Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003
New Research Questions Need For Some Common Surgeries:
After years of excruciating sinus infections, Susan Doyno decided to have surgery. After two separate procedures, not only did the infections persist but she also developed headaches and blood clots.
So she consulted a third sinus surgeon, who reviewed her case history and offered a startling diagnosis: “Surgery has likely caused much of her problems,” says the doctor, Robert Pincus of the New York Sinus Center.
[...]
It used to be, for example, that someone who suffered a liver or kidney injury in a car accident had the organ removed. Now in nearly all cases, the patient is tracked but not operated on — and most of the time, recovery occurs naturally.
[...]
Donlin Long, a neurosurgery professor at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, followed 3,000 patients with severe back and leg pain for two years during the late 1990s. The longstanding approach to treating that problem has been to give patients two weeks to feel better; if they don’t improve, then the doctor operates. But the study pointed out flaws in that approach: In 86% of the cases, the patients got better on their own, but it took between one and three months to get there. “The longer you wait, the better chance the patient will recover without any surgery at all,” Dr. Long says.
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003
After hearing a guest on NPR discuss “imposing our narrative on the Iraqis” yesterday, I found this passage from The Redistribution of Honor particularly on target:
The funhouse of the postmodern academics was built around the two closely related themes of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Together they displaced the idea of truth and its cousin, empirical evidence, with the notion of “narrativity.” All the world was simply words. There was no reality, just a series of competing stories all of which were mere social constructs and none of which was more correct than any other. In political terms, the campus postmodernists identified with the pre-modern rebels against modernity in the Arab world. But with the war in Iraq, those on campuses who, like Al Jazeera, believed “Baghdad Bob’s” account of events discovered that lo and behold there is such a thing as an empirically grounded reality.
Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003
In Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, Robert Nozick explains how the school system sets budding intellectuals up for a fall:
The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals.
Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003
Unchained reviews A History Of Mistresses by Elizabeth Abbott, and ends with this conclusion:
What made mistresses tolerable, socially acceptable or even occasionally welcomed in the past were the iron-clad arranged marriages that were completed to join bloodlines, alliances and inheritances — but never love. It was the tyranny and finality of marriage that gave the mistress her acceptable social status.
Now, with even England’s royal family divorcing and remarrying for love, the chains of marriage — which Alexandre Dumas once described as being “so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three” — are palpably lighter.
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Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003
Every Unhappy Family Has Its Own Bilinear Influence Function explains some unusual work applying nonlinear equations to psychology:
In The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press), which he wrote in collaboration with four mathematicians, Mr. Gottman uses the tools of calculus to describe the interactions of couples like Angie and Dave. The models presented in the book, he says, offer insights into the heaven and hell of couplehood that he would never have found by sifting through his data with standard linear statistical tools.
[...]
The germ of The Mathematics of Marriage was a remarkable piece of luck. Around the time of the heart-to-heart conversation with his wife, Mr. Gottman forgot to send in a reply card to a scientific book-of-the-month club, and therefore received a book he’d never heard of: Mathematical Biology (Springer-Verlag, 1989), by James D. Murray, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. The book explains how to use nonlinear equations to illuminate the mechanics of complex dynamic systems, such as the growth of brain tumors.
“The book was so different from all the other books I’d been reading in applied mathematics,” Mr. Gottman says. “Finally, concepts like catastrophe theory were very clear. I understood what it all meant.” Mr. Gottman sent a letter to Mr. Murray in Oxford — but the reply came from just five blocks away. Mr. Murray had retired early from Oxford and moved to Seattle; he was teaching at Mr. Gottman’s own university.
The two men met for lunch. “I thought John Gottman’s ideas about having mathematics involved [in his marriage studies] were ridiculous, and I told him that,” recalls Mr. Murray. “But by the end of the lunch, when I saw what he had in mind, I was totally hooked.”
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Monday, April 21st, 2003
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Saddam had a private wild-game reserve — and I really shouldn’t be surprised that Marines would hunt gazelle there. From Marines Feast on Saddam’s Wild Gazelles:
The Tikrit South airfield, where Marine Wing Support Squadron 271 set up base in this week’s campaign to take the city, is on the edge of a preserve where Saddam and favored guests once hunted gazelle.
Now, Marines are venturing into the woods to hunt the animals, which stand about waist-high. They haul back the carcasses as a welcome substitute for the prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat that have been their staple.
I suspect they’re having fun:
Each of the squadron’s platoons has been limited to killing one gazelle a day to make sure the herd isn’t depleted.
The marines are using 9mm pistols to hunt after initially being forbidden to use firearms for fear that gunshots in the woods might be mistaken for enemy fire.
“We hunted them with rocks, as Stone Age as that sounds,” Wicksell said. “We gutted them and skinned them and pretty much carried them over our shoulders barbarian-style.”
The preparation is almost as primitive: a fire pit dug in the ground, covered by a radiator grill from one of the Marines’ trucks.
Posted in Animals, War | No Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2003
Temporary Syndrome Found in Ironman Athletes reports on an amusingly named syndrome that affects endurance athletes who alternate between dehydration and overhydration:
Triathletes have to be the fittest of the fit, but a small, unpublished study of athletes who competed in an Ironman triathlon suggests that the arduous, all-terrain event can take its toll, creating a “constellation of symptoms” defined as post extreme endurance syndrome (PEES).
More than a third of the athletes who sought medical attention suffered from the condition, which is characterized by decreased body temperature, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, headache, cramping and the inability to drink fluids, said Dr. Hilary Ann Petersen of the University of Arkansas Medical Center.
Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2003
In Dumas: The King of Romance, David Coward gives an account of Alexandre Dumas’s equally amazing father:
Dumas said he was born without even bootstraps to pull himself up with, but he chose his parents well. His mother was an innkeeper’s daughter who gave him unstinting love and his father was a stupendous role model. Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was born in Santo Domingo in 1760, the illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In Egypt in 1799 he quarrelled with Napoleon, accusing him of putting personal ambition before Revolutionary principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship was detained in Southern Italy by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, then at war with France. For two years he was left to rot in Brindisi castle. In a neighbouring cell, the geologist Dolomieu, another prisoner of war, applied himself, using soot, a stick and the margins of Bibles, to the composition of The Philosophy of Mineralogy. It was a bit like Edmond Dantés and the abbé Faria in the Chateau d’If, except that the general, his health and career broken, returned to France in 1801 and died of stomach cancer in 1806. Alexandre was four.
Posted in Media, War | No Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2003
Den Beste gives a pretty blunt description of NATO’s original purpose in his Why is NATO?:
In other words, the purpose of NATO was to get the US to impose peace on Europe, because the Europeans couldn’t do it for themselves, and to protect Europe from the USSR, because the Europeans couldn’t do that for themselves either. And it worked, too.
Has it continued to work?
NATO was a mutual defense pact, where all members would rally when any member was attacked. After the attack against the US in September of 2001, NATO actually did invoke Article V for the first time in its history.
And except for the UK, no one did anything because of it, or at least no one did anything helpful. Rather than rallying for war, as those who wrote the NATO treaty had expected in such a case, and committing their armies and navies to fight along side ours, they tried to use the invocation of Article V to prevent the US from fighting back. The mutual-defense pact had somehow been transformed into a mutual-surrender pact.
Posted in War | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 16th, 2003
As soon as Theodore Dalrymple qualified as a doctor, he went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. There, he worked under a remarkable doctor (also from England), as he explains in After Empire:
He never panicked, even in the direst emergency; and he knew what to do when a man had been half eaten by a crocodile or mauled by a leopard, when a child had been bitten in the leg by a puff adder, or when a man appeared with a spear driven through his skull. When called in the early hours of the morning, as he frequently was, he was as even-tempered as if attending a social event.
Interestingly, Rhodesia paid doctors equally, regardless of race, but this didn’t have the effect you’d expect:
The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire — and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.
Posted in Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »
Monday, April 14th, 2003
Further proof that we gaijin will never understand Japan — Masked Wrestler Wins Japan Assembly Seat:
A professional wrestler who fought his way to victory in local assembly elections under his ring name and wearing his trademark mask has vowed the mask will not leave his face even after he enters the staid halls of Japanese politics.
“This is my face,” the wrestler — known as “The Great Sasuke” — was quoted by the Nikkan Sports newspaper as saying of his black and white full-face mask with bright scarlet streaks and golden wings by the eye holes.
“I won support from voters with this face, and to take it off would be breaking promises,” the 33-year-old wrestler, whose real name is Masanori Murakawa, said of his victory in conservative Iwate prefecture, some 460 km (290 miles) north of Tokyo.
Posted in Policy | No Comments »
Friday, April 11th, 2003
Den Beste has posted a Dr. Seuss-inspired poem about the fall of Baghdad, The Grinch Who Stole Quagmire:
The Grinch Who Stole Quagmire
…”That’s a noise,” grinned Ms. Amanpour, “that I simply must hear!”
She paused, and the prune put a hand to her ear
And she did hear a sound rising over the sand
It started in low…then it rose to sound grand…
But this — this sound wasn’t mad!
Why, this sound sounded…glad!
Every prole down in Baghdad,
the tall and the small,
was singing and dancing — without Iraq’s victory at all!
They hadn’t stopped Marines from coming — they came!
Somehow or other, they came just the same.
While the Arab Street, with their feet so near to the sand,
Stood puzzling and puzzling:
“This simply can’t stand???
They came without raping! They came without looting!
When Iraqis surrendered, they even stopped shooting!!!”
They puzzled and puzzled, till their puzzlers were sore.
Then the witch thought of something she hadn’t before:
“Maybe Joy,” she thought, “doesn’t come from the killing” —
Maybe Freedom — perhaps — is what has them all trilling.”
And what happened then — well, in Iraq they still say
That the idiot’s small brain grew three sizes that day.
But when the true meaning of Liberation broke through,
the dolt still had the brains of one neocon — less two.
Then suddenly, happily, her brain didn’t feel quite so tight,
She sang with new comments through the bright Baghdad night.
With a mean smile, at her mic, she descended from Hotel PLO,
Cheerily crowing “blowback!” It surely will blow…
Posted in War | No Comments »
Thursday, April 10th, 2003
From Knife Thrower Slices Assistant on Live TV:
A record-breaking knife thrower shocked Britons on Thursday when one of his daggers sliced into the head of his assistant on live TV.
Circus performer Jayde Hanson, 23, was demonstrating his skills when one of his knives hit his assistant and girlfriend, 22-year-old Yana Rodianova.
As she clutched the side of her head, horrified presenter Fern Britton shouted: “Oh my God, there is blood, quick — get her off.”
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 9th, 2003
In Smart Heuristics, Gerd Gigernezer examines how humans deal with uncertainty:
At the beginning of the 20th century the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells, said in his writings on politics, “If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking.” At the beginning of the 21st century, how far have we gotten with this program? In our society, we teach most citizens reading and writing from the time they are children, but not statistical thinking. John Alan Paulos has called this phenomenon innumeracy.
There are many stories documenting this problem. For instance, there was the weather forecaster who announced on American TV that if the probability that it will rain on Saturday is 50 percent and the probability that it will rain on Sunday is 50 percent, the probability that it will rain over the weekend is 100 percent. In another recent case reported by New Scientist an inspector in the Food and Drug Administration visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche. We can laugh about these examples because we easily understand the mistakes involved, but there are more serious issues. When it comes to medical and legal issues, we need exactly the kind of education that H. G. Wells was asking for, and we haven’t gotten it.
Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 9th, 2003
Matt Ridley says We’ve never had it so good — and it’s all thanks to science:
If you debate the new genetics in Europe and America these days you get asked the same question in two different ways. The average European says, with dread: “How do we stop people doing x?” The average American says with excitement: “When will I be able to do x?” For x, read “test myself for future dementia risk,” “change my unborn children’s genes,” or even “fill my blood vessels with nano-robots to enable me to live to 150″.
To the jaded European palate, the American attitude seems silly and irresponsible. Caution should be the watchword for all new technology. I beg to differ. I think the American optimism is necessary and responsible. It is the European pessimists who are in danger of causing real harm. Caution has risks, too.
Posted in Science | No Comments »