Archive for category Dumb thoughts

Link Dump: Snappy Answers to Stupid Vaccine Questions

As a boy, I adored Mad Magazine. Not to be trusted home alone, my mother would drag me along to the local Genuardi’s supermarket where I would camp out in front of the magazine rack to read Mad cover-to-cover. Among the heights of the magazine’s peerless wit was the regular Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions piece, written by Al Jaffee, the nine year-old American’s answer to P.D. Wodehouse. Jaffee provided us with ammunition we dared not use in the company of adults, who were, unfortunately, the most likely ones to set us up with “Stupid Questions” lines.

The Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation (thanks Wikipedia!)

At the risk of not sounding terribly polite, I’ve been researching (i.e., Googling) some of the stupidest questions being asked in our society: those of the antivax movement. Its not that it is stupid to question vaccinations, or for parents to ask sincere questions before having their children repeatedly jab. That’s common sense. No, the stupid comes in where we see antivaccine talking points repeated endlessly, unthinkingly by the antivaccine faithful. (And before you say it, “open minds” should go both ways.) You can’t help but find the same rhetoric being repeated endlessly on discussion boards, partisan websites and in interviews.

Anyway, I’m collecting some of my favorite Snappy Answers to Stupid Vaccine Questions here. While I am no expert, I’ll try to link to answers with good references. I’m also trying to avoid the vanilla PR answers you’ll get from health system websites.

Al Jaffee, by the way, is still alive, possibly in Guantanamo through either a tragic misunderstanding or an accurate Snappy Answer.

From A Photon in the Darkness comes Three Popular Anti-vaccine Myths Deconstructed. Spoilers: The myths are
1) “You claim that vaccines are 100% safe and effective!” Which technically is actually kind of a straw man of a straw man. A meta scarecrow, if you will. But only technically. As Photon explains, nobody of any real knowledge of the matter would claim that vaccines are either 100% safe or effective.
2) ”Vaccine-preventable diseases were in decline before the vaccines were introduced”
3) “The chickenpox vaccine causes shingles!”

From Losing in the Lucky Country comes a discussion on the mysterious phenomena of Vaccine Shedding, which follows in great part with myth #3 above. I’ve seen this sort of thing pop up in a number of discussion boards, where the real phenomena of viral shedding, a part of viral reproduction, has somehow been conflated with vaccines to create the myth of Vaccine Shedding.

The colloquial use of this nonsensical term seeks to convey that an individual who has been vaccinated can readily shed part of the vaccine and cause infection in the unvaccinated. Which by definition demands them to have shed not a vaccine but an infectious agent. Indeed a virus. Which by extension demands the vaccine to be a live virus vaccine. This then opens the door to viral shedding the vast complexities of vaccine induced immunity and viable modes of excretion – aka shedding. That won’t stop your garden variety anti-vaxxer claiming any vaccine can lead to infection of the unvaccinated via this ghastly “vaccine shedding”.

Its complex, and worth a read. To oversimplify, yes, live attenuated vaccines can pose a risk to immunocompromised people (and often infants and pregnant women) and a healthy child or adult cannot get sick from being near a vaccinated person.

I’ll try to keep updating this as whim takes me.

UPDATE 1: How Antivaxxers Debate

Here’s a nice primer on common antivaccine “Tropes and Tactics”, which is summarized and added-upon by Orac here for those who can’t access the article.

UPDATE 2: Brain Studies Demonstrate Autism at 6 Months

Interesting news for the antivaccine proponents who still cling to the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism: you can detect patterns of autism in children as young as six months. Of course, MMR isn’t given to children younger than one year old, which leftbrainrightbrain blog suggests time travel may be the last refuge for the vaccine denialists. They also take a nifty look at the causation/correlation fallacy commonly necessarily employed by people who still insist vaccines cause autism.

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We gonna light it up like its Dicynodont

I tweeted a picture of this bug-eyed beastie this morning, hoping someone could identify it.

We shall name him Toby.

I rescued young Toby from its hellish spinning prison at Giggleberry Farms because it interested me so. Yes, I am the master of the dino-teeth claw game…and apparently the master of spending 50 cents to win 4 cents of prehistorical-themed plastic. I have a general familiarity with dinosaurs, but this guy was new to me. Turns out, that might be because he’s not a dinosaur.

Cartographer extraordinaire and apparent dino afficionado Jim Miller, suggested he is a dicynodont, a type of tusked herbivore that nibbled its way across the Earth back in the mid-Permian era some 280 million years ago. It is, for all purposes, part of proton-mammallian line of reptiles as the more camera-friendly dimetrodon. I look forward to reading more about them. According to the Telegraph, they were very successful and can be found most anywhere on the planet. Good on them.

Also glad to know that whatever factory in Asia churns out plastic dino toys has been looking to represent therapsids. Good on them.

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No, Doctor, it said “TIconderoga, NY”

Dangers of penis tattoos.

I don’t know if you’ll get my subject line but, man, I loved that joke back in grade school. It was go-to gold for pre-pubescents who had a nominal grip on the process (no pun intended).

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My new Nano

I was gifted my first-ever non-refurbished iPod this Christmas, a shiny new Nano courtesy of my wife. She heard me grumbling how I screwed up the headphone jackhole (what? what else am I going to call it?) and she jumped at the chance for a Christmas layup. I’ve taken to wearing it on a Belkin wristband underneath my shirt cuff and next to my beloved $8 Casio F-28w. (I like to snake my headphones down my sleeve and out of the way, which is similar to what I’d do with my old iPod. It keeps me from accidentally pulling the buds out of my ears while I’m doing things.) The Casio is the present she bought me last year and has become, perhaps, my favorite watch ever. Why? It just works, and still retains the same face it did when Casio began making digital watches in the 80s. I only take it off when I sleep or shower (and even then, I probably don’t need to).

The new Nano in Action. Also, new facial hair. Old watch.

That’s one of my complaints about the new Nano (not that I don’t like it, I do). It doesn’t work as a watch, despite the umpteen stylish watch faces that come pre-loaded. Why? Because you are required to push the damn button and wait two tenths of a second before being able to see the time (and then only if you have remembered to set the clock to appear). Sorry, I need only glance at the Casio.

Second, they removed the admittedly infrequently-used video capability of the Nano seen in the previous two generations. It can’t be a lack of processing power or memory. It must because they decided they want a square form factor and that, if folks wanted video, they’d buy an iPod Touch. Fui.

Third, I for some reason, I can’t sync my calendar to the Nano, which is a pity considering how they’re pushing all this iCloud nonsense stuff.

I am grateful for the lack of gaming options, as I’ve learned that I get easily addicted to games like solitaire, which offer no conceivable end. (Must…get…to…$50,000…must…win…three…hands…in…a…row)

The radio is also a nice feature and works really well.

Since I’m one of the few people on the planet who do not have an iPhone or an Android, I do wonder if the Nano would make for a good mini-iPhone. I know Apple has dismissed such rumors in the past, but I’d totally dig a wristphone. I already like to keep it on my wrist all the time, and I wouldn’t mind a phone that didn’t do EVERYTHING. My current phone, while it gleefully NOT capable of doing everything, is just awful. Its theoretically capable of going online, through some arcane plan my wife pretends to enjoy, but it takes tens of minutes for it to get data. It theoretically has a camera, but can’t take pictures worth a damn (and even then, you can’t share them). Its theoretically a touch screen device, but it only responds when you don’t want it to, such as when it is in your pocket.The screen is locked, but I’m constantly draining my batteries by making the thing light up. Worse, if I have it set on vibrate, it will buzz a bit with every jostle, trying to fool me into thinking that someone is calling me. My Nano, however, needs to be purposefully woken, which is very nice. So, Apple, do it. I want a cool iPod wristphone that simply lets me take/make calls and listen to my iPod without a huge and unnecessary data plan.

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Why I don’t go in the water: Yeti Crabs

Here’s a great article on recent animal discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean.

Here’s a great reason why I won’t be sleeping well tonight: Yeti crabs. They look like giant, slightly fuzzy, ticks.

Yeti Crabs

The little octopus is just adorable, though, in an entirely Cthulhuesque way.

Also, why I read EarthSky.org: they’re good about linking to published sources. Handy! Considerate!

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LinkDump: Camping

The Lstrs went camping this past weekend with another bunch of swell folks. Nothing extravagant, just a trip to a KOA about two hours away–somewhere off of 81 between Allentown and Harrisburg. It was a great time, except for all the rain. Late Saturday night, after seeing other tent campers pack up and leave, I decided it was time to take the family home and come back in the morning for the tent.

We have a good new tent, a Coleman instant tent, in fact, but no tent on earth, I’m sure, could have withstood the rains we experienced that night. It rained hard. Then harder. Then harder still. Then harder yet. Eventually, the water began seeping in through the seams.

I may post more later, but now–for reference–some useful links for next time:

1. My knot tying skills aren’t what they should be…this I know. I quit Boy Scouts just as we were getting heavily into the knot thing. Hopefully, I can pick up a few pointers here at iwillknot.com.

2. While it is nice to see the stars, I think a rain fly (despite what Coleman says) could be useful. I had planned to put a tarp up above the tent, but the site we ended up on didn’t have many trees. I think I need to put together a kit like this tarp and home-built pole collection from this camping how-to site. I like the use of galvanized spikes as stakes, perhaps with washers to grip the rope better. I may just fork out the cash for tarp poles instead of making my own, though.

3. We had great fun at the Swatara State Park’s fossil pit, and collected some wee fossil shells and what I am hoping is part of a trilobite. Its all late Ordovician-era, about 450 million years ago–more than old enough to blow our minds. I might investigate other local PA fossil-hunting locales. If so, these groups might help, but many of the links are outdated. Apparently, there are some outcroppings in Deer Lake, PA that might be worth visiting with the kids. It could also be a nice stop on the way to the Yeungling brewery tour.

UPDATE: For far, far future reference: small camping trailers. I particularly like the small Casita and Scamp trailers, with fold-down bunks to sleep four.

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Note to self: Out of Office Replies, aka FailMail

Two points. First, Microsoft’s web application for Outlook doesn’t work too well on Safari if you want to set an out-of-office message. (It lies and says that your reply is too long.) Use Firefox, it works great.

Second point, don’t use Mac Mail’s Rules without thinking too hard about it. Between the time I set the message and made it back into my house an hour later, Mac Mail e-mailed replied to every message in my inbox since February.

Oy.

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The Second (Third? Fourth?) Coming of the Golden Fleece Awards

The Mighty ORAC has a nice piece on Sen. Tom Coburn’s attempt to revive Sen. William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Awards, Proxmire’s campaign in the 70s to “highlight” government waste. (Highlight being a technical political term meaning “to make hay out of an easy target for self-promotional purposes.” Clever folks these politicians.) More often than not, in the midst of pointing out some bit of local pork or another, these awards went after federally-funded research.

Why? Because research often sounds funny. Really. Why else would Palin attack fruit fly research? For the ignorant, it sounds pretty damn frivolous. For the rest of us, its pretty embarrassing to watch.

Now I’m not saying that there’s not waste in government, or even waste in research funding. There probably is. In fact, I’m willing to go as far as say–without any evidence at hand one way or the other–that there probably is waste in federal research funding. Someone, somewhere at the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, is funding a research program that they know, in their heart of hearts, will not advance the human body of knowledge one iota. Shocking, I know.

If only Coburn was actually pursuing something like that. No, he’s doing what Proxmire and others did before him, searching through the reams of research grant summaries produced by places like NSF to pick ones that sound silly or frivolous. Its easy enough to do, but will just as likely backfire on you. Again, ask Palin.

You can also ask Mark Sanford. Before Mark was a governor and a famed Appalachian explorer, he was a Republican Congresscritter of the Revolution of ’94 sort. In 1998, he played the same Golden Fleece game, searching the abstract databases of the National Science Foundation (which had become freely online) for funny-sounding award summaries.

To be honest, I did the same thing. I interned in the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA, which I always liked to say as Opa! They learned quickly to keep me away from the dishes.) As a pioneer in open-access government-type stuff, NSF put all their approved grant information online, which was pretty keen in the 90s. As an intern, I was not encumbered by a particular PR “beat” and was given free reign to cover whatever I found interesting, as long as the professional public information officers didn’t mind. I scanned through the award listings and came up with cool stuff like “supermassive” black holes and “doppler on wheels.”

Sanford did the same thing and came up with a remarkable rant on federal funding for ATM research. He wanted to slice almost $200 million from the budget, citing waste on ATM research and other silly things. Only he (or his staffer) didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, if they did, they would have realized that the award abstract referred to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, the switching technique that made your lightning fast dorm room ISDN connection so much faster than your parent’s Compuserve account. Cue the sad trombone. (Side note: Sadtrombone.com is apparently defunct so I’ll do it myself: Wah wah wah waaaaah.)

In fairness to Republicans, it was Sanford’s Michigan colleague Vern Ehlers who pointed out Sanford’s error, quashing the budget hack. (Check out this little note in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.)

Even more recently, Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, tried to play the Golden Fleece game. Last year, Rep. Smith called for folks to search through NSF’s award database to find other funny-sounding stuff like:

$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

Of course, both projects were taken drastically out of context. the soccer study was really a look at smart-swarming, that is how teams can come together to collaborate on complex problems. The “sound of objects breaking” was created for the study of how to recreate realistic noises in a virtual environment, say for search-and-rescue or the military, perhaps? Again, its a bit of irony. The NSF attempts to be responsible with our money, showing us precisely where the dollars are going, only for some political hack to come along, take the work out of context, and use it to further his own political agenda.

Oh, bother.

NSF, which only spends about 5 percent of its budget on administrative costs*, is getting nailed by political hacks for a) openly posting its award information (which is probably mandated by now) and b) funding scientists who often use imprecise or “clever” language in their award application titles and abstracts.

So, Coburn, you want to cut waste? Fine, but realize that federal funding for research is the backbone of our economy. Every new technical advance, therapeutic drug, surgical technique, material and technology we’ve seen in the last 50 years owes its very existence to agencies like the NSF and NIH. Every step forward we’ve made in medicine, technology and industry began in some academic laboratory with government dollars. Research funding is every bit a part of our infrastructure as our roads and bridges (which could also use a little bit of money now that I think of it).

Maybe you could take a little fiscal pride in that Tom, my friend, and a little less happy-dancing over the amount of farm subsidies your rake in for Oklahoma each year.

The fact is, NSF and NIH subject grant applications to peer review. That is, the agencies gather teams of scientists to review the grant applications made by other scientists. The NSF was started that way nearly 60 years ago as a way of making a science of science funding, whereas scientific projects would otherwise be funded through political largesse and budgetary earmarks. In other words, its the opposite of pork.

Money is scarce–only about 1 in 10 grants are ever given funding–so the pressure is on to fund high-impact, low-risk work. (If anything, there is a good argument to be made for funding high-risk work, but that’s not what I’m ranting about today.) Grants that get funding rarely get funded on the first go-around, and a lot of work goes into making sure the money is spent wisely. Note: I can’t think of anywhere else in the Federal government where people work so hard to make sure that taxpayer money is spent well. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Further reading:

  • Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation
  • What if They Gave a Science War and Only One Side Came?
    (An interesting essay regarding a recent American Association of Anthropology kerfluffle that’s tangentially-related.)
  • Science: The Endless Frontier:A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush
  • As We May Think (Another bit of Bush inspiration.)
  • * Best proof I can find is here, a report from 4 years ago. I admit, its a little outdated, but I’ve got work to do…

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    Quick Observation: Savvy or luck in PR? Friendly Planet Travel does disproportionately well in national press.

    I find my wee, weird suburban borough pops up in the news in unexpected ways, mostly dealing with Renee Zellwegger sightings (no, I’m not even going to bother to try and spell check that). The owners of Friendly Planet Travel in Jenkintown must be doing something right.

    So far, in the last few months, they’ve been named in stories in USA Today and the New York Times, a feat I have been unable to match in my dayjob, sadly. They’re written by two different people, which nixes my theory that they came from the same freelancer. Maybe both writers live locally, which may explain, at least, why the NYTimes writer also mentioned a travel agency

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    Giving up on the idea of growth

    NPR’s Planet Money posted an interesting story of how Youngstown, Ohio is dealing with its shrinking population after the close of its steel mills: its giving up.

    It isn’t shutting its doors and moving to Pittsburgh, not like it would find many mills there. No, its giving up on finding new schemes to entice industry to Youngstown and, instead, consolidating. That is, they are bulldozing entire neighborhoods, not piecemeal like they do in Philadelphia, they are figuring out where the abandoned houses are, and then helping the remaining neighbors move out as well.

    My knee-jerk reaction is that, yes, Philly should do it too. And, I guess that is my reaction. However, yesterday the news came out that Philly’s population actually grew the last census cycle…in fact, we’ve retaken #5! A minor miracle. Scratch that, a major miracle. A whopping 9.4 percent growth. Whoa.

    Still, Philly could use a Youngstown-style reorganization. When Mayor Street began bulldozing abandoned houses in earnest, it turned whole neighborhoods into wastelands. Where once there’d be an entire block of rowhomes, now you see two, maybe three solitary homes, their sides a windowless expanse of stucco, like they were amputated. Inevitably, these homes fall two. I’ve witnessed it slowly progress that way over the last ten years, just on my morning train commute.

    It worked like cancer. First one house would become abandoned, then its neighbors, until only two or three occupied houses remained. The abandoned houses would then rot, decay, catch fire or be broken into by kids or druggies or duggie kids. Then the city would come out to knock down the abandoned houses, leaving the block looking empty and gap-toothed like a carney’s smile.

    So, there’s reasons for both Youngstown and Philly to celebrate. Youngstown is going to circle the wagons and probably will be better off for it. Philly is booming. Whether it can overcome its baser instincts and be the world-class city it could and should be is another question.

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