Tribeca Film Festival Beclowns Itself
Andrew Wakefield simply has zero credibility. End of story. I can’t believe he’d compound his sins, or that anyone would give him a serious platform.
Medical
Monster Spray
Dee Vivian is pharmacy tech of the year for helping a dad bring home monster spray for his daughter.
Science Heroes
Who aved the most lives in history? Fascinating list. I tend to think of Borlaug as the biggie, credited with saving perhaps billions, but he is in sixth. Of course, numbers like these are always going to be estimated and conjectured. Still, these are some impressive people. Big Damn Heroes, in fact.
The Kids Who Beat Autism
Fascinating article about kids who recover from autism. Apparently this is not an urban legend after all; there are individuals who respond to the therapies and become teenagers who no longer display symptoms of autism. I wonder what these impossible kids will have to teach us about the way the mind works.
People aren’t built for the modern world.
I’ve been saying this for years, and more often now that I’ve been diagnosed with a severe mental illness. I’ve always felt that these things that are so problematic now must have been a positive somewhere in the past. Apparently I’m not the only one; there have been actual studies and real live papers about it.
Mind you that this is presented with Cracked’s usual offbeat sense of humor, but that makes it no less interesting: 5 Brain Disorders That Started as Evolutionary Advantages.
And now I’ve got Brian Wilson in my head:
Another one’s biting the dust.
Or at least sleeping easier. Turns out biphasic sleep really is a thing. And not, as the tales may tell, necessarily a bad one.
ACES Wild
This is long, but well worth the read. It rings true to me, and seems scientifically sound. Childhood trauma can have lasting, unsuspected repercussions.
I Take These
Statin madness asks some of the same questions I’ve had, like don’t medical people keep up with current research. Same with salt and hypertension. What happened with this doctors elderly, paralyzed father is ridiculous, and the result of people being on autopilot. We’re people, not algorithms. Sadly, I take a statin and am over fifty. Because of high cholesterol? No. I’ve never been higher than borderline, and was great at the time, apart from somewhat high triglycerides, which are apparently now considered more problematic than was once the case. It is simply standard procedure for having had stents that presumably eliminated a future heart attack. While I have seen no overt ill effects, I don’t like the sound of if being known as a decreaser of life expectancy.
I Wonder
Was the expression “inbox zero” inspired by Smallpox Zero? I was surprised to see that expression used by WHO in 1979. Inspired by the use of inbox zero for having cleared out/read/processed all waiting e-mails, I sometimes say “dishpan zero” for having no dirty dishes queued for washing.