support for such an idea to materialize. The...

    anciendaze, Dec 9, 2011

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