Speaking of pleasure: Having lived with fire ants, stepped in fire ants, laid down with fire ants, and been bit just about everywhere by fire ants, this pleases me immensely: Parasitic flies turn fire ants them into zombies. The fly maggots eat their brains.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Medicine
Pharma objects to empiricism, part xxx
by David Dobbs •
This gets at the deep, deep problem created by allowing pharma to dominant drug testing data while we lack the ability to collect information on how well various drug and other treatments actually work in clinical practice.
Uncategorized
Curveball deception & Koufax as god, cont’d
by David Dobbs •
The curveball further explained; Koufax Ks Mantle; and how even Koufax was better than his peerless stuff.
Uncategorized
POWs who weren’t, cont’d
by David Dobbs •
A concern with bogus POWs suggests I have a problem with — well, bogus POWs. Should it not bother us when people masquerading as POWs are collecting benefits and kudos and sympathies they didn’t earn — and which others earned through rather excruciating means?
Uncategorized
Human Descent from Lemurs? Could be, sortalike
by David Dobbs •
“A small, lemur-like creature may have been an early ancestor of monkeys, apes, and humans.” Or not.
Uncategorized
Deficit I mean Health Care Reform: Eye-popping chart dept.
by David Dobbs •
“That orange line headed heaven-ward? That’s our deficit. All those other lines dipping down? That’s our deficit if we had the same health care spending per person as France, Germany, Canada, and the UK (all countries, incidentally, with higher life expectancies than our own).”
read more →
Brains and Behavior, Uncategorized
The power of conformity: Candid Camera elevator psychology
by David Dobbs •
Most of us recognize the power of the urge to conform , but you don’t often see it evoked and displayed so starkly as in this old Candid Camera segment.
read more →
Medicine
An optimistic take on health-care reform
by David Dobbs •
“he opponents of health reform are, at this juncture, entirely isolated….”
read more →
Medicine
Effect Measure on what “so far, so good” means
by David Dobbs •
While approaching an intersection you see a truck on the intersecting road is fixing to run the stop sign and smash you. You slam on the brakes — as the truck driver slams on his. You release the brakes and roll through unharmed. Have you overreacted?
read more →
Uncategorized
Climate change and Western wildfires: gonna get hotter
by David Dobbs •
“CAP Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy covers the latest science in an American Progress column this week, explaining the problematic feedback cycle: higher temperatures from global warming increase the risks of wildfires, and increased fires release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere:”