Graduating year 12 school leavers party during the Schoolies week celebrations in Surfers Paradise on November 23, 2008 on the Gold Coast, Australia. Schoolies is the annual celebration by year 12 students following the culmination of their HSC exams. The celebrations happen in several official locations throughout Australia, but the Gold Coast kicks off the celebrations as the Queensland exams finish ahead of all other states. By Sergio Dionisio/Getty.
Theodore Dalrymple reviews Paul Offit’s book on the anti-vaccination crusaders:
Paul Offit’s new book, as readable as a good detective novel, tells the story of how autism, a disorder of psychological development, came falsely to be blamed first on the MMR vaccine and then on thimerosal, a preservative found in several vaccines. It is a tale about bad science, worse journalism, unscrupulous political populism, and profiteering litigation lawyers.
[…] Offit’s book raises questions much broader than his ostensibly limited subject matter would suggest. What is the place of scientific and scholarly authority in the modern world, and how is it to be institutionalized in a democracy? Is it inevitable that the best should now lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity? What is the relation between information, on the one hand, and knowledge and wisdom, on the other? Cranks are often oversupplied with the former and deficient in the latter, not realizing that there is a difference between the two. Autism’s False Prophets gives no easy answers, but it does provide a rich source of material for political philosophers and even epistemologists, who ought to assign it to their students.
(Hat tip: Clive Davis)
Julia Christensen has a slideshow of reclaimed big box stores. The description:
The big-box aesthetic does not immediately lend itself to any other use. The buildings are often upward of 150,000 square feet. There simply aren’t many enterprises that need that much space, and because the buildings are built for a single-use purpose, it’s not so easy to break them up into smaller units. Yet all over the country, resourceful communities are finding ways to reuse these buildings, turning them into flea markets, museums, schools—even churches.
Magdalena Bors creates landscapes out of household products. This one is titled "Mountain Vista." More here.
Mark Danner opines:
…scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal. Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new. Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped "breaking news," beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.
Xinzhuang, Taiwan 4.58 pm.
Alexander Gelfand looks at the future of medicine:
…the potential usefulness of pharmocogenetics extends beyond safety. Most drugs on the market are, by some accounts, only effective for 50 percent of those who take them. Researchers envision a time when you’ll be able to walk into your doctor’s office and have him or her conduct a simple test to determine whether this or that drug will work best for you, given the presence (or absence) of specific genetic variations — the age of designer drugs. Combine that with genetic testing that reveals predispositions toward particular diseases, and you have a future in which medical science could circumvent potential problems by intervening even before symptoms appear. But we’re not there yet.
A biomedical research scientist blogger writes about marijuana potency:
…there’s a whole literature in which it is shown that if you manipulate the nicotine content of cigarettes, smokers will alter their smoking topography (volume per puff, puff duration, etc) in the direction of restoring the dose obtained from their usual brand. The marijuana literature is smaller…Nevertheless a close reading of the available literature in controlled human laboratory studies will suggest that marijuana smokers are also quite good at titrating dose in response to the content of the smoked product.
Another way to put this is that users smoke to reach a subjective high rather than to consume a certain number of puffs of a certain amount of drug. The product and route of administration are such that the overdosing variance would seem to be quite narrow relative to cases where the drug administration is more of a one-shot ballistic event (like swallowing a purported Ecstasy pill of unknown content, IV administration of drugs of uncertain purity / weight). Consequently I tend to doubt that the concentration of the source material plays a huge role in establishing marijuana dependence.
A newly born elephant baby plays with its mother at the Hagenbeck Tierpark in the northern German city of Hamburg on November 22, 2008. The baby Asian elephant was born yesterday. By Roland Magunia/AFP/Getty.
Toby Young believes celebrity culture sustains the illusion of meritocracy:
If the existence of the celebrity class does play a role in securing people’s consent to our winner-takes-all society, then the fact that the entry requirements are so low helps this process along. If people believe there is a genuine chance they might be catapulted to the top, they’re more likely to endorse a system in which success is so highly rewarded. To paraphrase the advertising slogan for the National Lottery, it could be them. As with the lottery, people may know that the actual chances of winning are low but the selection mechanism itself is fair—a level playing field. After that, their "specialness" will take care of the rest.
The Dish 