18 October 2010 allergy edition

Allergies (or a cold?) and I am getting shocked by static electricity again.

So, I’ll be a bit brief:

Robert Reich: we have a plutocracy (or we are getting that way): a government for big money interests, period.

Political Ads
I roared at this one:

This ad would get me to consider Rand Paul…well, it would if I didn’t know more about him. But this is Kentucky….

Some more ads
I am backing Senator Boxer, but I had to laugh out loud at this ridiculous ad:

I’ve never seen an ad like this one

John McCain: gone to the evil side

There are more here that I will get to later.

18 October 2010 Rehabilitation

Sleep: no shoulder pain, but I didn’t sleep well. I took an antihistamine which may have been a mistake.
I felt terrible when I woke up but my workout went ok:

one legged squats: 10 x 45, 10 x 95
Two legged: 10 x 235 (smith)
Leg presses: 30 x 180, 30 x 270, 30 x 360
sit ups: 100 (4 sets of 25 at inclines)
extensions: 3 sets of 10
curls (leg): 3 sets of 10
toe: 3 sets of 30
back: 2 sets of 20
leg lifts: 3 sets of 20

Upper body:
rows: 3 sets of 10 with 80 each arm
pull down: 15, 10, 10 with 120
curls: 3 sets of 10 with 20 pound dumbbells
military (machine): 2 sets of 20 x 70 (two handed)
bench: 1 set of 30 with 25
arm bike: 4.25 miles in 15 minutes.

Then to class; I didn’t return home.
Right now: very tired and sleepy.

Athletic note: be very wary of taking NSAIDs prior to a long race:

Runners may think that as long as they don’t go overboard like Ehret, they’ll be safe. But experts say the benefits of popping even one pill before a 10K don’t outweigh the risks. NSAIDs inhibit prostaglandins, hormones that help normalize blood flow to the kidneys. Mix an NSAID with physical exertion and dehydration, and you can overwhelm your kidneys.

What’s more, NSAIDs can bump up your blood pressure, and when you add this to the natural rise that occurs when you exercise, “suddenly you have two things increasing your blood pressure,” Graedon says. If you already have high blood pressure, “you could have a mini stroke or a heart attack,” he says. NSAIDs also block an enzyme called cyclooxygenase (COX) that normally protects the heart, and this might explain why many NSAIDs, including ibuprofen, may raise the risk of heart attack.

Some forms of COX also protect the stomach lining from digestive acids, so when an NSAID blocks this enzyme, you may experience nausea, diarrhea, intestinal bleeding, and cramps. When used during a marathon or ultra, NSAIDs also seem to boost the risk of hyponatremia, an electrolyte imbalance that can cause the brain to swell. “It’s something you can die of during a race,” says Martin Hoffman, M. D., director of research at the Western States Endurance Run.

Many runners believe that NSAIDs increase their pain tolerance, but studies contradict this notion. In 2005, David Nieman, Dr. P.H., director of the human performance lab at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, examined ibuprofen use at Western States. About 70 percent of the racers said they took it to help them manage the discomfort of racing. But when he measured pain and muscle soreness in these pill poppers, he found no reduction compared with nonusers. Worse, ibuprofen takers had more inflammation. “There’s no good reason to use ibuprofen during a race,” Nieman says. “There are too many potential negatives.” Any pain and inflammation that turns up while running is not something you should medicate but a signal that it’s time to reevaluate your training regimen, he says.

Watch the dosage
For relief during or after exercise, Hoffman recommends acetaminophen since it works via a different mechanism than NSAIDs, and the drug doesn’t have the side effects associated with aspirin or ibuprofen. “It’s a relatively safe drug, and it doesn’t present problems with the kidney or gut,” he says.

But watch the dosage. While it’s safe at recommended doses, acetaminophen can be toxic to the liver, especially when mixed with alcohol. “You can hit the tipping point pretty fast with acetaminophen,” says Graedon. Acetaminophen overdose is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States, in part because the drug is found in many over-the-counter cold and allergy medicines, so it’s easy to overdose if you take one of these drugs with Tylenol.

I wonder if this was the cause of my stomach issues.

17 October 2010 PM (sleepy eyes)

My struggles with allergies continues…

Here are a couple of videos:

(too true; thanks to Mano Singham for the link)

17 October 2010

Science, the public and medicine

Sandwalk alerts his readers to the following video which is plugging an ID work:

Actually, I agree with much of the beginning of the video; a evolution, as scientists understand it, precludes a directed process by which a deity could intentionally create beings designed to worship it. The people in this video clearly don’t understand this process and end up making ridiculous statements toward the end…and no, that evolution happened in more or less the way that scientists say that it did is accepted science.

Sandwalk points us to yet another article in which a non-scientists expresses hurt feelings over the fact that scientists don’t take their criticisms seriously. Yes, non-scientists can criticize all they want, but they have no right to be taken seriously. It would help if they got the science right prior to making their criticisms.

Nature
If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all. Maybe not. Seriously, surf to this article to see some awesome variety of trees; here is but one to tease you:

Medicine
Here is a case study that highlights:
1. Why diagnosis is so darned hard
2. Why what you did years ago can come back to haunt you today
3. How the body can keep a fungus at bay for decades only to fall prey to it when the defenses go down.

I simply love the the Vital Signs feature in Discover Magazine. In the November 2010 issue there is an article called Reckless Medicine (by Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee which talks about how science is often NOT used in medicine.

Along the same lines is this article:

[...]Last spring, I sat in on one of the team’s weekly meetings on the medical school’s campus, which is plunked crazily across a series of sharp hills. The building in which we met, like most at the school, had the look of a barracks and was festooned with political graffiti. But the group convened in a spacious conference room that would have been at home at a Silicon Valley start-up. Sprawled around a large table were Tatsioni and eight other youngish Greek researchers and physicians who, in contrast to the pasty younger staff frequently seen in U.S. hospitals, looked like the casually glamorous cast of a television medical drama. The professor, a dapper and soft-spoken man named John Ioannidis, loosely presided.

One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

Salanti remained poised, as if the grilling were par for the course, and gamely acknowledged that the suggestions were all good—but a single study can’t prove everything, she said. Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began? “Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile. Everyone nodded. Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted? [...]

To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news? Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions. [...]

Now I am NOT going to say that such research is worthless but there are some problems.
Here are some statistical problems:
1. Confidence intervals are often set at 95 percent. This means that right off the bat, 5 percent of the studies will “show” an effect that really isn’t there.
2. People often don’t understand what the studies say. Here is but one example: (from the November 2010 Discovery Article “Reckless Medicine”):

For example, when an ad for the anticholesterol drug Lipitor trumpets a one third reduction in the risk of heart attack or stroke, that is a relative risk, devoid of meaning without context. Only by knowing how many patients have to be treated to achieve a given benefit and how many will be harmed can doctors determine whether they are doing their patients any good….[...] in the best-case scenario, 50 men at risk for a heart attack would have to be treated with statins like Lipitor for five years to prevent a single heart attack or stroke.

In other words, 98 percent of these men would receive no benefit at all (but which ones?)

If this seems strange, consider the data presented in another way: if I could find a drug that would cut my risk of a heart attack by one third, should I take it? Well, “it depends”: according to an online calculator, I have about a 3 percent chance of getting a heart attack (or dying from from heart disease in the last 10 years) and this medicine would reduce it to 2 percent. Well, what side effects would this drug have? On the other hand, if someone has a 30 percent chance, a 1/3 reduction of risk could be substantial and perhaps worth the risk of side effects.

Religions and atheism

How outspoken should atheists be? I see no reason why we shouldn’t challenge widely held but unsupportable ideas. But remember that, in general, people deserve respect even if their ideas don’t. I know that I sometimes forget this.

Politics

The tea party people often conflate the Constitution with their own ideas on how America should be:

[...] But near the end she veered into stranger—and more revealing—territory. O’Donnell once told voters that her “No. 1” qualification for the Senate is an eight-day course she took at a conservative think tank in 2002. Now she was revisiting its subject: the Constitution.

The Founders’ masterpiece, O’Donnell said, isn’t just a legal document; it’s a “covenant” based on “divine principles.” For decades, she continued, the agents of “anti-Americanism” who dominate “the D.C. cocktail crowd” have disrespected the hallowed document. But now, finally, in the “darker days” of the Obama administration, “the Constitution is making a comeback.” Like the “chosen people of Israel,” who “cycle[d] through periods of blessing and suffering,” the Tea Party has rediscovered America’s version of “the Hebrew Scriptures” and led the country into “a season of constitutional repentance.” Going forward, O’Donnell declared, Republicans must champion the “American values” enshrined in our sacred text. “There are more of us than there are of them,” she concluded.
[...]

There is much more there.

On the whole, Americans are remarkably uninformed:

Economy: Paul Krugman points out that this current government is NOT a big spending government; the problem is more with the fact that we are underperforming with respect to what our GDP should be.

2010 election It appears that the expected value of the number of expected House pickups by the Republicans is 50; but the confidence interval is very, very wide. In other words, there is a ton of variance in the expected value (either way).

17 October 2010 Rehabilitation

Sleep: shoulder was fine; still coughing up junk. But even that is getting better.

I went to McNaughton and left at 7:25. I saw some other runners who started a few minutes after I did; they got away from me at about 1.5 miles into it (just prior to the woods).

I wore hiking boots and was 46 minutes at the Totem pole, 1:01 at the first crossing and 1:33 at the half way bridge and 2:35 at the 8 mile bridge.

The right knee (inner lateral) was a bit whiny when I woke up but overall it was fine.

I saw yet another idiot with a loose pit bull; at least this one moved aside.
But over all this was a joyous walk; pretty day and the body seems to be adjusting.

16 October 2010 Rehabilitation

Night: shoulder and knee were ok.

Workout: I started by walking a 5K with my buddy Tracy (who ran/walked); we finished in 39:30 (almost dead last). Then I went out to McNaughton and hiked a 10 mile loop in 3:24; what slowed me down was a few of the leaf buried steep downhills and some bozo who had two large pit bulldogs off of a leash; I stood still and seethed but remained calm on the outside.

The allergies were bad and I could smell some of the burning leaves. But, on the whole, save the brief pit bull incident, it was very enjoyable and pretty. I saw several deer run past.

The knee was ok; achy at times.

Total for the day: 14 miles, 10 on trails.

16 October 2010 Posts

Science and Nature
Check out our Family Tree (hominids):

Surf to the link to see which hominid is which; note that there are homo sapiens and Neanderthals pictured.

Nature
Alpine ibex have adapted to mountainous terrain so well that they can walk along a face of a dam to lick salty residue. Follow the link to the Conservation Report to see the photos.

Transitive Property of Christine O’Donnell

ColbertNation.com video – Stephen concludes that masturbating equals being gay by following Christine O’Donnell’s ironclad logic.

Transitive Property of Christine O’Donnell, posted with vodpod

15 October 2010 PM

Here are some random things:

Factual error: Stephen Hawking is a citizen of the UK. Nevertheless, we’d lose 93 percent of our Academy of Science level scientists (and about 60 percent overall).

This is the candidate I voted for (and met) in IL-18.

White House Science Fair

WASHINGTON, DC — On Monday, October 18th, President Obama will host the White House Science Fair celebrating the winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions. The President will view exhibits of these students’ work, ranging from breakthrough basic research to new inventions, followed by remarks to an audience of students, science educators and business leaders on the importance of STEM education to our country’s economic future.

The White House Science Fair fulfills a commitment the President made at the launch of his Educate to Innovate campaign in November 2009 to inspire boys and girls to excel in math and science. As the President noted then, “If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.” The White House event will kick off a week that culminates with the USA Science and Engineering Festival on the National Mall and in over 50 satellite locations that is poised to draw more than a million people nationwide.

Way cool!

Social
Remember all of those mortgage securities? That’s right…it is unclear where the actual notes are. In other words, those greedy bastards may have well screwed themselves!

While it seems that Geithner isn’t in any hurry to consider action on the foreclosure fraud crisis by declaring a national moratorium on foreclosures, saying that “a national moratorium would be very damaging to exactly the kind of people we’re trying to protect,” the SEIU is trying to help people protect themselves to the extent that they can.

They’ve launched “Where’s the Note” an online tool that will help homeowners figure out who it is that is actually holding their mortgage note. The mortgage note is the document homeowners sign when securing a home loan. The original mortgage note with the the borrower’s signature is the only proof that that the borrower owes the debt. Banks need the note to prove that they own the loan and can collect payments, or have the right to foreclose if payments aren’t made. And here’s the rub.

The problem is, banks now buy and sell mortgages up and down Wall Street – slicing them up and repackaging them to sell to other banks. The bank you bought your mortgage from two years ago may not be the bank that owns it today. But, in all the shuffle, the mortgage notes often don’t get transferred along with your debt.

This is where the SEIU’s new tool comes in. With it, you can find out who actually now holds your note. Here’s how they explain it:

The Wall Street banks’ foreclosure system is a mess. Their total disregard for mortgage laws and standards is what created the foreclosure epidemic in the first place. Now, their total mismanagement is catching up to them. As of today, some of the largest mortgage lenders – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and GMAC (now called Ally) – have been forced to halt foreclosures in 23 states and growing. We can’t rely on Wall Street banks to follow basic rules. We have to hold them accountable. At very least, they must provide the mortgage notes.

When Wall Street banks securitized, packaged, sold, and resold our mortgages, they created a system where it is often impossible to figure out who actually owns mortgage notes and therefore has the authority to foreclose on properties. But the big banks are getting tangled up in their own web. Recent events have exposed a handful of banks that are throwing families out of their homes even though they don’t have the mortgage note that proves they actually have a legal right to do so. There have been instances of two banks trying to foreclose on the same home, and in at least one case, of a bank trying to foreclose on a house where the homeowner had never even taken out a mortgage with anyone in the first place.

Whether you are facing foreclosure, have an underwater mortgage, or are just a concerned homeowner, it’s important that you contact your bank and demand to see the original note on your mortgage.

Hey, these reptiles don’t hesitate to use the law against the “little person.” So use the law right back!

Mark my words: the Republicans will start whining about having “compassion” on the banks and the other reptiles …..

15 October 2010

Science/Geek awesomeness
Here is a collection of cool images and charts.

Here is a sample:
(click for larger)

Mortgage Crisis: banks are sometimes foreclosing on properties that they don’t have the title to!

The story so far: An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on mortgage payments. So servicers — the companies that collect payments on behalf of mortgage owners — have been foreclosing on many mortgages, seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes? Horror stories have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits asserting that the papers are in order. And these affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of borrowers are being defrauded — charged fees they don’t actually owe, declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they aren’t.

So the response?

True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s the government’s job to create them.

That won’t be easy, but there are good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has proposed giving mortgage counselors and other public entities the power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

We’ll see; but for now if someone tries to kick you out of your home, get a lawyer and ask to see the documentation.

Science, religion and stochastic factors
Jerry Coyne wrote an op-ed in USA today about how science and religion are incompatible. He then shared some of the feedback:

I want to briefly highlight one because its claim that I made a philosophical boo-boo has also appeared at several places on the internet:

Interesting but flawed argument

Jerry Coyne delivers a bold perspective on the compatibility of science and religion. He argues that a scientific viewpoint is contradictory to, and clearly trumps, a religious world view.

However, in his zeal to argue his point, he creates his own internal contradictions. He states that the existence of religious scientists cannot be used to support the compatibility of science and religion, and yet later he states that the incompatibility of science and faith is “amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists.”

Before Coyne can convincingly argue that science and religion are incompatible, he needs to take care of the incompatibilities in his own viewpoint.

Brent Metfessel; Eden Prairie, Minn.

I find this argument curious. My claim was that science and faith are philosophically incompatible. If there were to be evidence for such a philosophical claim, then it would not be that every scientist would be an atheist. Rather, we’d expect that scientists would tend to be more atheistic than the general public.

People simply don’t understand what a stochastic factor is. Here is an example: we could show that height is an advantage in basketball; one bit of evidence would be to measure the average height of an NBA player and compare that to the average height of someone in the public. BUT, there might well be a Spud Webb or Muggsy Bogues who would be an outlier (exception to the rule).

You see the same thing when people discuss the relevance of college entrance scores. True, there are some who score in the 30′s on their ACT and still flop and a few who might score in the teens but make it through. But if you look at 1000 random students with an ACT of 30 versus 1000 random students with ACT of 20, the first group will have more successes. But the first group will have some failures and the second group will have some successes.

Some Cartoons