I’m absolutely buried under stuff to do so I may not post for a day or two.  Cheers!
Archive for 2007
070509 – Wednesday – buried
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine
Saturday, May 5th, 2007The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.
Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.
The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.
It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.
Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.
Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.
Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.
Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.
More… ➡
– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, recently, a friend of mine suggested the website bugmenot.com
as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.
– Not worried yet? Go back and read these earlier posts ➡ ➡ and see if you can squint and, perhaps, see a pattern beginning to emerge. The cause of problems like this is putting profit before all else including people. And the results of the problem may be your health or the health of someone you love.
– When people tell you that we should fully unleash the power of the market. When people tell you that the market can provide for any need that arises without the need or governmental intervention. When people tell you that we’ll all be better off if we give ourselves fully to the benefits of Globalization. When they tell you all of that, if it sounds reasonable to you, go back and read these articles again. Maybe you missed something.
– I’ve tagged this post with the categories of ‘Perfect Storm‘ and Culture – How not to do it‘ because any form of governance which sets profit before people is not in the best interest of the people so governed and governments and organizations with that orientation (read corporations) are contributing to the coming Perfect Storm by ignoring humanity’s peril for their profit (stupid and short-sighted as it might seem).
Latest IPCC Report is out now
Saturday, May 5th, 2007– The UN started these IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports in 1988 and they come out approximately every five years. This is the IPCC’s Fourth Assesment Report. Previous reports came out as follows:
IPCC First Assesment Report 1990
IPCC Second Assesment Report 1995
IPCC Third Assesment Report 2001
– Within each report, there are multiple working groups, each with a different focus and they each release their own sub-reports at various times during the reporting year.
– What we’re looking at here in this post is the IPCC Fourth Assesment Report, Working Group III.
– In the Fourth IPCC Assesment Report the working group’s specific focuses were as follows:
Working Group I – Physical Science Basis of Climate Change
Working Group II – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Working Group III – Mitigation
– Working Group III’s Mitigation sub-report is where we are now in the sequence.
– For a complete breakdown/overview on the IPCC Reports, go here: ➡
– This stuff is the subject of huge debates among nations, between scientists, within the Blogosphere and anywhere else where people have formed opinions or have vested interests in the implications. Therefore I’m not going to try to report on it. Rather, I’m just going to collect reports and POVs and enumerate them below as I find them.
————————————
➡ – Wikipedia overview of the IPCC Reports up to and including the fourth one.
➡ – The actual IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III document (PDF)
➡ – Report from the Sietch Blog (only 8 years and counting left)
➡ – From Scientific American (what will it cost to fix it?)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (countries are avoiding responsibility)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (US & China resisting global efforts)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (Highlights of the IPCC’s Mitigation Report)
————————————
– One thing I noticed is that there do not seem to be as many articles and commentaries on this sub report as on the last. One wonders if the subject material (mitigation) is just inherently less interesting or if people are just getting bored with the entire business.
– The more I think about these things, the more I keep circling back around to the idea that since humans are the cause of the world’s environmental problems, the need to develop a deep and consilient understanding of human nature is probably one of the most effective and obvious approaches we can make to solving our problems. In this context, Evolutionary Psychology seems to me to hold a particular promise.
‘Stunning’ Nepal Buddha art find
Friday, May 4th, 2007Paintings of Buddha dating back at least to the 12th century have been discovered in a cave in a remote area of Nepal’s north-central region.
Researchers made the find after being tipped off by a local sheep herder. They discovered a mural with 55 panels showing the story of Buddha’s life.
The mural was uncovered in March, with the team using ice axes to break through a snow path to reach the cave.
The find was in the Mustang area, 250km (160 miles) north-west of Kathmandu.
Sheer cliffs
“What we found is fantastically rich in culture and heritage and goes to the 12th century or earlier,” American writer and conservationist Broughton Coburn told the AP news agency.
Mr Coburn said the main mural measured around 8m (25ft) wide, and each panel was about 35cm (14in) by 43cm (17in).
It was set in sheer 14,000ft (4,300m) cliffs in Nepal’s remote Himalayan north.
More… ➡
Pakistan downplays radioactive ad
Friday, May 4th, 2007WHAT?
I think only Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine and a couple of severely retarded or gullible people would remain unworried after this strange bit of business.
————————————
Pakistan’s nuclear authority has said there is no cause for concern after it published press adverts for information on “lost” radioactive material.
|||||
The adverts urged members of the public to inform officials if they found any “lost or stolen” radioactive material.
They were published in major Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan.
A spokesman for the nuclear authority said that there was a “very remote chance” that nuclear materials imported 40-50 years ago were unaccounted for.
International concern over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear programme was expressed in 2004, when the country’s top nuclear scientist, AQ Khan, confessed to leaking secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Dr Khan was subsequently placed under virtual house arrest, and is now suffering from pancreatic cancer.
‘Cradle to the grave’
Officials on Wednesday were keen to reassure the outside world that the latest incident in no way has the makings of another nuclear scandal, and that no radioactive material had been stolen, lost or gone missing.
But officials say they need to heighten public awareness of nuclear issues to ensure that decades-old nuclear material is fully accounted for.
More… ➡
– Mmmmm. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling much more reassured now that they’ve explained themselves. Yah sure, ya betcha.
Mt Cook glaciers ‘permanently damaged’ by climate change
Friday, May 4th, 2007
New Zealand’s famed Mount Cook glaciers are so affected by a warming climate they will never return to their former splendour, a New Zealand glaciologist has said.
Glaciologist Dr Trevor Chinn, who has been studying the Mount Cook structures since the 1960s, said some had already shrunk up to five kilometres, about 20 per cent, and it was too late for any of them to completely recover.
He said that while some of the world’s glaciers would grow back if the climate cooled to its pre-global warming levels, those fronting lakes, like some at Mount Cook, would not.
“You can’t get a re-advance that will come back if you apply the previous climate … a re-advance across a lake is difficult because the ice breaks off the front of the glacier and floats away,” Chinn said.
He said local warming since the 1890s had started the trend, but man-made climate change in recent decades had exacerbated the effect.
“They will never completely go. For that to happen the climate has to warm enough for the snowline to rise clean above the mountains, but they will retreat quite a bit more,” he said.
More… ➡
Protein Enables Discovery Of Quantum Effect In Photosynthesis
Friday, May 4th, 2007Science Daily — When it comes to studying energy transfer in photosynthesis, it’s good to think “outside the bun.” That’s what Robert Blankenship, Ph.D., professor of biology and chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, did when he contributed a protein to a study performed by his collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley.
Taco shell protein
It’s called bacteriochlorophyl (BChl) a protein, but Blankenship fondly calls it the taco shell protein because of its structure: its ribbon-like backbone wraps around three clusters of seven chlorophylls, just like a taco shell around ground beef. The structure also is referred to as trimeric because of the three clusters.
The protein, which comes from a photosynthetic bacterium that lives in extremely high temperatures, enabled the researches to discover that quantum mechanical effects appear to play a role in photosynthesis.
The taco shell protein is arguably the most studied and understood protein in a complex photosynthesis researchers refer to as the antenna system, molecules that efficiently transfer energy from light in a cascade.
Photosynthesis transforms light, carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy in plants and some bacteria. The wavelike characteristic of this energy transfer process can explain its extreme efficiency, in that vast areas of phase space can be sampled effectively to find the most efficient path for energy transfer.
“We have a very detailed molecular structure of this protein and we understand the electronic properties of it very well, too,” said Blankenship. “It’s taught us a lot about how chlorophylls interact with proteins. It was ideal for this study.”
Blankenship’s colleague, Graham R. Fleming, Ph.D., deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of chemistry at the University of California, and colleagues used 2-D spectroscopy to study what happens inside a bacteriochlorophyll complex, and detected a ‘quantum beating.”
The effect, described in the April 12, 2007, issue of Nature, occurs when light-induced excitations in the complex meet and interfere constructively, much like the interactions that occur between the ripples formed by throwing stones into a pond.
The collaboration is a good illustration of interdisciplinary science. The Washington University group’s expertise is in photosynthesis, especially antenna systems, and the West Coast group’s specialty is advanced laser techniques. The quantum finding would have been impossible without collaboration.
More… ➡
– Also see ➡
We’re Number Two: Canada Has as Good or Better Health Care than the U.S.
Friday, May 4th, 2007Despite spending half what the U.S. does on health care, Canada doesn’t appear to be any worse at looking after the health of its citizens.
The relative merits of the U.S. versus Canadian health care systems are often cast in terms of anecdotes: whether it is American senior citizens driving into Canada in order to buy cheap prescription drugs or Canadians coming to the U.S. for surgery in order to avoid long wait times. Both systems are beset by ballooning costs and, especially with a presidential election on the horizon, calls for reform, but a recent study could put ammunition in the hands of people who believe it is time the U.S. ceased to be the only developed nation without universal health coverage.
Gordon H. Guyatt, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who coined the term “evidence-based medicine,” collaborated with 16 of his colleagues in an exhaustive survey of existing studies on the outcomes of various medical procedures in both the U.S. and Canada. Their work appears in the inaugural issue of the new Canadian journal Open Medicine, and comes at a time when many in Canada are debating whether or not to move that country’s single-payer system toward for-profit delivery of care. The ultimate conclusion of the study is that the Canadian medical system is as good as the U.S. version, at least when measured by a single metric—the rate at which patients in either system died.
More… ➡
070504 – Friday – Trust your brain?
Friday, May 4th, 2007– I’ve got a nice collection of relatively unpopular books. They concern how poorly our brains work and I suspect they are unpopular because we, as a species, just don’t want to take a hard look at this issue. We are, after all, the smartest animal on the planet, right? I mean, look how well we are running the place.
– Here a little problem that just might give you a glimmer:
There are three boxes on the table and I’ve put a $100 bill into one of them. I know which one it is but you don’t. I ask you to pick one box and you do and you slide it over to your side of the table without opening it. Then I open one of the remaining two boxes that I know is empty and and I show you that there’s nothing in it. (The fact that I know the box is empty before I show you is the key bit here.)
Now, I ask you if you want to keep the box you originally chose or would you like to trade for the remaining closed box that I have?
You can either keep your original box or trade for mine. Which ever you choose to do, you need select and complete one of the following statements to explain your choice:
(1) It was important to stick with your original box because <fill in the blank>.
(2) It was important to switch to my box because <fill in the blank>.
(3) It wouldn’t make any difference if you switched or not because <fill in the blank>.
THINK about your answer for a bit before you click on the following link to get the answer.
Oh, and that collection of books? I thought you’d never ask.
A Mind of its Own – How Your Brain Distorts and Decieves by Cordelia Fine
Non-sense – a handbook of Logical Fallacies by Robert J. Gula
Inevitable Illusions – How the Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Mean Genes – from Sex to Money to Food Taming our Primal Instincts by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan
Thought Contagion – How belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch
– And if you want to buy any of these books, make your way to Amazon through one of the following links and a few pennies will come my way so that my on-line raving does not go totally unrewarded.
– Minor postscript: I originally wrote this piece yesterday and entitled it, 070403 – Thursday – Trust your brain? Then, after it was all written and I was making a few final tweaks, my brain, which I trust very little indeed, caused me to press some unknown combination of surprise keystrokes (while thinking it was doing something brilliant, no doubt) and the entire piece vanished from the screen and, I thought, from the face of the Earth forever. It was GONE. It was also fairly late in the evening and so I got up, said a few choice words about bad luck and the illegitimate parentage of this particular computer (note, I left any culpability on the part of my brain entirely out of my carefully thought out post-mortem analysis) and went off and had a glass of Sake to quell my irritation. Have I ever mentioned, that with few exceptions, I hate doing anything twice? So, imagine my surprise, when I checked my E-mail this morning, to find a copy of the lost piece in my mail box! Apparently, the WordPress system, which E-mails out copies of the pieces I write to those who’d prefer not to read them on web browsers, had snagged a copy in those lucky few second between my completing the piece and my final aberrant keystrokes. My conclusion (this is my brain talking here so be wary) is that either some one loves me or someone has a strange sense of humor. Either way – I’m clueless and happy.
– Thx to Rolf A. for suggesting a change to this piece that made it more effective.
China gas emissions ‘may pass US’
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007China could overtake the US this year as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, a leading international energy group has said.
The International Energy Agency had predicted China’s carbon dioxide emissions would pass the US by 2010.
But IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said the rate of China’s economic growth this year defied expectations.
His comments come days after a Chinese government report warned of the impact of climate change on the country.
The report, compiled by several government bodies, said that higher temperatures would lead to worsening droughts, spreading deserts and reduced water supplies.
But it stopped short of recommending cuts in greenhouse gas output and risking the country’s economic growth.
More… ➡