Bad HIV news

HIV becoming resistant to key drug, study finds - BBC News

Splitting the sample size roughly into two groups the study found that in Africa 60% of patients were resistant to Tenofovir, whereas in Europe the figure was only 20%.

The paper, which has been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal,
said poor administration of the drug, in terms of regularly taking the right levels of Tenofovir could be explanation for the discrepancy.

"If the right levels of the drug are not taken, as in they are too low or not regularly maintained, the virus can overcome the drug and become resistant," Dr Gupta told the BBC News website.

"Tenofovir is a critical part of our armamentarium against HIV, so it is extremely concerning to see such a high level of resistance to this drug," he added.

The paper also suggested that Tenofovir-resistant strains of HIV could be passed on from person to person.

"We certainly cannot dismiss the possibility that resistant strains can spread between people and should not be complacent. We are now conducting further studies to get a more detailed picture of how Tenofovir-resistant viruses develop and spread," Dr Gupta said.

So that's what a physics professor's whiteboard looks like?

Bringing time and space together for universal symmetry

Go on:  have a read of the article, but also look at the whiteboard.  

The lonely professor

Was it mere co-incidence that the day after there were several news reports about the record low rate of smoking amongst Australian youth (something that the stories noted might be at least partially attributed to plain packaging - but the claims was cautiously made) that Sinclair Davidson posted a long critique of another paper that looked at whether plain packaging was making adults more likely to quit.

For those who could even bother following the highly technical argument, the bottom line is that the evidence from the study isn't that overwhelming.   M'eh.

Seems a bit beside the point, when before its introduction, I believe the main hoped for effect of plain packaging was to be to discourage young people taking up the habit, and the study wasn't even looking at that.  The survey evidence which did get publicity does indicate that it may be having that effect.  

So the Professor's attempts to deride plain packaging as possibly being effective are being seen, even by some who comment at his blog, as rather obsessive (and, I would add, desperate).  As someone in comments said:

Sinc: wish you would drop this embarrassing obsession

Every time I see Simon Chapman on the TV talking up dropping smoking rates, I imagine a blood pressure spike happening in a certain office at RMIT.  And then a scurry to look at some anti tobacco research or other to see what pointless nitpicking can be made of it.

Update:  if you want to read (or at least glance at) evidence for a truly obsessive personality disorder, you need only read the extremely lengthy comments that commenter "Some History" comes up with at every single post where the Prof whines about plain packaging not being proved to be effective.  

Update 2:  Oh!  A new post by SD  seems to be correct in saying that the paper discussed in the news (linked above) may have mis-spoke when saying that youth smoking was at "record lows".   Although, truth be told, how much weight one should put on the difference between 2.5 and 3.2% in voluntary responses on surveys by teenagers is debatable.

Still, as usual, the overall picture remains a matter of not seeing the wood for the trees.  Just like with climate change.

Mosquito borne diseases and climate change

While it seems that a feared expansion of malaria due to a warming climate hasn't happened (and the reasons why are a matter of much debate), there is renewed concern with the zika virus outbreak that other mosquito borne diseases are spreading faster because of the increased range (and life span?) of mosquitoes.  As explained in this Vox article, there are pretty good reasons to suspect a warming, wetter climate is already playing a role:

The spread of Zika is part of an unnerving trend: Several mosquito-borne tropical illnesses have lately been spreading into regions of the world that have never experienced them.

A viral disease called chikungunya — which had never appeared in the Western Hemisphere until 2013 — has lately affected Central and South America, even making an appearance in Florida last year. (Its name comes from the Makonde language of Tanzania, where it was discovered in 1952; it means "that which bends up," referring to the contorted physique of a person afflicted by the virus.)

Dengue fever, known as "breakbone fever," has also seen new outbreaks in Puerto Rico, Florida, Gulf Coast states, and Hawaii — all places that hadn't usually been affected. In 2015, Brazil reported nearly 1.6 million dengue cases, a big increase from 569,000 in 2014.

Zika, dengue, and chikungunya are all spread by a species of mosquito called Aedes (in particular the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes). For reasons researchers don't understand, these mosquitoes have been more effective at bringing diseases to new places lately, affecting fresh populations that don't yet have the antibodies to fight off the viruses.

Heidi Brown, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Arizona, explained there are at least three factors that help these illnesses spread: the number of mosquitoes out there, the number that are biting humans infected with the virus, and the number that are surviving long enough to infect other humans.

"The survival of the mosquito is driven a lot by temperature," she added. Mosquitoes thrive in warm and moist environments. "So people go to the idea of global warming — that climate change and changes in precipitation patterns and temperature are helping mosquitoes survive in different areas." In other words, warming is helping expand the range of places that are habitable to mosquitoes.

There are other factors that may be driving the trend, too: People are traveling more than ever, bringing diseases to new locales. More and more people live in crowded cities, where it's easy for viruses to jump from person to person and for mosquitoes to find large concentrations of humans to feast on.

Eye maintenance is more complicated that I thought

BBC - Future - Why do we get sleep in our eyes?

I didn't know this:

It all begins with tears – or more precisely the tear film that coats our eyes. Mammalian eyes of the terrestrial variety, whether they're found on the faces of humans, dogs, hedgehogs, or elephants, are coated in a three-layered tear film that allows the eyes to function properly.
(Tears work somewhat differently in marine mammals like dolphins and sea lions.)

Closest to the eye is the glycocalyx layer – a layer made mostly of mucus. It coats the cornea and attracts water, which allows for the even distribution of the second layer: the water-based tear solution. It might be just four micrometres thick – about as thick as a single strand of spider silk – but this layer is very important. It keeps our eyes lubricated and washes away potential infections. Finally, there is an outer layer composed of an oily substance called meibum, which is composed of lipids like fatty acids and cholesterol.

Meibum has evolved to be exquisitely tuned to the mammalian body. At normal human body temperature, it is a clear oily fluid. At just one degree cooler, though, it becomes a white, waxy solid – the familiar eye gunk.

Large flakes of this solid can form during sleep for a couple of reasons. First, the body cools down a bit at night in general, so some of the meibum becomes cool enough that it moves below the melting point and turns solid. Second, according to Australian ophthalmologist Robert G. Linton and colleagues, "sleep relaxes the [muscular] action on the [meibomian] gland
ducts…[which] is sufficient to cause far in excess of the normal to exude onto the lids and eyelash roots during sleep". In other words, our eyes are coated with more meibum than usual at night – and so when that meibum cools we can end up with appreciable amounts of eye gunk.

Media notes

*   ABC has been running the BBC quiz show Pointless before the 7pm news; hence I sometimes catch the last 5 or 10 minutes of it.

I assume there are people who will disagree, but I think it's the most stupendously stupid quiz show idea ever conceived, and it's as boring as hell too.   Could the host possibly be any duller?

*  Vox has a lengthy piece on the woeful prospect of Hollywood being stuck for the next 20 years in "expanded movie universes".  The worst news in the article: 

The Transformers films, for example, are no longer being treated as a single series but as a larger world to explore.

Last summer, Paramount hired a gaggle of writers to spend a few weeks brainstorming ideas to broaden the series, an effort that apparently produced at least nine different movie ideas — and producers have said that five of those ideas look viable.

*  To my surprise (as I didn't care much for the second one), Kung Fu Panda 3 is actually getting good reviews.   It may be maintaining its popularity better than Shrek.  

Depressed about physics

The problem that some physicists warned about - what if the Large Hadron Collider finds Higgs, but nothing else very interesting - seems in danger of becoming a reality; and given that there's a more widespread acknowledgement than ever that string theory is an untestable waste of time (well, this is my impression, anyway), it seems that the physics community has fallen into a bit of a depression recently.

Here are a few pieces to back this up:

a.  John Horgan wrote a great piece this month "How Physics Lost its Fizz", and his explanation of why he (used to) find physics so fascinating mirrors a lot of my own interests.    But whether it deserves this full amount of pessimism still seems a bit unclear to me - the problem being that you never know what is just around the corner in both theory and experiment, although it certainly seems true that the era of building ever larger particle colliders is over. 

b.  Starts with a Bang notes that early inflation of the universe sets a natural limit on how far back you can see, as explained in the post "Physicists Must Accept That Some Things are Unknowable".   Not a new idea, perhaps, but good to be reminded.   (And by the way - I really don't quite understand the way inflation is so widely accepted when, at the same time, as far as I know, there is no clear understanding of what caused it.  It has always seemed to me to have more than a touch of the Deus ex machina about it.)

c.  You can also watch a Downfall parody video with a difference:  Hitler doesn't get a postdoc in High Energy Theory.  Somewhat amusing, and realistic, apparently.

Against against the stimulus

Idiotic Anti-Stimulus Talking Point Won’t Die -- NYMag

Heh.  Jonathan Chait writes of the chart that I am sure I have seen at Catallaxy (I think posted by S Davidson himself?):

As I noted before, we can’t prove that the stimulus reduced unemployment because we can’t
measure exactly what unemployment would have looked like otherwise. But the talking point that the stimulus failed because unemployment exceeded the forecasted level is not a serious argument. No reasonably informed person could take it seriously. And yet this blunt and easily refuted bit of propaganda continues to circulate seven years later within the airless bubble of the conservative echo chamber.

Why so many awards?

I'm honestly interested in the question "how many Australians understand our awards system in any detail?", because unless I'm doing some unfair extrapolation from my own ignorance, I would say that there are very, very few.   (And most of those being "establishment" types who have been around a while and keep an eye on which of their colleagues have got a gong when they haven't yet.  In fact, it may only be those Australians who have a clue about the difference between an AO, AM and an OAM.)

And looking at the list of award recipients this year:   aren't we starting to run out of people worth congratulating when there are so many each year?   Patsy Biscoe may have done a lot for the community of the Barossa, and I know nothing of the charitable efforts of Liza Wilkinson, but this type of work is its own reward, surely?

And, of course, how can I overlook the award given to "Groucho" Henry Ergas?   Here's what he wrote in a piece kept at the IPA website since 2009:

The myth is that evidence-based policy is good policy: nothing could be further from the truth. The value of public policy does not depend on whether it rests on evidence, but on whether it seeks goals that are worth pursuing.

Well, talk about your succinct summary of all that gone wrong in Right wing politics and policy over the last decade or so, particularly in the US! 

To be fair to Ergas, even though he doesn't deserve it because those lines are such a poor explanation of what he is trying to say, his article is actually arguing more that statistics and "evidence" is malleable, depending on the end result desired.   In the article, he later clarifies his position to:

Evidence is perhaps a necessary condition for sound policy, but it is far from being sufficient. 

"Perhaps"!   How generous of him to allow evidence to reach the heights of "perhaps" being important to policy.

And, strangely, the citation in the SMH says he is getting his OA partly for distinguished service to "higher education".   Yet in 2014 he wrote a column in The Australian that complained:

That is not to deride our institutions of higher learning. But a stroll down the corridors of even highly rated universities would shock the most hardened of ­troopers. Entire buildings seem to have been struck by specially ­developed neutron bombs: the structures are intact, but the ­academics are nowhere to be seen.

What teachers there are tend to be tutors, all too often foreign postgraduates struggling with the ­mysteries of the English language, and part-timers on short-term contracts.

No doubt many academics take their vocation seriously, but they are swamped by those too intellectually feeble to get employment elsewhere, too satisfied ever to leave and too young to retire.

This prompted actual teaching academic Harry Clarke to write:

Your views on inactivity in the universities are just wrong and outdated. Education and teaching are central priorities and have been for several decades. But that is just my claim just as your views are a claim. You provide no evidence to justify your impressions.  Why do Australian universities do so well in international rankings if they are so poor? Why do we attract so many international students? Is this  export success story based on wrong information? Your judgement about academics being intellectually feeble likewise reflects pure prejudice partly because many of them don’t take you very seriously. Most academics regard your politics (and your propensity to dominate verbal exchanges with long rambling monologues) with well-deserved disgust.  You are wrong about professors regarding teaching undergraduates as only a burden.  It is simply untrue – good researchers are invariably good teachers since the two things go together.

Now, I don't know much about Ergas' contribution to infrastructure economics, and (to my surprise) economics journalist Peter Martin seems to think Ergas is a worthy recipient, but I'm pretty convinced that his getting this award makes for a great case that the country is giving out too many. 

Short version: "With low expectations, you'll probably enjoy it"

TV Review: Mulder and Scully Return in a New 'X-Files,' Conspiracy Theories Abound - The Atlantic

And you thought the Freemasons were bad

Australian politics is pretty boring at the moment:   Malcolm Turnbull would easily win the election if only he could continue doing nothing before it has to be called.   Just like the Queensland Premiership, where Annastacia Palaszczuk maintains popularity by simply keeping a pretty low profile, the non-scary leaders who get to follow those who do scare the public have a pretty easy run for quite a while.   

Of course, there is the bizarre spectacle of Kevin Rudd thinking he would be good for the United Nations - but surely that is more of a matter of entertainment than a serious possibility.   Why would Julie Bishop say the government would even consider it, though?   (Kevin doesn't look all that well to me in recent photos I've noticed, too, although they might be old file ones I suppose.)

So without politics to worry about at the moment, I wandered over to Arts & Letters Daily, to read a scathing review of book about Augustine.    It's lengthy, but this episode is noteworthy for its insight into ancient rumour mill:

The story begins when Augustine, as a Manichee, may have heard (must have heard according Lane Fox) an anti-Manichaean slander that the cult’s Elect, at their secret meals, had sex on top of flour spread on the floor. Their joint juices were spilled on the flour, and the male like some unknown Onan spilled his seed upon the ground, making the flour a carrier of the particles of light from the Elect, as the members of the Manichee sect were called. Bread was then made of the flour for the Elect to consume. Like most attacks of bigotry, this slur was illogical. What good would it do for the Elect to recycle light out into bread and then back into the source of the light in the first place? There is no way to know how widely this crude attack was known to people, much less to know how many credited its nonsense. 

 Erk.  

Down the black hole to a new universe

An abstract on arXiv:

 We investigate the effect of a black hole as a nucleation cite of a false vacuum bubble based on the Euclidean actions of relevant configurations. As a result we find a wormhole-like configuration may be spontaneously nucleated once the black hole mass falls below a critical value of order of the Hubble parameter corresponding to the false vacuum energy density. As the space beyond the wormhole throat can expand exponentially, this may be interpreted as creation of another inflationary universe in the final stage of the black hole evaporation.

I'm pretty sure I saw another paper making the same argument on arXiv last month, but I forgot to note it.  (I think Sabine H saw it too.)   Should try to find it...

Maybe this will help...

OK, if you don't understand, listen to this.

(It appears Nesmith has required all YouTube's of Elephant Parts to be taken down from YouTube, which is fair enough I guess.)

How good a debater is Cruz? (A short, funny Colbert piece)

Surely even Republicans would find this funny:



And while you are on the Colbert channel, you may as well look at this clip just to see how extraordinarily similar Colin Hanks talks, looks, and acts like his father Tom.   As many people say in comments after, it's almost spooky.

Ross Douthat confesses

My Sarah Palin Romance - The New York Times

It was, however, a very brief romance.

And look, if one looks back at this very blog (no, I'm not going to help you find it), one will see that I too thought that her very first appearance on the national stage showed an impressive and natural confidence that might work well.   But then, as Douthat says, she had to talk national policy to the media, and it all fell apart.

So I actually have a bit of sympathy here for Ross.   But I still don't think he knows the way forward for the Republicans.   No one on the Right has a proper grip on what has happened to the American Right, if you ask me.

The Gaia bottleneck?

The aliens are silent because they're dead

Interesting idea, I guess...

Don't worry, Catallaxy, we already know you don't "do" science

That’s a silly number | Catallaxy Files

Being ideologically dedicated to as tiny a government as possible because - well, just because! - the economists of Catallaxy don't like the idea of government funding science.   Which is consistent with the blog being deeply devoted to climate change denial.

The blog would be better served by just not discussing science at all.  Crank economics is enough of a burden, let alone taking on crank science.

Trend change discussed

Changes | Open Mind

Tamino notes that, for most climate change indicators, it's not yet clear whether the trend rates are changing (that is, accelerating.)  But, of course, the actual current trends are worrying enough.

Furry empathy, re-visited

Consoling Voles Hint at Animal Empathy - The Atlantic

I like research into niceness, but I see that people were doubting that rats saving other rats were displaying empathy.  But perhaps this study into prairie voles makes a stronger case.  (I'm still generous in my interpretation of the rat study, too.)

Seems a significant graph

Just noticed on twitter: