The appendectomy in history (subtitle: now is a pretty good time to be alive)

Via Dr Beachcombing's site, this link discusses briefly the history of the appendectomy:

In 1735, Dr. Claudius Amyand performed the world’s first successful appendectomy, at St. George’s Hospital in London. The patient was an 11-year old boy whose appendix had become perforated by a pin he had swallowed. The first successful operation to treat acute appendicitis was performed soon after, in 1759 in Bordeaux.  General anesthesia was not available until 1846, so these operations required many assistants to restrain patients during what were undoubtedly very painful procedures.

Surgical treatment for appendicitis began in earnest during the 1880s. Although doctors struggled to decide who should undergo the knife – some patients would recover on their own without surgery – surgical technique and anesthesia had improved outcomes to such an extent that surgery would rapidly became the gold standard approach. By the end of the 20th century, laparoscopic surgery replaced open surgery in most cases, and laparoscopic appendectomy is now considered one of the safest, lowest-complication surgical procedures performed today.

I didn't know that it could often be successfully treated with antibiotics:

More recently, researchers are revisiting the question of whether antibiotics are just as effective as surgery for treatment for acute appendicitis. In the 1940s and 1950s, doctors in England began treating patients with antibiotics – with excellent results. During the Cold War, men on submarines received antibiotics instead of an appendectomy, as the submarines could not surface for six months or more, and patients reportedly did well with this approach.  And five recent European studies reported findings consistent with those anecdotes: 70% of patients recovered using antibiotics rather than surgery in these studies. In light of this evidence, a new study in California will attempt to verify whether antibiotics may be as good as surgery and offer a less invasive approach to the treatment of appendicitis.

 

Psychopaths considered

A somewhat interesting piece by Ed Yong on some recent research on psychopaths.  (The suggestion being that they can see things from other people's perspectives, if they try, but they don't do it automatically like your normal person.)

The details of the study described, though, does give another idea of the very airy fairy, "open to interpretation" nature of a lot of psychological testing.  (As I was complaining about recently when it comes to violence in gaming studies.)

A likely hit?

Spielberg's Ready Player One - a movie about which I have no particular expectations, given that I was never a gaming nerd - seems to have largely gone over well at its first nerd screening.  (Some  nerds, being nerds, weren't happy, but that was probably always on the cards.)

The PC problem that isn't that big a problem?

Matthew Yglesias argues, using survey results mainly, that the debate over US campus "PC versus free speech" issue is not exactly the crisis that conservatives and libertarians like to claim it is.

Good to see this position being put, as I suspect there is an element of truth to it.   (Even though, yes, it does seem stupid PC based on identity politics is having a significant revival, after quietening down for a while.)

And so it goes

The never ending back and forth about social disadvantage in remote aboriginal communities continues, with Warren Mundine, who now seems constantly in a state of flux between supporting relatively conservative views and relatively progressive views, writing that they do need economic involvement, not closure, and maintaining some sort of vague hope that economic activity can be created in them.

This seems rather pie in the sky to me.   Surely there have been previous attempts to get some communities to do their own maintenance, for example?   

There was another bit of political commentary by Noel Pearson last weekend, which seemed pretty balanced to me, and I must go find it and extract parts here...

Well, they do take their football seriously..

Look at what Russian media is suggesting about possible motives as to why Britain (yes, Britain) poisoned their Russian double agent in public:

Living high has its down side

High altitude living - even at pretty modest altitude - seems associated with more suicide:

High-altitude areas--particularly the US intermountain states--have increased rates of suicide and depression, suggests a review of research evidence in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

The increased suicide rates might be explained by blood oxygen levels due to low atmospheric pressure, according to the article by Brent Michael Kious, MD, PhD, of University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and colleagues. Pending further research, the evidence may point to possible treatments to reduce the effects of low blood oxygen on mood and suicidal thoughts....

They analyzed 12 studies, most performed in the United States, including population-based data on the relationship between suicide or depression and altitude. While the studies used varying methods, most reported that higher-altitude areas had increased rates of depression and suicide. In general, the correlation was stronger for suicide than for depression.

The highest suicide rates were clustered in the intermountain states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. (Alaska and Virginia also had high suicide rates.) In a 2014 study, the percentage of adults with "serious thoughts of suicide" ranged from 3.3 percent in Connecticut (average altitude 490 feet) to 4.9 percent in Utah (average altitude 6,100 feet).

Other key findings from previous research on altitude and suicide included:

• Populations living at higher altitudes had increased suicide rates despite having decreased rates of death from all causes. Rather than a steady increase, the studies suggested a "threshold effect": suicide rates increased dramatically at altitudes between about 2,000 and 3,000 feet.
• Suicide rates were more strongly associated with altitude than with firearm ownership. Other factors linked to suicide rate included increased poverty rate, lower income, and smaller population ratios of white and divorced women. However, the studies could not account for all factors potentially affecting variations in suicide, such as substance abuse rates and cultural differences.
• While more than 80 percent of US suicides occur in low-altitude areas, that's because most of the population lives near sea level. Adjusted for population distribution, suicide rates per 100,000 population were 17.7 at high altitude, 11.9 at middle altitude, and 4.8 at low altitude. Studies from some other countries, but not all, also reported increased suicide rates at higher altitudes.

 I find this quite surprising.

More UFO talk at the Washington Post

Surprisingly, the Washington Post has another opinion piece by the guy who sounds to have come from a credible background, but who is now associated with what sounds like a dubiously motivated, money raising project:

Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He is a private equity investor and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science.

Interestingly, though, the piece contains (what I think is) a new video of what looks like a small, fact moving UFO over the ocean being tracked from an aircraft.  The pilots sounds excited, but don't seem to be making comments that indicate they are worried by what they see.

Mellon claims that different parts of the military have different bits of UFO evidence, but there's not overarching attempt to work out if they are seeing new, earth based technology, or something extraterrestrial in origin: 

I served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and as staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I know from numerous discussions with Pentagon officials over the past two years that military departments and agencies treat such incidents as isolated events rather than as part of a pattern requiring serious attention and investigation. A colleague of mine at To the Stars Academy, Luis Elizondo, used to run a Pentagon intelligence program that examined evidence of “anomalous” aircraft, but he resigned last fall to protest government inattention to the growing body of empirical data.

Meanwhile, reports from different services and agencies remain largely ignored and unevaluated inside their respective bureaucratic stovepipes. There is no Pentagon process for synthesizing all the observations the military is making. The current approach is equivalent to having the Army conduct a submarine search without the Navy. It is also reminiscent of the counterterrorism efforts of the CIA and the FBI before Sept. 11, 2001, when each had information on the hijackers that they kept to themselves. In this instance, the truth may ultimately prove benign, but why leave it to chance?

It seems to me, from the audio on these recently released videos, that the pilots are assuming something high tech from Earth, but I could be wrong.

Mellon links to an interview done with that "Academy" with the retired Navy pilot who appeared on some media recently.   I don't like the way there are occasional edits, but he certainly sounds sincere, and his description of what happened is very hard to explain as a mis-identification:



Mellon also makes mention of Putin's recent surprising claims of Russian developments which might be relevent: 

Putin’s speech, less than three weeks before the Russian presidential election, represented an escalated level of martial rhetoric even by his pugnacious standards. For the first time, Putin claimed that Russia had successfully tested nuclear-propulsion engines that would allow nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and underwater drones to travel for virtually unlimited distances and evade traditional defenses.

 I find it hard to believe that Russia could keep such propulsion technology a secret for so long;  but then again, they are good at ensuring that potential spies know they'll be targeted no mater where they might try to live.

It's all very puzzling...

The socialist capitalism of Singapore

Found via a Peter Whiteford re-tweet:   an article explaining another way (the first, which I have noted before, is their health system) in which Singapore is hardly the shining example of a free market capitalist dream state that some American, "less government is always best", Right wing think tanks seem to think it is:

 In the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Singapore ranks as the second most “economically free” country in the world just behind Hong Kong. Since many use this index as a shorthand for “most capitalist” countries, a lot of prominent people end up saying some really weird things about Singapore. For instance, in his Liberty Con remarks, Bryan Caplan claimed Singapore was one of the closest countries to the capitalist ideal.

It is true of course that Singapore has a market economy. But it’s also true that, in Singapore, the state owns a huge amount of the means of production. In fact, depending on how you count it, the Singaporean government probably owns more capital than any other developed country in the world after Norway.

The Singaporean state owns 90 percent of the country’s land. Remarkably, this level of ownership was not present from the beginning. In 1949, the state owned just 31 percent of the country’s land. It got up to 90 percent land ownership through decades of forced sales, or what people in the US call eminent domain.

The Singaporean state does not merely own the land. They directly develop it, especially for residential purposes. Over 80 percent of Singapore’s population lives in housing constructed by the country’s public housing agency HDB. The Singaporean government claims that around 90 percent of people living in HDB units “own” their home. But the way it really works is that, when a new HDB unit is built, the government sells a transferable 99-year lease for it. The value of that lease slowly declines as it approaches the 99-year mark, after which point the lease expires and possession of the HDB unit reverts back to the state. Thus, Singapore is a land where almost everyone is a long-term public housing tenant.

There are more paragraphs at the link that provide more details, then this point:

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t generally associate state ownership of the means of production with capitalism. One way to see whether libertarians or conservatives actually think Singapore’s system is uber-capitalistic is to imagine how they would respond to someone who ran a campaign in the US aimed at bringing the country up to the Singaporean ideal.

What is it, exactly, that causes people like Caplan not to be able to acknowledge that the country has been very successful under a wildly different system from what they think is the best for the US and every other country under the sun?   

The culture war Right in search of a hero

This whole Jordan Peterson thing - it's one of those odd situations where I have the feeling that I should be more sympathetic to his philosophical approach to life, having shared some of his general Jungian interest in what mythology, religion and philosophy has been trying to get at over millennia, but I just can't muster the enthusiasm, and suspect there is less to him than meets the eye.

You can read here (out from behind The Australian's paywall) what fan girl Caroline Overington  says about his talk this week in Melbourne.   (Yes, a rare occasion where that blog's threads serve a useful purpose.)  There are certainly signs of crank eccentricity in there regarding diet, which I hadn't heard about before.  As for his long term bouts with depression - it raises some concern about his judgement, although if it is well managed, I know it shouldn't.

He certainly got lucky with that ridiculous BBC interviewer.   It seems to have doubled or tripled his fame overnight. A good profile of his sometimes rather murky or semi contradictory beliefs is in  this recent New Yorker review of his "rules for life" book, although it doesn't add that much to a previous profile of him I had read, which I can't find again at the moment.     

Perhaps I would feel less cynical about it were it not for the disproportionate enthusiasm disgruntled conservatives and Right wing culture warrior types have for him.   It seems to me that they are looking for a hero, and not finding one in the current somewhat charred reputation of the major Churches (which are either too dogmatic or too "social justice" for them, and caught in their own slow moving crisis of understanding the modern world), they have latched onto Peterson as a de facto leader.  I don't really want to use the meme in response, but I have to:  "Sad!"

Signs of decline

Seriously, these statements of Paul Keating about Trump and foreign policy make no sense whatsoever:

Mr Keating on Friday said he had not expected Mr Trump to have "such a pragmatic" foreign policy on China and Russia, and he urged the President to continue down the path he was on.

Um, can Keating tell us what path Trump is on?   Especially when Keating goes on to say:

Mr Keating argued the US should be a "balancing power" in Asia and learn to relinquish some control of the region.Mr Trump's strategy of using partnership diplomacy with China was a better approach than what Democrat Hillary Clinton would have adopted if elected, he added.

What the heck gives Keating the impression that this is the path that Trump is trying with China??

My old rule of thumb - it's unfortunate but true:  virtually everyone reaches an age by which their analytical judgement can start to safely be ignored.   Seems that 74 is about that for Paul.   (Bit younger than average, but it's in the ball park.)

Useless violence studies

I made mention in a recent post how people who defend high level, realistic looking violence in video games having no skepticism at all of psychological studies that claim "no connection with violent behaviour".

Here's a good example:  a website reporting on Trump meeting with video game industry people says:

A recent York University study backs up the ESA’s claim, finding no evidence of a link between violent video games and violent behavior.

When you go to the linked report on the study, this is what they did:

The dominant model of learning in games is built on the idea that exposing players to concepts, such as violence in a game, makes those concepts easier to use in 'real life'.

This is known as 'priming', and is thought to lead to changes in behaviour. Previous experiments on this effect, however, have so far provided mixed conclusions.

Researchers at the University of York expanded the number of participants in experiments, compared to studies that had gone before it, and compared different types of gaming realism to explore whether more conclusive evidence could be found.

In one study, participants played a game where they had to either be a car avoiding collisions with trucks or a mouse avoiding being caught by a cat. Following the game, the players were shown various images, such as a bus or a dog, and asked to label them as either a vehicle or an animal.

Dr David Zendle, from the University's Department of Computer Science, said: "If players are 'primed' through immersing themselves in the concepts of the game, they should be able to categorise the objects associated with this game more quickly in the real world once the game had concluded.

Um, yeah.  Tells me a lot about freaking realistic gun violence in video games.

OK, maybe another study did more:

In a separate, but connected study, the team investigated whether realism influenced the aggression of game players. Research in the past has suggested that the greater the realism of the game the more primed players are by violent concepts, leading to antisocial effects in the real world.

Dr Zendle said: "There are several experiments looking at graphic realism in video games, but they have returned mixed results. There are, however, other ways that violent games can be realistic, besides looking like the 'real world', such as the way characters behave for example.

"Our experiment looked at the use of 'ragdoll physics' in game design, which creates characters that move and react in the same way that they would in real life. Human characters are modelled on the movement of the human skeleton and how that skeleton would fall if it was injured."

The experiment compared player reactions to two combat games, one that used 'ragdoll physics' to create realistic character behaviour and one that did not, in an animated world that nevertheless looked real.

Following the game the players were asked to complete word puzzles called 'word fragment completion tasks', where researchers expected more violent word associations would be chosen for those who played the game that employed more realistic behaviours.

Oh come on.

Look, common sense tells us that this is going to be hard to study.  Not many people in the world are of a mind set, or have the weaponry available, to replicate in real life an ultra violent scenario in a video game.    (I suppose they could ask to do studies with criminals already in prison for violent crimes - has anyone actually done that?)

Common sense also tells me that these sort of studies as described above are highly unlikely to tell us anything about the worst possible influence with these games.  Because no, I am not worried that they turn a relatively normal person into a willing mass murderer.  But that's not what I'm interested in. 

So how about some skepticism about what these airy fairy studies about "priming" can actually tell us?

Here's what annoys me - video games can be made to be exciting without the highly realistic and bloody depiction of killing people (or for that matter, aliens or animals.)    To my mind, repeated depictions of sadistic and graphic violence is just obviously morally dubious - sadism should not be not something for which people should be encouraged to get a participatory thrill.   I don't need a freaking psychological study to tell me that - just as I don't need a psychological study to tell me that a porn video of some guy having sex with an underage girl (even if with her full consent) is wrong.  Or put it this way - it should not be made, regardless of whether you can prove that, on balance, it might mean less pre-teen sex by adults because they masturbated over the video, rather than encourage men to seek out underage sex.   (And I would say the same even if it was a question of a computer generated video of underage sex.)

If game makers were moral, and serious, they could still make exciting games that do not raise legitimate concerns over the deadening effect on some deadbeat's qualms about actually doing a mass shoot up, of the kind he has probably rehearsed on a video game scores of times.

But they don't.  Because they can show gross and graphic head explosions with bullets, they do it - looking for violent novelty all the time.

This is not a good thing.  It is, in fact, a bad thing.

The Entertainer, part 4 (or 5, whatever)

Look, I'm not going to bother copying any of this rather unhinged comment by my "favourite" nutcase in need of medication at Catallaxy, but if you enjoy theories of how the forces of global socialism are encouraging free porn on the internet and thereby low sperm counts by too much masturbation, all as part of the plan to kill off the righteous "Western male," knock yourself out...

Nunberg explained

Yes, the Stephen Colbert explanation of Sam Nunberg's wild (drunk? drug affected?) afternoon of media appearances was pretty funny:

They like tough men so much, they enjoy being bullied

The way the Trump tariff process has been announced sounds to me very much like behaviour that in schools or the workplace would be called bullying.

"Look, I like some of you, and I might exempt you from my new policy of delivering 25% of your lunch money to me everyday, as long as you to come to me and offer me something in return and/or tell me how great I am."

Yet what's the bet that the wingnutty world in Australia (hello, Kates and followers) will call it a brilliant bit of negotiation?   Almost guaranteed.   Because they like what they think is "alpha" tough guys so much they actually enjoy being bullied by them.

Update:  this article in the Washington Post earlier this week referred to Trump's tactics as bullying, and made the point that he's going completely the wrong way if the intention is to get at China.  As for Gorka's claims - yes, they are ridiculous.

But Trump's base is so dumb, they just have to hear a Trump lackey say "our opponents disagree with us because they are socialists" and they swallow it as true.   That's how basing all your ideas on a belief in a fundamental culture war works.  Any Republican - and there are many in this sordid bunch - who continually calls a different policy to theirs "socialism" is an idiot hurting America.

Update 2:  this was written prior to the actual announcement, but is still valid:

Trump’s tweets put the governments of Canada and Mexico in an awkward position. Before tariffs were an issue, all three countries could at least pretend they were trying to negotiate some sort of win-win compromise. Now, if our neighbors make consolations on NAFTA, it will look as if they are caving to Washington’s bullying tactics, which will almost certainly play poorly with voters back home. Maybe that’s Trump’s intention; perhaps he is trying to throw yet another wrench into the NAFTA-bargaining process in order to finally kill the pact. Or perhaps he’s thinking just the opposite; it’s possible he’s worried that the tariffs aren’t playing well enough with the public and hopes that tying them to an inevitable deal with Canada and Mexico will give him an excuse to drop the whole ill-conceived lark while still claiming victory. You can only guess with Trump. But by ostensibly resorting to blackmail, the president may be making it politically harder, not easier, to strike an accord. 

The president’s loose thumbs aren’t doing the administration any legal favors, either. Trump plans to impose the new tariffs under a law—Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act—that gives him broad powers over trade specifically in order to protect national security. As part of that process, the Commerce Department has produced two elaborate reports arguing that the steel and aluminum industries need to be protected for the sake of American safety and well-being. But by telling Canada that it might be able to get rid of the tariffs by letting U.S. dairy farmers sell more milk in Toronto, Trump is making a mockery of that carefully wrought legal fiction. After all, if the health of the steel and aluminum industries were actually essential to U.S. security interests, the president probably wouldn’t be willing to barter them for butter sales.

A confession

When I first read the headlines yesterday about McDonalds in the US flipping its symbol upside down for International Women's Day, I thought "What?  To make it look like a pair of breasts?  Kinda controversial, no?"    Only today did I realise it was to make it into a "W" for women.

True, if embarrassing...

A culinary observation

Duck fried rice is particularly delicious.   The greater depth of flavour of duck meat makes it considerably tastier and satisfying than chicken fried rice.

You may return to your duties...

More history: railway surgeons

The article is a couple of years old, but Beachcomber recently linked to it.   I didn't know that the advent of the railways, and the injuries railway workers suffered, led to the speciality of the railway surgeon:

For rail workers and passengers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, train travel — while miraculous for the speed with which it carried people across vast distances — presented ghastly dangers. Brakemen commonly lost hands and fingers in the hazardous coupling of cars. Exploding boilers released high-pressure steam that scalded stokers. Passengers were maimed or crushed when trains jumped the tracks, or telescoped into tangles of wreckage. And in the hours they spent aboard, travelers and workers suffered heart attacks, strokes, seizures, all the health hazards of daily life, but far from their family doctor — or sometimes any doctor. One in every 28 railroad employees was injured on the job in 1900 — and 1 in 399 died.

These grim statistics helped spark the development of a new medical specialty during the Victorian Era: railway surgery. Physicians in this field focused on the injuries and maladies specific to workers and passengers. Eventually, railroad companies would open hospitals close to the tracks in remote locales otherwise without medical facilities. Professional organizations arose that furthered railway-related medical knowledge and investigated new avenues of preventive medicine. And within a century, railway surgery met its own untimely end — but its influence continues today....

... at their peak, about 35 railway hospitals had opened in the U.S. These included the Southern Pacific’s 450-bed hospital in San Francisco, the second medical facility in the country to operate an intensive care unit — a specialized approach to treatment much needed by maimed railroaders. Other rail systems contributed to existing hospitals on their routes, or set up mutual benefit associations for workers that covered the treatment of injuries. This was long before other industries considered providing health care services to employees.

So expansive were these railway medical systems that in 1896, just one railroad, the Missouri Pacific, treated more than 29,000 patients in its medical system and clinics, comparable to major metropolitan hospitals. “The direct descendants are employer-based insurance and employer-based health care,” says Stanton. “A lot of the larger corporations still do that. They have a medical center and a medical staff inside the factory that does the initial evaluation before getting patients out to the emergency room or hospital. What’s come out of railway surgery is our current employee-based occupational health system.”

Lawrence's problem

The allegations of sexual creepiness against Lawrence Krauss seem to be having some bite:

More Organizations Cut Ties With Physicist Lawrence Krauss

I have to say, I have never been enamoured of the manner of Krauss in his television appearances.  And to be perfectly honest, there is something about his face and head that has always struck me as remarkably unattractive or unappealing.   (Yes, he can't help that, but it does make it all the more remarkable if he thinks he's in with a chance with women.) 

I find his physical unattractiveness so obvious that I sometimes try to pin down what it is exactly about his features that is so off putting:  pretty much in the same, but opposite, way you sometimes read about scientists analysing what makes certain faces very appealing to other people.

Yeah, sorry Lawrence: God still loves you, anyway...

In other Netflix news

Oh - a new version (with a pretty decent budget, by the looks) of Lost In Space is coming in April.

Seems it will be worth checking out.