Author: Aaron Weber

And All the Scientists are Above Average

Andrea Lafferty, of the Traditional Values Coalition, says, “There’s an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American.” Perhaps that’s because scientists are are educated and knowledgeable enough that “knowing more than the average American” is actually their job, just like “being better at fixing cars than the average American” is how an auto mechanic gets paid to fix cars by average people who respect that expertise. The fact is that if Andera Lafferty actually represents the average American citizen, then America is a nation so mired in barbarous superstition that it opposes the very concepts of science, research, and the advancement of knowledge.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

I had some of the A-Mano Primitivo when I was in SF, at an amazing little restaurant called Osteria Del Forno, in North Beach, but I didn’t know its origins. Then, just yesterday, I read in The Wine Bible an odd fact that the article also notes: the Primitivo grape is genetically identical to California Zinfandel. I haven’t drunk much of that because they tend to be just a little more than I want to pay. Now, Primitivo wines aren’t the same (the NYT helpfully points out) as Zinfandel wines just because they’re practically clones: they’re still raised differently. Nonetheless, they’re worth drinking side-by-side if you’re the type to do that, and it’s worth considering one when you’re thinking of the other.

Petra’s father believes that there is no such thing as a good American wine, at least partially because his experience of the US consisted of Richmond, VA during the 1970s. I plan to convince him otherwise, if he’s ever willing to enter the country again after the trauma of living in Richmond. This determination is probably a proxy for the fact that I still resent my ex-girlfriend’s mother and never managed to convince her that software was a legitimate business.

Señor MacDonald

My old spanish teacher, Señor MacDonald, often said “You pays your money, you takes your choice.” I think he meant that there were limited choices in life and that you were supposed to do what you could. Play the hand they deal you. That sort of thing.

We all make compromises. At least, most of us do. The rest of us, depending on the nature of the desires on which we refuse to compromise, are called idealistic, pigheaded, quixotic, exacting, annoying, stupid, or insane.

Recently I wonder about bicycle helmet laws. Lady K, friend of the nauseated bloggers, died in part because she wasn’t wearing a helmet. I blame the car, of course, more than I blame her or the helmet. But would a helmet law have saved her life? Would constantly mussed hair have ruined her artistic career? Would a helmet law make it too inconvenient or too expensive for some people to bicycle, make them walk more, be late more, lose their jobs, exercise less, ultimately creating greater obesity and killing more people than it would save? What about the lives of the sweatshop workers in Indonesia manufacturing the helmets, ruined by the sudden popularity of newly mandated styene foams?

You pays your money, you takes your choice.

He’s said it before

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who saw the Globe item and wondered What Would Gelwan Think? and so now he’s responded with an in-depth discussion of the issues. Sadly, it boils down to “Dammit, I’ve said this before: inadequate staffing, for-profit insurance-gaming, misdiagnosis, inadequate supervision, overestimating the usefulness of drugs, poor explanation of illness and treatment, and sensationalized journalistic coverage all lead to death, disaster, and scandal.” Accurate and insightful, I’m afraid.

Man, being crazy isn’t the world of sympathy and Hallmark cards it’s cracked up to be.

Things to do in Boston When You’re Dead

Eliot Gelwan of Follow me Here is pretty politically oriented these days, but I’d still kind of like to hear what he’s got to say about this weekend’s Boston Globe article sensationalizing teen suicides that may or may not be related to their depression treatment.

My impression: Everyone should have monitored her more carefully. Her parents should have been told more about the side effects of the medication. The hospital should have notified her parents of suicidal ideation, or kept her in-house longer (my guess is her insurance was up so they declared her ready to leave). The Globe was irresponsible in its failure to point out the fact that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between deaths caused by the disease and deaths caused by the treatment, and also in the way that it hyped up the Zoloft connection and just barely mentioned that she was also on antipsychotics and may have had auditory hallucinations, indicating that her illness was more severe than the run-of-the-mill teenager with depression.

The question: if you don’t medicate the kid, and she dies anyway, whose fault is it?

NYT Catches Up

The NYT has finally noticed Provigil, the miracle anti-sleeping drug from Cephalon. It’s a pretty good article–covers the business the drug-maker is in, but more importantly the way that the drug probably works, and how it might or might not affect society. It’s coming into vogue as an off-label and cosmetic psychopharm product, people are beginning to figure out how it works, etc. The thing I don’t get is this: they say a lot about how important sleep is, but they don’t say how Provigil affects the quality of wakefulness you get when you’re taking it, and they don’t say whether anyone’s studying the effects of abuse, which is what I really want to know about, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day, you know?