anciendaze
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Many sports fans will recogize the term "homefield advantage". Even I, who don't always know which teams are which, am aware that some consistently do better at home than away. This may depend on actual physical characteristics of that home field, which are less familiar to opposing teams...
The BBC has a health news item on gaps in research on breast cancer. Research into "genetic factors" and "life-style changes" are always safe because they place the onus for disease on the victim. What is conspicuously missing is any search for a pathogen. ("We've already ruled that out...
Medical research has any number of difficult aspects, and the sociology of research is one of them. It would be nice to have fundamental laws which would deal with various conflicts based, not on subject matter, but on known characteristics of human beings which frustrate investigation of much...
We often talk about some threat sneaking up on us as "coming in under the RADAR", even if we don't know exactly what that means. RADAR was of course the technological magic of WWII which allowed airplanes to be located long before they were seen or heard. (It also allowed the battleship Bismarck...
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...
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...
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...
While I fall far short of the above ideal, I keep trying to look beyond the incredibly narrow perspectives of most researchers in biomedical fields, and the ephemeral subjects of disputes which dominate their working lives. Admittedly, this is moving upstream against a powerful current which...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
My topic today is outside the daily scope of economic news. While many overlooked details are too small to be seen, this is an example of the opposite. We don't normally perceive this trend because many of us have lived our entire lives inside it.
My story starts in the mid 1950s with a...