- A Chinese medicine huckster. “Zhang asserts that different body organs have their own color preferences: lungs like white food, the liver likes green food, kidneys like black food, the heart likes red food and the spleen likes yellow food.”
- According to Gawker, “kombucha tastes terrible”. Some store-bought kombuchas contain too much alcohol.
Category: Assorted Links
Assorted Links
- Probiotic cuts probability of pneumonia in half for high-risk patients. In related news, yogurt confiscated.
- Medical ghostwriting is research misconduct, argues this article. Think what this means: A common practice among medical school professors can reasonably be considered research misconduct. Via the Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
- Parking-space maximums by Tom Vanderbilt
Thanks to Anne Weiss and Mark Griffith.
Assorted Links
- Success is fickle: The case of Megan Fox. Is Big Pharma in the same situation? Lacking profound understanding of disease (just as Fox can’t act) . . .
- Excellent anonymous obituary of Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist. “Give power to the state and you end up with self-serving interest groups [he believed].” Via The Browser.
- David Healy on Big & Little Pharma (100 words). “Posted parcels are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.”
- Beijing Ikea. I shop there often. The cafeteria, with heavy silverware and live music, feels opulent. An industrial design student I know admired one of their chairs for three years and finally bought it as a prop for her final project. During exhibition of her work, unfortunately, visitors said, “What a beautiful chair.”
Thanks to Bruce Charlton and Paul Sas.
Assorted Links
- In 2001, Bruce Charlton criticized the Human Genome Project. “The hype that surrounds the human genome project is essentially a form of advertising.”
- “Patients feel the single greatest impediment that stands between them and [CCSVI] is the [Canadian] MS Society,” [a woman said] . . . . Days after [her son’s] CCSVI procedure [in another country], she added, he was out sight-seeing with his father.”
- devil or angel? A long list of common things
Thanks to JR Minkel.
Assorted Links
- What’s the umami fad all about?
- Tests of new MS idea funded. “ A sweeping new set of studies is aiming to determine whether there’s any merit to a controversial theory that blocked blood veins cause multiple sclerosis.”
- “ The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. . . There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming.”
Thanks to Michael Bowerman.
Assorted Links
- Quotation bias in reviews of the diet-heart idea. “Criticism of the diet-heart idea is often met with the argument that consensus committees have settled the issue unanimously.” Uh, where have I heard that?
- Kefir for sale in Beijing. Eating plenty of fermented food for the first time, “for whatever reason this is first trip where I didn’t have any real bout with food poisoning or tourista.”
- Cheese and tooth decay
- Tim Harford on Jane Jacobs
- Fermented grain recipes from around the world
- Triumph over HMO. “His lack of action protected his status and his organization, but put [my daughter’s] safety and well-being at risk.”
- Never bet against New Yorker writer Susan Orlean
Thanks to Steve Hansen and Gary Wolf.
Assorted Links
- submarine tunnel and giant terrain model, discovered via Google Earth. More here.
- Nassim Taleb interview podcast.
- Shades of Jane Jacobs: How the cure for scurvy was lost. “From the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease.”
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Assorted Links
- “ Playing in the dirt could make you smarter,” study says. Playing in the dirt could make you happier, another study says.
- Why does Steve Ballmer still have a job? especially this comment.
- Less tooth-brushing, more heart disease. Those who brushed their teeth less than daily — a small fraction of the sample — had more heart disease. Less-than-daily tooth-brushing may reflect depression or isolation, neither of which was controlled for. The data is openly available.
- Black-and-white thinking strikes again.
- OMG, “ polar bear population very very healthy“!
Thanks to Mark Griffiths.
Assorted Links
- fermented shark, an Icelandic delicacy
- Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides (may be gated). Found a correlation between ADHD scores and pesticide exposure. “The present study adds to the accumulating evidence linking higher levels of pesticide exposure to adverse developmental outcomes.”
- Does God see everything? (see comments). “The pent-up pain and frustration of current and former ABC News employees has finally boiled over.” Follow-up.
Assorted Links
- Jane’s [Jacobs] Walks
- 9 years of sleep data
- overview of Jane Jacobs’s work
- God is in every leaf of every tree. A great summing up of what science is about — taking seriously little things (such as leaves) and drawing inferences from the very small (“leaf”) to the very large (“God”). Someday I am going to use this saying . . . I would have used it already, had I known of it.
Thanks to Anne Weiss, Tom George, and JR Minkel