Madelaine McMasters

Perrie Juran wrote: Alien Invasion? You're the alien around here, where's your Earth shattering KABOOM?!

RenaHolden wrote: *grin* thanks, problem is we are both beginners. Thanks so much for the reply! What a lovely problem to have, Rena. I envy you both. ;-)

As you experiment your way around RLV, I suggest you familiarize yourself with both sides of the interface. If you encounter someone unfamiliar with their side of your RLV interface, you can help them out. You will also have some understanding of the challenges and opportunities they face. Have fun, Rena!

Celestiall Nightfire wrote: Vaccines are the victim of their own success. Because people are not seeing the deaths, and severe complications that so many of the diseases cause, the average person is forgetting (or never saw) the devastation that they wreak on humans. So, it's easy to dismiss their vital importance. This demonstrates the value of teaching history and, in particular, the histories of science and disease. While teaching history to help us avoid wars is laudable, li'l bugs have killed more of us than all wars combined. I don't know that Deltango was responding to the anti-vaccine idea so much as the "pro dirty childhood" idea, which is one I think we both agree with. I consider vaccines to be one of the more important kinds of "dirt" we should encounter when young. I am concerned about our current anti-biotic predicament. MSRA is a growing problem and there doesn't seem to be sufficient financial reward for the development of new anti-biotics. Unfortunately, we have a health care system that is more reactive than proactive. You can't make a profit treating diseases people never acquire, nor from drugs that cure a problem in one week rather than control it for 75 years.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: We don't talk about it But the secret handshake is to die for.

4-26-1936 After appearing sullen and withdrawn at the dinner table, 17 year old Theodore "Two Ton" Tenson retires to his bedroom. An hour later, when queried by his mother, Tenson refuses to come out, saying he's "feeling blue". The phrase "feeling blue" would eventually become synonymous with depression. 4-26-1937 Theodore Tenson and his visibly pregnant girlfriend Beatrice "Blue" Bonette are married in a brief civil ceremony at City Hall. Parents of the bride and groom were present. 4-26-2013 Occupy Wall St protestors with extra time on their hands demand the recall of all Radio Flyer wagons because they neither have radios nor fly. Angry children hurl their wagons off rooftops onto the protesters yelling "Half right is not alright!"

Hippie Bowman wrote: Good morning all! Late today. At home sick! Sigh! Have a great day all! Peace! Sounds like it's time for some chicken juice! Hugs, Hippie!

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Alak Dyrssen wrote: The theory that the Large Hardon Collider would pound us in to a black hole was an illogical phallacy During the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller raised the possibility that detonation of a nuclear bomb might ignite the Earth's atmosphere. Two scientists aided Teller in calculating that it couldn't actually happen, which I suspect reduce some of the angst over development of the bomb. When I first heard of the LHC black hole scare, I immediately thought of this. I believe you have missed the joke Alak intended. Please see the last word of his sentence and any other unorthodox spelling. "Mobile phones causing cancer" was an interesting scare I think. If I remember correctly it was 'crazy thinking' that was considered quite seriously as a possibility, investigated, tested, found to have no specific or statistical link and wrapped up quietly. I haven't heard any irrational continuations so it seems to be exactly the way things should be done (although we'd like to think there was no 'crazy thinking' required in the first place). Oh yeah - and to all these things, if I can't blame fairies at the bottom of the garden or orbiting teapots I think: Lazy journalists cause scares to sell advertising. But only when they have to because it's even easier to just re-publish press releases and call it news. No, I got it Peter. Teller's concern over igniting the N2 in the atmosphere also produce joking (one can wonder if they found a sexual angle as well), with Hans Bethe taking wagers on whether it would happen. The full analysis of Teller's worry wasn't completed until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Teller's case, he was worth listening to (even though he was a whiner), but in both cases, the virtually instantaneous end of the world was at stake. For me, the humor is deeper than the jokes. How many times will we think we're but a button push away from ending it all. Let's hope we're always wrong! The worries over EMF/RF causing cancer stem from research into non-heating effects. The thought is that, at the right frequency, DNA can be made to resonate and eventually break. Tests were done on unwound linear sections, showing that microwave radiation, as one might get from a cell phone or wi-fi/microwave oven, can indeed break DNA. Fortunately, our DNA (all six feet if it) is wound up in a ball that fits inside a human cell. This shifts the resonant frequency up so high that there's nothing we make that can reach it, except ultraviolet light, which can only break DNA in our skin because it doesn't penetrate, and ionizing radiation from X-Rays to proton beams. My Father knew quite a few scientists and engineers, and his office was in our home (I am sitting in it as I type this), so I was exposed to quite a few of those fellas growing up. One of them had done experiments with military radar, sitting in the beam until he felt uncomfortably warm. They had calculated the rate at which his body core temperature would rise, so he was in no danger of cooking. I think back to that and wonder if Otto would have lounged in the beam if he'd been a molecular biologist rather than an electrical engineer. MRI machines torque our hydrogen atoms around to align the spins of their protons. The electromagnetic fields we experience inside an MRI tunnel are many orders of magnitude larger than those we encounter anywhere else. We've yet to discover any problems from the use of MRI. Dad told me of another of his colleagues who worked at the University of Chicago (now Fermilab), building their first cyclotron. To test the thing, they placed an aquarium near the exit port and dumped the beam into it, creating a bat shaped blue glow in the water. One of the guys wondered what looking directly into the beam would be like. The bat shaped glow died out before the beam exited the tank, so it was thought that there were few particle leaving the aquarium. He looked into the beam from the far end of the aquarium and proclaimed the view to be "all sparkly!". This later developed cataracts in the one eye he used to view. He was cautious enough not to use both eyes, which seems to me to mean he was crazy enough to use one. That same cyclotron was left to run overnight as a sort of burn-in for all the systems. A crescent wrench was inadvertently left in or on the thing, and was discovered the next day by one of the technicians, who picked it up. That technician developed radiation poisoning. These stories stick with me, as cautionary tales. It's easy to think that because we know a lot, there's little we don't know.That's dangerous thinking.

Canoro Philipp wrote: the rise would be easy to explain if the research for autism has been increased while in the past not that much attention was given to it, meaning that since more hope has been given to the parents, more parents bring their child to medical facilities in hope that they will be cured, increasing awareness of more autistic people, and also, if more characteristics has been noted as part of autism that in the past has been unknown, the people that have the new characteristics that are labeled autistic will rise with the expanded range of what is autism. This effect has been witnessed for other diseases as well. As we improve awareness and access to improved diagnostic abilities and expand the definition of a disease, the reporting rate increases. In the past, the milder cases of autism may have gone undiagnosed, called by any number of other names. I don't imagine there were many public schools in 1930 that had staff psychologists or nurses with mental health training. Now they do, so fewer kids and their parents fall through the cracks.

Alak Dyrssen wrote: The theory that the Large Hardon Collider would pound us in to a black hole was an illogical phallacy During the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller raised the possibility that detonation of a nuclear bomb might ignite the Earth's atmosphere. Two scientists aided Teller in calculating that it couldn't actually happen, which I suspect reduce some of the angst over development of the bomb. When I first heard of the LHC black hole scare, I immediately thought of this.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: I've been trying my best to think of others but the only one I've come up with is "Power lines cause cancer" and that's from several years ago. Cell phones cause cancer? A lot of research has gone into non-heating (ie, mutagenic) effects of RF energy on tissues and I expect more will be done. I have worked on devices that purposely expose tissue to RF, so this is an area of interest to me. Here in Wisconsin, when I was a kid (and years before), there was a lot of chatter about a VLF antenna array to be installed up-state for communicating with submarines. It was throught to be a ruse to cover up the "fact" that this antenna would beam thoughts directly into our brains. Fluoride in the water (I loved Sterling Hayden's Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove"). I don't recall what the fluoride is actually supposed to do to me. I live on well water, so must I actively participate in my own self destruction by brushing my teeth with fluoride toothpaste. Mom is 83, has survived breast cancer and still has all her own teeth. If I told her that toothpaste was responsible for both her mammary asymmetry and her beautiful smile, she might call it a wash (In all seriousness, her cancer was caught early, treated quickly, she's been healthy for 15 years and she does have a beautiful smile). Governments aren't telling us about that black-hole/asteroid thingie from the Kuiper belt that is about to destroy us. (We discussed it in a thread here). It's massive enough to be a black hole and clever enough to cause the vernal equinox to occur two days early in Iceland without perturbing anything else in the universe. Amateur astronomers are always looking for something they can get named after themselves, so they'd be thrilled to detect anything out of whack. They haven't. Widespread snooping on our cell phone conversations/hard drives/e-mail etc. (Project Tempest) The government maintains a dossier on each of us, minute in every detail. This is a theory I believe is beamed into our heads by Google so we won't worry about their cute camera cars roving our neighborhoods. Due to superbly effective muzzling by big oil companies, individuals who have built actual working perpetual energy machines are only able to leak demonstrations of their amazing discoveries via YouTube. None of these rise to the magnitude of either Global Warming or Vaccine/Autism, but the mechanisms at work are similar throughout. I think the Internet has been a boon to this kind of thinking as it allows like minded individuals to get/give positive feedback. There is both a democratization and balkanization of thought online. I am optimistic overall.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Science is not immune to the effects of money. Is it time to shift the thread from chemists to enviromentalists and the worldwide "global warming", er, no, that doesn't work, um, "climate change" conspiracy? All the money is in 'proving' the climate-change theories, not disproving or even testing them. As with this thread there was no real definition of the problem/situation for a long time, just an awful lot of pundit-warming as they could rant about almost anything they wanted. The climate 'debate' is still dishonest - almost anyone claiming "mankind is not the biggest factor affecting the climate" will instantly be ridiculed for denying that "mankind does not affect the climate", an altogether different statement. Another fascinating topic. I'm waiting for folks in the Maldives to move out so I can take my pick of paradise huts. Having been born too late to be a cargo cult priestess, I'll have to settle for squatting.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Ansolutely. Progress needs creativity and creativity is usually not rational, although there are those few times when someone does something new (ie; creative) and everyone just slaps themselves and says "Of course! Why didn't I think of that". I just finished reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". It's a delightful travelogue through some of the sciences, replete with oddball characters. It's a perfect tutorial on the messiness of science and the people who do it.

emmettcullen93 wrote: for wensday this one applies to Mr. Emmett right here. I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. - Thomas Alva Edison That's the spirit, Emmett! The young Edison accidentally burned down his family's barn in 1852. His home went up in flames in 1914. In 1919, as his office and library was blazing away, he woke his wife to view the event, remarking that one doesn't get to see such things very often. My contribution for the day... “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” - Henry Ford ;-)

Paladin, thanks so much for your post. I just heard about the Silicon Valley connection and found it compelling. I too have hope that the scientific community will find solutions to a great many problems in medicine and elsewhere. The general public is simply unaware how science and the scientific community work. It's a messy business and "conspiracies" (which one might call herd-think) are constantly subjected to scrutiny. Nothing looks better on a resume than a highly publicized peer-reviewed paper that overturns a few apple carts. As more and more epidemiological data is banked online, we'll see meta analysis bloom. People will be digging through everything with ever more sophisticated analysis tools, looking for the countless needles in the haystacks of our research data. I find this growing collection of, and access to data very encouraging. But while science does have self correcting properties, there really can be large scale aberrations in the process that work against the public good. They are hardly secret, but they're difficult to rectify. As an example, there is evidence that pharmaceutical companies direct their research towards treatments that turn deadly diseases into manageable chronic conditions, rather than cure them. There is no long term profit in eliminating your customers, either by killing them or curing them. So the financial rewards of our economic system are not quite aligned with our best interests. I have friends what work in big pharma who witness this profit pressure at work in the internal review process for new research. While they are frustrated, they remain in the game with a hope of affecting the outcome for the positive. It's not hard to find other examples where this happens, such as in education and social welfare programs and military expenditures. Science is not immune to the effects of money. Not much is. I do think people in general want to do the right thing, knowing what's right is the problem and discovering that requires patience and thoughtfulness.

4-25-2013 Danica Patrick wins at Talladega. Fans are stunned when Patrick emerges from the car after her victory lap wearing a Versace sequined gown and Jimmy Chou strappy sandals. She entered the car at the beginning of the race wearing the traditional race jumpsuit and helmet. Careful analysis of race footage later shows that Patrick changed clothes during the race and crossed the finish line while touching up her lipstick in the rear view mirror. 4-25-2025 James Cameron of Planetary Resources releases video imagery of the company's first successful "lasso" of a mineral rich asteroid. A robotic survey of the asteroid's surface reveals three volcanoes (two still active) some beobab trees and a single rose. 4-25-2025 During a post-mortem analysis of LL server code, open-source coders discover that SL's ubiquitous plywood boxes actually contain sheep.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Taking a stand against received wisdom is indeed difficult and likely to be ridiculed. Indeed, and that does sometimes spring from irrational thought. Irrationality is natural and not without benefit. Just as mutation is a fundamental component of biological evolution, irrational thinking seems to be an important part of our technological evolution. I'm sure my analogy is imperfect, but selection may be to mutation as science is to "crazy" thinking. Yeees, I'm not great on philosophy of science, mostly getting it from Popper's books and general history. Let's be clear about 'irrational thought and 'crazy thinking' though, in the context of medicine at least. I would say irrational thought is just that, with no evidence or 'system' to support it. While it's possible something (currently considered) irrational is true there's absolutely no good evidence to support it. That sodding teapot orbiting the sun is an example. In contrast theories like circulation of the blood, germ theory, etc. were "crazy thinking". They went totally against the perceived wisdom at the time so 'educated' people automatically called them crazy. As with Galileo 'perceived wisdom' often had the force of law and the power of life and death. And yet those theories weren't proposed irrationally but because there was good evidence to support them. Eventually this evidence was examined and accepted by enough people that it became the new perceived wisdom. To avoid a logical fallacy we now have to say that there are two useful definitions of a 'good scientist/doctor'. The first is someone who has learnt, understood and applies the current perceived wisdom. The second is someone who spots errors and ommissions in perceived wisdom and works - rationally but perhaps crazily :-) - to correct them. Collectively we hope those are the same people, but they often are not. All too often the dogma of perceived wisdom, reinforced with awards for agreeing and ridicule for disagreeing, prevent a lot of doctors thinking crazy 'outside the box' things. If nothing else, they're just too busy applying what they know to evaluate what they don't know. On your more general point - mutation|selection, ideas|science - I'm quite happy with that as a concept, I like the theory of memes, for instance, but I think we need a better definition of 'science'. (Or at least I do, it not being my field). Yep, I should have been more careful to set a scope on "crazy", but pithy must be compact, right? I was indeed trying to get at what you're saying, that we need some people who are rational enough to make actual progress in some endeavor, but irrational enough to oppose direction (dogma). We have the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. I am ever aware of this in myself, as my mind jumps to most bizarre conclusions at times. I believe this explains my sense of humor, my professional success, and my Father's lifelong attempts to give/send me away ;-) Taken to extremes, this propensity to find meaning leads to imaginary actors. A great many of those actors have been immortalized in books, some of which may still be found in hotels or burning in piles on city streets. On smaller scales, they poison our water and our children and tell us stuff that just ain't so. I've read theories (or maybe they were ramblings) that mixing a pinch of oppositionality (which is irrational) with a bit of paranoia (also irrational) may be the engine that has powered some of our greatest discoveries. Newton was at once brilliant and subversive, discovering the laws of motion and gravitation while trying to disprove the Holy Trinity at Trinity college. That does make me smile. We're all irrational somewhere and sometime, Peter. Maybe that's a curse and a blessing?

Medhue Simoni wrote: Did you really watch the video? I provided you with a reply that contained over half a dozen quotes from the video, complete with time markers spanning through the first hour. Having been given that, you ask if I watched the video. From this, I could conclude (and this is not an exhaustive list): 1) You have significant problems with comprehension. 2) You believe that insulting people is an effective way to win arguments. 3) You are too emotionally invested to argue rationally or with civility. There is a little edge in that list, but I think I can be forgiven for my frustration given the abrasive nature of your participation in this thread. I do not continue to engage you with any thought that I might change your mind. I have had many discussions like this with others over the years and I know better. My interaction with you is intended to give you the opportunity to publicly paint yourself in the most unflattering tones. I am curious to know if you are able to resist my charms.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Celestiall Nightfire wrote: I don't own a television, nor do I know what a LIfetime drama is. Nor do I. I'm beginning to spot a pattern here, Celestiall. ;-) You had the opportunity to debunk all the stuff in the videos, yet you have given not 1 arguement other than crazy, in a thread about logical fallacies? Every single so called credible study that the CDC uses to defend the non link to vaccines has been discredited in this thread, and you have given no response but crazy. That's not a valid response. It appears that Celestiall, who is far more familiar with mercury/autism than I, has provided some links for you. I hope you don't mind if I defer to her expertise in the details while I stick to the issue of logical fallacy and methods of argumentation elsewhere in this thread.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Look at the title to the last column on the table "Approval Date for Thimerosal Free or Thimerosal / Preservative Free (Trace Thimerosal)*** Formulation". If read as it should be read, it is stating that all the vaccines in the list once had Thimerosal, and the dates in that column are it's approval dates for Thimerosal free or trace amounts. Now, I'm sure this is a mistake, because I know of some of them that have never had it. So, either some1 doesn't really know how to label a table, or it's saying they all had Thimerosal. You'd think some1 in government could write a clearly stated table. It is clearly stated. The column shows the approval date for those re-formulations which got approval. If something wasn't reformulated, it wouldn't have an approval date. That is indicated by "Never contained Thimerosal". This is like the NA entries you often see in data lists indicating "Not Applicable". This labeling practice is pretty commonplace. ETA: I see Innula responded while I was on the phone and my post sat waiting for "Post". A girl likes to be seen, so I'll leave my response, even though it's superfluous.

Celestiall Nightfire wrote: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/autism-treatment/AN01488 While reading about chelation therapy, I stumbled across this... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18949650 If the abstract accurately represents the situation, one could wonder if there's a logical fallacy there. The patient was killed by administration of the improper chelating agent (in another article I did not bookmark, I think it was stated that the wrong agent was delivered at the dosage for the correct agent). The conclusion of the report is that chelation therapy can have tragic consequences. From the abstract alone, the conclusion I would draw is that medical errors can have tragic consequences. Administration of the correct chelating agent at the correct dose would, one might guess, not be fatal. While I don't think Medhue is arguing his case terribly well, I don't think any of us are suggesting that science is error free. This might be an example of of that, twice over.

Celestiall Nightfire wrote: I don't own a television, nor do I know what a LIfetime drama is. Nor do I. I'm beginning to spot a pattern here, Celestiall. ;-)

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Taking a stand against received wisdom is indeed difficult and likely to be ridiculed. Indeed, and that does sometimes spring from irrational thought. Irrationality is natural and not without benefit. Just as mutation is a fundamental component of biological evolution, irrational thinking seems to be an important part of our technological evolution. I'm sure my analogy is imperfect, but selection may be to mutation as science is to "crazy" thinking.

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Yes, commercial and political interests lie and cheat. To accuse every chemist, every doctor, every bioloist and every government in the world of doing so about this issue unless they agree with you is stretching credulity. Peter, even if you believed that every chemist, doctor, biologist and government in the world lies and cheats (they actually do! ;-), it's hard to explain such large scale collective actions as global conspiracies. One interesting property of actual conspiracies is that eventually (and more than proportionally dependent on size of the conspiracy) participants often see a profit in revealing them. One interesting property of imagined conspiracies is that people rarely imagine only one. Welcome to humanity!

4-23-65,000,000BC The Tertiary period kicks off with a bang when dinosaur astronomer Tyrone "Dr. T" Rex fails to detect the approaching Chicxulub asteroid. Archaeologists eventually discover that Dr. Rex's oversight was likely the result of pushing his telescope off course with his nose every time he reached for the focus knob with his too-short arms. 4-23-2011 Facebook's chat support lines are swamped when users of the game "Farmville" report the mysterious appearance of crop circles. 4-23-2013 The TSA suffers yet another embarrassment when it is revealed that airport full body scanners appear to show that everyone is actually Rick Astley.