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Seasonal Complications

There were complications associated with the six inches of wet, heavy snow we received last night. Given that the local arboreal landscaping has not yet lost their leaves, large amounts of snow accumulated on branches. The resulting destruction not only damaged hundreds of trees around town and caused major traffic impediments, it broke a number of power lines. Much of town is without power, and even the traffic signals are no longer functioning.

I only hope that the power is back before I return home tonight. If I can’t get my heat to function properly, my pipes could freeze – and that would be extremely bad.

Snowing

It’s snowing. October 15th, and it’s already snowing.

It’s not even Halloween yet, for crying out loud, and it’s snowing!

Anything people had left in the community garden – and there were quite a lot of squash and gourds left lying about – has probably frozen solid. Everything frost-tender has died. We had a cold, short growing season and now an early freeze – this is just terrible. I hate to think what this implies about the upcoming winter.

Hospitalism: A Failure to Thrive

In medicine, it’s important to distinguish between a disease and a syndrome. Syndromes are collections of symptoms characteristically associated with each other – they don’t necessarily share the same causes.

One noteworthy syndrome of infancy and early childhood is called ‘failure to thrive’. The child’s development and growth fails to proceed normally, sometimes for obvious reasons such as inadequate nutrition or a major illness sapping resources. But sometimes the cause is less obvious.

Hospitalism was the name coined in 1895 to describe a phenomenon that often struck infants and young children who were hospitalized in the late 19th century. Despite receiving the highest standards of care, they were weak and sickly. They didn’t grow properly. They died at rates exceedingly high even for the norms of the time. And no one knew why.

Heroic measures were taken. Infants were isolated from their mothers, kept under constant supervision in specially-sealed incubators. It didn’t help. Children continued to die, and nothing anyone could do seemed effective at protecting them from the mysterious contagion that claimed their lives. It had been noted that Hospitalism struck at the most modern facilities and wealthiest parents but not at the children of the poor and isolated, but the significance of this fact was not recognized until the 1930’s. Then the common factor responsible for the failure to thrive was identified: the modern, up-to-date, sterile, and thoroughly unnatural treatment afforded the young was itself the cause.

It is not well-known why bonding and physical interaction between caregivers – particularly mothers – and infants is necessary for health and even survival, but it is thought to be the result of Darwinian calculations. Infants are cheap in terms of resources devoted to them – it would take many long years before they are capable of reproductive contributions. Mothers can produce more offspring relatively quickly. It follows that it is more important to preserve the life of a mother than the life of an infant if the lives of both are in jeopardy. Under conditions where a mother cannot spend time caring for a new infant, the principles of selection determine, it’s better for the infant to die so that the mother can focus on preserving her own life. So infants are programmed to self-terminate if they receive inadequate attention and stimulation.

Much as treating the weapon kept physicians from injuring their patients and was thus an ‘effective’ treatment, being poor meant that your parents had to take care of you and had no access to the ‘advanced’ standards of care that hurt the infants they were intended to keep safe. The doctors themselves were the problem – keeping them away from the infants was the solution.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Boiling the Frog

Via boingboing.net and Cory Doctorow:

Philadelphia Free Library System is shutting down

Well, sort of. They’re threatening to do so, possibly as a form of brinksmanship or hostage-taking. But as one commenter points out, their choices are to hold their functions hostage and try to get the proper funding or risk having their funding slowly reduced until their services shut down.

In some ways, the public is like the aphoristic frog in a slowly-boiling pot: they’ll notice sharp changes but not gradual ones. Shocking people by threatening to cut off everything at once is more likely to induce outrage and grass-roots activity than letting the libraries wither.

Libraries are one of the few government services I favor; it’s a terrible shame that the worthiest programs tend to have the hardest time getting funding. This is why we can’t have nice things, though – does our society deserve proper libraries if we force their caretakers to beg for enough money to keep services functioning?

More Borgstromancy

More of the informal work of Jenna K. Moran, taken from this rpg.net thread.

The phone call is coming from *inside the house!*

The butler did it.
. . . well, the butler, and Cthulhu.
Cthulhu did most of the butchery.
But the butler let him in.
And held his knife.
And dusted him off afterwards
To help him disguise himself as the Christmas Tree.

He’s actually . . . Luke’s *father*.
But more astonishingly
Luke is *his*.
In episode three Luke warps too fast around the sun
Due to a problem with communication
And winds up in the past.
He builds two robots
And saves some whales
And has sex.
That’s why almost a quarter of his genes are an exact match with his own.
Remember, kids!
Midichlorians measure inbreeding!

The Iron Giant is friendly.
He loves people.
In fact, he loves them too much.
Just like Big Bird.

The owls are not what they seem.
They are luxury sedans with smooth, precise shifting,
High engine rev,
And dynamic performance.
See?
It’s a funky show.

Star Trek is based on the true story
Of Rasputin
And his faithful half-Vulcan companion,
Ivan.

What is the Matrix?
A tissue of false fate
Woven in the Wyld.

Sing, oh muse, of the wrath of Achilles
Sing, oh muse, of the birth of Ganesha
And of Iron John
And of that place
East of the sun, west of the moon.
And of all the old stories
Told by the Wyld
Before they were e’er told by men.

Superman comes back to life
Again
Later on.
Only now,
He’s radioactive.

The Purpose of Power is Power

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating, and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price for maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.

- from “Muad’Dib, The Religious Issues” by the Princess Irulan

- Frank Herbert, “Dune”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of power. What it’s good for, what its limits are.

It’s increasingly clear to me that power, used in ways that are not compatible with the maintenance and continued existence of that power, tends to expend itself. Power that persists usually concerns itself with itself and its perpetuation. But there are inherent trade-offs that cannot be avoided.

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the path to slavery.

- Frank Herbert

What is power to be used for? What goal is the end to which power is the means? Those who have purposes for their power will sometimes find that purpose in conflict with the perpetuation and increase of the power itself, and so must choose. Those whose purposes include the use of power in a certain way will face even more conflicts and more choices. But those who seek power only for the purpose of possessing and exercising power will not be conflicted, and will be forced to no difficult choices.

Maintaining a democratic system and keeping it functionally in touch with reality is an example of having standards for the use of power. Demagogues and popular tyrants – the most obvious threats to any democracy – are examples of seeking power for power’s sake.

I don’t think this is a conflict we can win.

Irreducible Stupidity

By now, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard about the McWhorter-Behe diavlog on Bloggingheads.tv, and its removal for unknown reasons.

So I have very little to say about that.

I would like to point out this post over at BH’s thread regarding the video removal, written by someone with the handle “IRQ Conflict”:

As for entropy. When is the last time you saw an organism gain information and order rather than lose it with time?

Gee, he’s got us there. [takes bite of sandwich] [swallows] I don’t recall any biological organism ever increasing in order and energy in any way… [takes bite] bwff I suppos thair mai bee [swallows] – sorry, shouldn’t type with my mouth full – but I suppose there may be some way in which living creatures might be able to increase their energy. [takes sip of beverage] I wonder what that might be?

I am reminded of the infamous Internet exchange in which a Creationist ridiculed the laws of thermodynamics by noting that they imply that there’s some large source of negentropy pumping energy and order into Earth… thus suggesting that, in his colossal arrogance, he did not permit himself to recall the existence of the Sun.

First, Do No Harm (Part 2)

What does Dr. Vertosick suggest is the cause of such snafus as the EC-IC bypass?

As the EC-IC bypass affair illustrates, experimental operations can jump into the medical mainstream long before anyone establishes their efficacy – or even their safety. Although ego and greed help keep unproved procedures in the operating room, it’s bad scientific judgment that puts them there in the first place.

Before new drugs can be marketed, they undergo three levels of testing. First, volunteers are given the drug to see how toxic it is and how well it’s absorbed and tolerated by the body. (This leads to specifically unexpected yet globally inevitable tragedies every once in a while, most particularly when one of the test subjects happens to be in a minority that has serious reactions to a drug that hadn’t been previously observed.) Then, once the obvious risks of the drug are known, it’s given to ill patients to see if they do better on it than previous, retrospective patients. Finally randomized trials are conducted to compare treated and untreated patients directly. Only when this last stage has been successfully completed is a drug considered for approval.

There is no such regulation on surgical procedures; although the FDA regulates surgical devices, it has no jurisdiction over surgeries. There is no legal obligation for surgeons to test therapies with the third stage of randomized trials. And since they can charge for any surgery, surgeons have no financial reason to put their therapies through expensive and difficult examination.

It is not unusual for surgical procedures to be widely implemented without rigorous testing – it is in fact quite standard. Vertosick offers the example of spinal fusion to treat back pain caused by degenerating disks. The disks can be removed “in a simple, two-hour operation”, or surgeons can remove the disk and implant a steel plate, which in theory helps to stabilize the spine, a procedure which is more involved and incidentally costs two to three times more. As Vertosick points out, “there’s no evidence that it’s any more effective than the simpler procedure”.

The reasons why so little testing is done are legion. It takes lots of money and effort to conduct randomized trials, patients don’t want to be assigned to “nonsurgical” groups – they want to be ‘treated’ when they go to surgeons, and that usually means undergoing surgery – and they go elsewhere for the surgery if they can’t get it in the study. Many doctors are not qualified to evaluate the statistical results produced, and often don’t believe the results when they arrive. Some of the critics of the NINCDS study initially complained that the best candidates for the surgery left and had the surgery elsewhere when they had been assigned to nontreatment, for example. But doctors often simply ignore studies, even when there aren’t potential confounding issues like that one, simply because they want to stick with what they “know” works.

What is known now is that the retrospective studies used by Yasargil did not accurately reflect the rates of stroke at that time. Too little was understood about how people’s health had changed between the time those studies were done and the time EC-IC was first being tested, and our assumptions that the two were comparable turned out to be wrong. As a result, Yasargil reached the wrong conclusion.

He didn’t even do something wrong – or at least, wronger than usual in medicine. He was in fact more careful than most such innovators, and certain more so than those who adopted his ideas without subjecting them to any testing at all. He was merely tragically wrong.

Other, equally tragic mistakes happen not through bad luck, but through incompetence, willful ignorance, and arrogance.

Gilding the Candlestick

Scalzi informs me that Hollywood has plans to remake Clue.

No! Why would you do that? This is officially the Worst. Idea. For a while.

I’m very fond of that ridiculous movie and its absurdly contrived mysteries. The actors are superb and the acting perfectly suited for both the setting and the premises. It’s a classic of the genre. Admittedly, a very silly classic in a very silly genre, but that’s not the point.