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Caffiend 5/29/2008

  After another not-so-hot night's sleep, I once again gave in to the sweet siren song of soda. It was a fountain drink, so I loaded up on ice. I feel approximately 34% less guilty than I would have without ice.

  This quick sketch sums up my day before that. Beware of impossibly exciting shenanigans.

New Sounds In My Ear Hole

  I just discovered an interesting podcast called To The Best Of Our Knowledge. It's produced by Wisconsin Public Radio and distributed by Public Radio International. It's a little hard to distill, but I'll give it a shot. Otherwise, this will be a complete waste of a groggy, early morning post.

  It's kind of an audio idea tapestry. They do two themed hours every week, and they interview a bunch of people with really different backgrounds on each topic. It turns out to be a thorough, nuanced and often surprising treatment of each week's central idea. Think This American Life, replacing the "fascinating lives of ordinary people" with "the engrossing implications of commonplace ideas."

  I've listened to a few episodes so far, but I was really hooked by last week's second hour, "Revenge Of The Nerds." Five interviews illuminate some unexpected facets of a defiantly intellectual outcast culture. It was amusing and enlightening and weirdly empowering. I've always self-identified as pretty nerdy, and I suspect that I'm not the only one around here. =)

  I've blathered enough. Go check out the podcast. And consider yourself lucky that I spared you my little tangent about how much I love podcasts of radio shows that don't air in my geographical area.

Caffiend 5/28/2008

  Trying to hack out my first soda-free day went surprisingly well until the middle of the afternoon. I drank about 36 ounces of water, and only missed the sweet taste a little.

  Okay, it was a lot. An awful lot, actually. No matter how many times you drink it, water doesn't taste good. It just tastes like wet. I think I drank so much because I kept hoping that the next sip would be sweeter. It wasn't.

  Around 3 pm, things went rapidly south. I started to have trouble focusing on the screen in front of me. Blinking turned into several seconds of closing my eyes, and my head took on a definite downward trajectory.

  I tried getting up and walking around, but it didn't really help. There's a limit to how vigorously one can exercise in an office suite shared with 20 other people. So, I gave up and shuffled over to the soda machine for a 12 ounce can of cola.

  Even though I failed, I'm calling it a partial victory. I just about halved my average daily consumption, and didn't actually fall asleep for more than a few seconds. These are the only marks in my win column, people. Let me enjoy my pathetic accomplishments.

Caffiend 5/27/2008

  My primary caffeine delivery system is soda. I only resort to coffee very occasionally, when I'm particularly exhausted and I have to resort to drastic measures.

  Coffee is obviously more efficient, since it's richer in the hyperactive ingredient. Unfortunately, I'm unnaturally sensitive to hot liquids. Freshly brewed coffee has to sit for a long time before I can drink it. Iced coffee is fine, but it winds up being so diluted by water that it's mostly useless. Also, coffee breath is perhaps the foulest oral stank that one can achieve short of a gangrenous tongue.

  The problem with soda is, of course, the metric buttload of empty calories in each serving. As I fall rapidly into my mid 30s, my metabolism has finally started to fail me. My midsection is turning into honky pudding, and there's a slab of flesh under my jaw that's threatening to envelop my chin.

  For the sake of my health, my wife's visual environment, and my dwindling supply of pants that fit, it's time for me to cut out some of the gratuitous high fructose corn syrup. And don't talk to me about diet soda. If sugar cane could urinate, it would taste exactly like diet soda, and it probably wouldn't linger on the tongue for quite as long.

  Difficulty: I'm still in law school. When I was only working full time, I'd almost completely cut out caffeine, but the pressure of law school reawakened my jitterbug in a big way. I'm working over the summer, but classes start again in late August. I can't predict what will happen once I'm back to that grind.

  Because you're no doubt curious it's my blog and I'll write about whatever stupid, solipsistic topic I want, I'm going to start tracking my progress as I try to wean myself from the caffeine habit. I'm sure it will be riveting slightly less boring than trimming your own nose hair. Stay tuned.

Don't Let Grandma Retire To Kenya

  The BBC is reporting that a mob in western Kenya has burned to death 11 elderly people. The eight women and three men, all of whom were over 80, were on a list of people who supposedly attended a "witches meeting," which produced a list of people who were scheduled for future bewitchment. The victims were dragged from their homes one by one and set on fire in the street. The mob then burned down their houses.

  The best (most appalling) part of the article concerns the response of the people who weren't burned to death:

Residents have been ambivalent about condemning the attacks because belief in witchcraft is widespread in the area.

  Yes, let's not get up on our soapbox about burning old people to death, because a lot of people think that witchcraft is real. Hopefully, it won't be MY grandmother that's tortured and murdered next time.

But local official Mwangi Ngunyi spoke out against the murders. "People must not take the law into their own hands simply because they suspect someone," he told AFP news agency.

  OH CRAP YES, Mr. Nugunyi. It's not so important that your neighbors are vicious predators, murdering elderly people. It's not the fact that their ridiculous superstitions are inciting them to this kind of appalling violence. No, the real problem here is vigilantism. We can solve the whole problem with a small shift in behavior. Next time your suspect that your elderly neighbor is casting spells on you, don't burn her to death. CALL THE POLICE ON HER!

  This is why superstition and belief in (or fear of) the supernatural are not harmless fun. Blind belief, ignorance and fear are volatile and dangerous. Today, we can add 11 more names to the list of innocent victims of these awful human failings.

It's Probably Just Me

Click for full size.

For My Proud Nerd Friends*

From the Skepchick store:


*But especially for Michele.

A Little Late

  Okay, a lot late, but I've been busy. The excellent skeptic/girl power communal blog Skepchick.org has a regular "Comment o' the Week" feature. From what I can tell, a shadowy cabal of the site's contributors arbitrarily pick a comment that amuses them.

  Despite the lack of transparency in the process, their picks have been consistently excellent and LOL-inducing. Until last week that is, when, for some inexplicable reason, they picked one of my comments.

  Don't let this oversight dissuade you from reading an otherwise interesting and amusing blog. This is just evidence that it's always good to keep your critical thinking brainmeats engaged. Even consistently smart people can make odd, irrational choices.

Irreducibly Awesome

  As part of its Expelled Exposed project, the National Center for Science Education tackles that tired creationist argument, irreducible complexity. If you're not familiar with this line of reasoning, it basically goes like this:

"I can't imagine how [COMPLEX ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE] could possibly have evolved from simpler structures, without any deliberate guidance. Therefore, relying only on my own ignorance as evidence, I conclude that [COMPLEX ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE] must have been conjured up fully formed by a benevolent sky-grandpa."

  Luckily for the poor, misguided creationist, there are plenty of scientists who can imagine, and describe in great detail, the intermediate stages and slow development that led to the current version of [COMPLEX ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE]. In the video below, they demystify the development of perhaps the favorite target of the irreducible complexity argument, the eye. Enjoy.

Inelegant, Inefficient, Intelligent?

  If you've ever suspected that the complexity and perfection of the human body are evidence that it must have been deliberately sculpted by an intelligent hand, I'd like to introduce you to the epiglottis. It's a small flap of cartilage in the back of your throat, that hangs out just behind your tongue. When you swallow, it lays down to block off the opening to your larynx, directing food and liquids into your esophagus, and away from the "gas only" zone that is your lungs.

  If something did deliberately design human anatomy, it made the choice to channel all the normal states of matter through a single space, with only a small flap of mucous-covered cartilage to play traffic cop between the lungs and the stomach. It's both needlessly complex and downright dangerous. Building separate, dedicated pathways for breathing and swallowing would have been simpler, and far less prone to catastrophic failure.

  If the human body were intelligently designed, Dr. Heimlich would have died in obscurity.

Seven Year Bitch

  Despite millennia of being consistently mistaken, charlatans and true believers alike continue to predict that the end of the world is just around the corner. The latest entry in the Book Of Inevitable Failure comes from pastor Mark Biltz, of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Wash. Pastor Biltz has determined that a series of lunar eclipses that will appear in 2015 are a likely herald of the long awaited second coming. Why? Because they happen to fall on the same days as his religious festivals.(video)

  This prediction has all the classic elements. Regular, predictable astronomical phenomena, reference to vague bible verses, coincidental timing with arbitrarily dated church holidays, current political unrest and enough wishful thinking to kill a yak at 20 paces.

  My favorite part of this whole scenario is that Hal Lindsey, crackpot and lifetime member of the failed prophets club, dismisses Biltz's theory as "pure speculation." Talk about the 100% non-reflective surface calling the kettle black.

  Someone remind me to send Mr. Biltz a postcard in 2016. I'm sure I'll be way too busy not burning in hell to remember by myself.

Question #126: National Day Of Wasted Breath

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  How are you going to celebrate the national day of Prayer?
- Belief/relief

Dear Belief/relief,
  In the classic Christian tradition of co-opting other people's holidays (and crotch-punching the First Amendment's Establishment Clause), U.S. evangelicals have managed to shove poor, neglected May Day 2008 aside in favor of a federally sponsored day for people of faith to beseech their favorite deity. This putatively ecumenical event has been entirely hijacked by evangelical Christians, led by Focus on The Family's Shirley Dobson. Dobson heads the National Day of Prayer Task Force, and requires all of her coordinators to sign a statement explicitly stating belief that Jesus was both a ghost AND a zombie.

  I'm going to spend my day like I spend any other. I'll be angry that the rights of those who opt out of the supernatural aren't as important as those of believers. I'll be appalled at how tolerance of diverse faiths doesn't apply to people who place their faith in the natural rather than the fantastic. I'll be aghast at this country's sad, greasy slide toward outright theocracy. Most of all, I'll wish I was surprised by any of it.

I Was Not Aware Of That

  Three things I did not know:

1.  Dr. Henry Heimlich, purported inventor of the famed and (I shit you not) registered trademark "maneuver" for rescuing choking victims is still alive.

  I don't know why, but I always assumed that such a simple procedure must have been invented in the 19th century. Based on the last name, I pictured a humble Bavarian physician, decked out in lederhosen and suspenders. While knocking back a pint at a rural ale house, he rushed to the aid of one of the town volk who was choking on a bit of bratwurst. Thanks to his quick thinking, his technique became the namesake maneuver, and his improvised flailings (and maybe the bit of horked-up sausage) were preserved for posterity.

  As it turns out, the maneuver was first described in the mid-70s. Although it is still taught as a remedy for choking, it isn't the recommended first treatment. Dr. Heimlich was born in Delaware in 1920, and doesn't seem to be particularly humble. Or Bavarian.

2.  Dr. Heimlich has been dogged by allegations of fraud.

  One of Dr. Heimlich's most persistent critics is his son, Peter Heimlich. Among the allegations he levels against his father is the charge that the famous technique was appropriated from Dr. Heimlich's long time colleague, Dr. Edward Patrick.

3.  Dr. Heimlich may be completely, dangerously, batshit insane.

  Dr. Heimlich advocates the use of his system of abdominal thrusts to treat drowning victims, despite much evidence that such use is dangerous and potentially fatal. Most obviously crazy, though, is his insistence that he can cure HIV/AIDS with an injection. Of malaria.

  Dr. Heimlich, who has no training as an immunologist, seriously believes that he can cure AIDS, as well as cancer and Lyme disease, by injecting patients with malaria. In support of this hypothesis, he's conducted ethically suspect trials with HIV patients in China and Africa. One of the conditions of those trials was that participants couldn't receive any other treatment, either for their HIV or the symptoms of their malaria infections.

  This is what I get for relying on Eddie Izzard for information about a public figure.



I'm not about to say that my hour of casual reading amounts to a definitive case, but there is a good bit of evidence of a disconnect between Dr. Heimlich's self-promoted legacy and the details of his actual career in public health. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to argue.

The Sleazy Side of The E-niverse

  Interviews and artwork in the new book Colorful Illustrations 93°C were ripped off wholesale from Darren Di Lieto's Little Chimp Society. Dozens of original illustrations and interviews with the artists who created them have been copied and repackaged as a $100 book.

  It's the modern nightmare of electronic distribution. On the one hand, it's an inexpensive way to get your work in front of a worldwide audience. On the other hand, a fake publisher in Hong Kong can copy it all and publish it under a fake ISBN with very little fear of legal retribution.

  If you or someone you know/love/share fluids with is a big fan of overpriced art books, please make sure they know that purchasing this particular tome is a kick to the soft bits of all hard working artists who share their work online.