Gardasil and marketing

Cervical cancer vaccine is popular, but fails to cure doubts - International Herald Tribune

Some experts are rather cynical about the way Gardasil became the "must have" vaccine overnight. More a triumph of marketing than obvious good sense, they suggest.

Interesting read.

A quiet "yay"...

It is, after all, Brendan Nelson, but it is the right idea.

Modern pot

Back to the stoned age - Features, Health & Wellbeing - The Independent

So, a 38 year old who had quite a lot of cannabis in his youth tries it again and now finds it causes paranoia. His explanation:

....cannabis itself has evolved into something unrecognisable – skunk, which is now the market leader, accounting for 81 per cent of the marijuana sold on British streets, compared with just 20 per cent in 2002. It's around three times stronger than normal cannabis thanks to higher levels of the compound THC, which causes the psychotic symptoms, and lower levels of another compound called cannabidiol, which experts think protects users from the effects of THC.

The cannabis that fuelled the hippie generation's quest for world peace has been contorted by market forces and cross-pollination into a nervous, twitching grotesque. The latest government stance on marijuana is to suggest that it be reclassified from a class C drug to a class B drug, based largely on the fact that skunk is now so prevalent.

Bizarrely, given my past, I am now inclined to agree with them. What I took bore no similarity to the dope I used to enjoy

This will annoy the drug de-criminalisation crowd.

Smart bird

Magpies are no bird-brains, mirror test shows | Science | Reuters

It seems that magpies understand mirrors:

Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, highlighting the mental skills of some birds and confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals.

It had been thought only chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror.

But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies -- a species with a brain structure very different from mammals -- could also identify themselves.

Not smart enough to leave harmless humans walking under their nest alone, though.

Come back next month

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China 'yet to approve protests'

China has received a total of 77 applications to stage protests during the Olympic Games period - but none has been approved.

Beijing's public security bureau said 74 applications were "withdrawn", two were "suspended" and one was "vetoed".

What a farce.

France's dirty secret

Supersize ... moi? How the French learnt to love McDonald's - Times Online

According to the article:

In 2007, as you may have read on our business pages, the chain's French revenues increased by 11 per cent to €3 billion (£2.3 billion). That's more than it generates in Britain. In terms of profit, France is second only to the US itself - and this in the land that first realised that food wasn't just about eating.

Apparently, it is due to some successful style makeover in the stores, which sound much the same as the process that has been undertaken in Australia in the last few years.

The Australian menu has recently become rather too chicken-heavy, if you ask me, and if I want a piece of deep fried chicken in a burger or a roll, KFC does it better.

The deli choice menu also has lost the "roast beef" item, which I quite liked.

But, I can still be convinced by some of their special burgers.

The Appleyard endorsed diet

The diet that really works - Times Online

It's all about low carbs, but not as much fat as Atkins. Maybe it's close to that CSIRO diet book that was a recent hit?

Not sure how I would feel eating a lot more protein, especially at breakfast. But who knows...

Lunchtime education

SpecialtyFood.com

I had been wondering why "washed rind" cheeses have an orange rind. (There are a couple of brands commonly sold in Australian supermarkets now, and they are well worth trying if you like "stinkier" cheese. I like the King Island Dairy one; its flavour reminds me of the sea, for some reason.)

The answer is in the link above:

What distinguishes them from other types is that the cheesemaker actively encourages the surface growth of B. linens (Brevibacterium linens). This aggressive bacterium produces a thin, golden-orange rind—think Pont L’Evêque—and most of the beefy, garlicky, frankly “stinky” aromas that washed-rind cheese enthusiasts love.

I just finished eating a piece that was a couple of weeks past the "best by" date. I trust that B. linens cannot overpower my immune system and make me bright orange and dead.

Coming soon to SBS

The Weekend's TV: The Perfect Vagina, Sun, Channel - The Independent

Here's a review of a documentary about the increasingly common interest of women in having their genitalia surgically altered. It would seem some (most?) do it for the worst possible reasons:

A pretty 21-year-old called Rosie wanted to have some of her labia removed after being teased by her sister, who regularly makes derogatory comments about her vagina to Rosie's boyfriends. Rogers seemed to be having the same thoughts as any sane person: it's a new sister Rosie needs, not a new vagina. But Rosie was determined, so we watched in graphic close-up as a cosmetic surgeon performed the grisly operation, with the poor girl, under local anaesthetic, crying on the gurney. Rosie is by no means the youngest patient to have undergone such a procedure. One doctor that Rogers spoke to regularly operates on 16-year-old girls.

I have suggested before that a significant proportion of cosmetic surgeons need to be rounded up and sent to some modern form of Gulag until they promise to use their medical training for something useful. The idea still has appeal.

Seriously poor judgment

The life of John Edwards flame Rielle Hunter | Salon News

In case you hadn't heard, John Edwards' ex-lover Rielle Hunter is an extreme oddball with a very chequered past. If he actually had an affair with someone half sensible, maybe his political career could recover. But especially by getting involved with this woman, he's well and truly done for. Heading back to the law practice might be a good idea.

Odd medical news of the day

Red Bull drink lifts stroke risk: Australian study | Health | Reuters

Just one can of the popular stimulant energy drink Red Bull can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke, even in young people, Australian medical researchers said on Friday.

The caffeine-loaded beverage, popular with university students and adrenaline sport fans to give them "wings", caused the blood to become sticky, a pre-cursor to cardiovascular problems such as stroke.

"One hour after they drank Red Bull, (their blood systems) were no longer normal. They were abnormal like we would expect in a patient with cardiovascular disease," Scott Willoughby, lead researcher from the Cardiovascular Research Centre at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, told the Australian newspaper.

I wonder whose idea it was to undertake this study? Red Bull has responded by saying:

"The study does not show effects which would go beyond that of drinking a cup of coffee. Therefore, the reported results were to be expected and lie within the normal physiological range," Rychter told Reuters.

Further information needed, I think.

Indeed

The Bigfoot press conference and the art of selling a website - CNET News.com

This is a pretty funny take on the Bigfoot circus, and this part is indeed true:

Emblazoned with the URL bigfoottracker.com, a site devoted to their own Bigfoot tracking enterprise, (a site, incidentally, that declares that Bigfoot's DNA has been taken away for 'analization'), the baseball caps worn by Matthew Whitton (aka Gary Parker) and Rick Dyer said so very much.

If you follow the link, you will see that remains uncorrected.

An uninspired post

I'm having trouble finding anything particularly inspiring to post about, so I'll mention the following:

* for all of my reader in Osaka, there's a particularly good deal going on in the Hotel Nikko Osaka at their Beer Hall in the sky (well, the 32nd floor):

A dinner set (¥5,500) includes snacks, plates of assorted hot and cold dishes, a main dish, salad bar and bread, and unlimited drinks for 100 minutes. Customers may choose from draft beer, wine, whiskey, sake, shochu, cocktails and soft drinks.

Mind you, caution should be advised for any function which provides unlimited cocktails available for 100 minutes. Could be some spectacular results on the carpet.

* I'm nearly finished Clive James' first volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. I see it was published in 1980, and have been half inclined to read it ever since then. (I often imagine heaven as being a place where you can spend the first thousand years catching up on all the reading you meant to get around to while on earth. The second thousand might be taken up with lessons on musical instruments. Then there may be a few hundred thousand years each of learning about and spectrally observing alien planets. But I digress.)

I had heard that James was very open about his childhood sexual development in this book, but it still made me feel "way too much information" too often. At least such disclosures do something to give a clearer picture of sexual activity of youth in history. I mean, it is easy to get the impression that childhood/early teenage sex only got really going in a big way since the 1960's, but memoirs like James are a strong corrective to that idea.

Anyhow, I found the book does truly become 'laugh out loud" funny when he gets to his university years, and the chapter about his brief stint of National Service was the best in the book.

* Bigfoot is 96% possum? This is probably the most stupidly run hoax in history

Hold on to your kidneys, Ji

Al Jazeera English - BEIJING 08 - Olympic protest zones lie empty

This is all pretty much a PR disaster for the Chinese, these Olympics. From the above report:

So far there have been no reports of any legal protest in the zones, with those applying uniformly rejected or detained.

Ji Sizun, 55, a self-described grassroots legal activist from Fujian province, appears to be the latest casualty of this system.

He told Al Jazeera on Saturday that he had submitted his protest that day to the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (PSB).

He said he wanted to demonstrate on behalf of the petitioners who come to Beijing as a last resort to resolve cases of alleged injustice in their home provinces....

He was told to come back Monday, but by Monday afternoon Ji was unreachable.

His family in Fujian believes he has been detained and will be held until after the Olympics, a source said. They spoke with him briefly on Monday but he only managed to say "I have some problems," before the call was cut off.

Let's just hope he keeps his organs intact.

Which brings me to this story from ABC radio last week:

JENNIFER MACEY: Last year David Mr Matas and Canadian former secretary of state David Kilgour released a report investigating allegations of organ harvesting of Falun Gong members in China. Mr Matas concedes it's difficult to find proof of this practise as China won't release official statistics on executions or organ transplants

But he says he has new audio tapes of Chinese doctors admitting they have Falun Gong organs for sale.

DAVID MATAS: We had callers calling in to China pretending to be relatives of patients who needed organs and asking the hospital that they were calling for organs of Falun Gong practitioners on the basis that Falun Gong's an exercise regime that practitioners are healthy and their organs are healthy. And we got admissions on tape throughout China and we've got the transcripts in our report and we've got phone records and we got the tapes from pick up to hang down.

I think I have heard about these taped calls before, but the story is well worth repeating.

The problem is that Falun Gong is a weird cult-like phenomena, although it's not entirely clear why the China government sees it as such a threat. Still, being a cult, people tend to be sceptical about their claims. So any evidence such as that in the phone calls is important.

As I said before, it is a topic that seems to attract limited attention.

Here comes a bad movie

Hitler to get Pulp Fiction treatment in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards - Times Online

Can't someone tell Tarantino to just grow up?

Surely cheap pulp films were partly about compensating for lack of budget by being sensationalist in their content. But when you have access to large budgets, as does Tarantino, it's just juvenile to keep going on making this style of film.

Own your own dome

International Dome House

Go have a look at this Japanese company's website for (try saying this 3 times quickly) - foam domes for homes.

They make some odd claims - especially under the page "Housing for health". And the introductory video is, well, rather cheesy in a Japanese way.

Yet, when you look at the interiors of some of their examples, they don't look half bad, at least if you admire Japanese ingenuity in fitting a lot of stuff in tiny living spaces.

They look a lot like the sort of igloo dome moon homes I used to draw as a kid. Maybe that's why I want to live in one.

Justice system of India only too willing to help

Six students of Flytech Aviation held for ragging-The Times of India

It's been a while since I've noted an odd story from India, but here's a strange one:

Six senior students of Flytech Aviation Academy, Nadargul, were arrested by the Vanasthalipuram police on Wednesday in an alleged case of ragging...

According to police, the senior students called the juniors over to their place for an "interaction' on August 12. The students were asked to do frog jumps on the steps, measure the room with match sticks and also measure water in a tumbler using caps of a soft drink bottle. This continued from 2.30 pm to 6.30 pm. The juniors filed a complaint with the police. "Cases were booked under the AP Provision of Prevention of Ragging Act, 1997," Vanasthalipuram inspector Chandra Shekhar said.

They need the court system to deal with this? It must be fun being a parliamentary counsel (the lawyers who draft legislation) in India.

Pointless killings

3 aid workers, driver killed in ambush

Three female foreign aid workers, including two Canadians, were slain in a "senseless, heinous attack" by Taliban insurgents south of Kabul, a senior official of the aid agency said Wednesday....

The women and their Afghan driver died in a hail of bullets around 10:30 a.m. local time in a brazen attack in Logar province, southeast of Kabul. A second Afghan driver was critically wounded and remains in hospital. The province's deputy police chief, Abdul Majid Latifi, told Agence France-Presse that Taliban insurgents ambushed the two clearly marked vehicles that were carrying the workers on a 100-kilometre stretch of road between Gardez and Kabul.

He said the attackers broke the windows of the vehicles and then shot the workers at close range.

"There were signs of about 10 bullets on the vehicle but more bullets on the body of the victims. They were hit by dozens of bullets," he said. "We don't know yet how many men carried out the attack."

A person claiming to be a Taliban spokesman took credit for the attack, saying it was done in retaliation for the ongoing NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.

"We don't value their aid projects and we don't think they are working for the progress of our country," said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in telephone interview.

Quantum stuff

Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information transfer : Nature News

I'm not entirely sure that this experiment shows much that wasn't already believed by most scientists, but it seems to have done mainly to rule out some possible explanations. This paragraph at the end is of note:

The experiment shows that in quantum mechanics at least, some things transcend space-time, says Terence Rudolph, a theorist at Imperial College London. It also shows that humans have attached undue importance to the three dimensions of space and one of time we live in, he argues. “We think space and time are important because that’s the kind of monkeys we are.”

God is clearly a quantum mechanic, then.

Cool

US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability' - New Scientist Tech

From the article:

Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing (powerpoint format) on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June...

Corley and Kaiser did not respond to requests from New Scientist to expand on their comments. But John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear.

"The target would never know what hit them," says Pike. "Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike."

A laser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night.