Assorted Links

Thanks to Dave Lull and Tucker Max.

Ancestral Health Symposium Awards
Taurine cures eczema
Surprises from celiac disease. “This is a perfect example of why healthcare is so expensive,” says one comment. I agree. Not because of the conspiracy theory espoused in the same comment but because of the way expensive ineffective solutions are promulgated when a much better cheaper one exists.
One problem with a low-carb high-meat diet: bad metabolites. This is why it is a good idea to find out what causes obesity rather than simply lose weight with something that works (such as a low-carb diet).
Could spoiled food be safe to eat?
reform the IRBs!
conning the Kindle

Thanks to Tucker Max, Melissa McEwen, Peter Couvares, Edward Jay Epstein, and Alexandra Carmichael.

Edward Jay Epstein on Kindle publishing
review of The Beekeeper’s Lament, a book about the fragility of bees. “Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD] is a problem. But it isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn’t just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along.”
Vanity Fair provides a public service by providing full access to the final installment of Michael Lewis’s great series of Financial Disaster Travel Writing. Earlier installments were about Iceland, Ireland, and Greece. This installment is about Germany.

Thanks to David Archer.

Marcia Angell makes good points in reply to critics of her anti-psychiatric-drug article
The ADA and early detection of diabetes. “If you wait for your doctor to give you a diabetes diagnosis, the chances are good that by the time you are diagnosed you’ll already have one or more serious diabetic complications. . . . .This is not an accident.” Jimmy Moore’s interview with Jenny Ruhl.
Stolen children in Hunan Province. Via Evan Osnos.
Michael Wolff, one of my favorite writers, podcast on Rupert Murdoch and the phone-hacking scandal.

The Practice of Personal Science (talk by Gary Wolf)
fingerprints predict mental abilities (might be gated).
“When compared with nondepressed individuals, both medically ill and medically healthy patients with MDD [Major Depressive Disorder] have been found to exhibit all of the cardinal features of inflammation.” Article here.
“A professor of physics [from Australia] told me: Brian [J. O’Brian, a professor of physics], I completely support what you’re saying [about lack of evidence for man-made climate change], but I’ve got 65 researchers in my laboratory and the only funding I can get for them and to get their PhDs is greenhouse funding from Canberra or wherever. Twenty years people have been indoctrinated.”. Excerpts here.

Intervention bias by Nassim Taleb
article about self-tracking in the Economic Times (India).
Autism and PFCs
Two weeks of FitBit
Psychology professor Marc Hauser resigns from Harvard
Stay classy, Larry Summers. Calling people far less powerful than himself “assholes” is entirely consistent with this. I like to think if Spy magazine still existed, it would run a Larry Summers Watch.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Aaron Blaisdell.

Top uses of natto
I found Three Cups of Tea (about establishing schools in Pakistan) unreadable. Whereas I want to learn more about Pratham schools.
Stagnation in claims about climate-change skeptics (such as me)
“A 51-year-old physician colleague who looked the picture of health—no cardiovascular risks, a marathon runner who had exercised vigorously each day for 30 years—had just flunked a calcium screening scan of his heart” (link). After I started doing the “wrong” thing (eat half a stick of butter per day) my calcium screening score substantially improved.
more about scientific fraud at Duke University

MMO (massively multiplayer online) game connoisseurship
Thorstein Veblen lives! (cartoon)
article about self-tracking in Technology Review with several associated articles. The author, Emily Singer, describes a month of self-tracking, including what went wrong.
triumph of new-age medicine. Emily Blackburn, a Nobel Prize winner, says modern medicine does a good job with infectious disease. What about antibiotic resistance? What about failing to understand how to boost the immune system?
Medtronic didn’t waste $23 million. Associated article. A surgeon named Thomas Zdeblick, who received $23 million from Medtronic, has drawn attention away from the company by claiming he has no financial interest in a product that generates substantial income for him whenever it is used according to FDA guidelines.

Thanks to Tim Lundeen, J.C. and Ben Casnocha.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Category: Assorted Links