Ed’s corner of the web

First of all, a little context.  There’s this friendly outdoor cat that lives on a road close to us where we often walk on or way to and from the T stop.  He’s all black, and his collar has a tag with the Batman symbol.  Naturally, I’ve taken to calling him Batcat.  Then I come across the photo below, and I realize that there’s more than one Batcat…

At long last, all of our Vietnam photos are uploaded here.  It was a great trip, and we had an especially great time exploring all of the culinary variety of the country.  The Vietnamese are serious about food, and it was an adventure finding all the favorite local spots to eat.  We had great success using online blogs and personal travel pages to target our searches, and we found this strategy to be much more fruitful than using guidebooks, which usually cater to slightly different palates.  The “find the sketchiest-looking place that’s full of Vietnamese people” strategy also worked exceedingly well.  Other highlights included whizzing around on motorbikes in the countryside around Hue, getting lost in the frenetic markets, and experiencing the near-worship of Uncle Ho.

Throughout the trip, I found myself having a hard time capturing the country in pictures.  For one thing, large parts of the country aren’t objectively pretty – lots of urban landscapes, traffic, crowds, pollution.  But I felt it went beyond that; I was taking pictures of some of these not-so-pretty things because they appealed to me on some level.  The photographic result failed to capture that appeal; places seemed bland and lifeless when they were anything but.  Only looking back over the photos after the fact did I realize what the problem was.  You use all your senses to experience Vietnam.  You smell it, you feel it, you hear it, you taste it.  My photos failed because they only had one sense to exploit when all five were necessary.  You have to smell the fish market of Hoi An to really experience it.  You have to feel the quiet misty air and cool water of Ha Long Bay, hear the cacophony of motorbike traffic whizzing around you in Saigon.  And by god you have to taste the tamarind crab – not to be missed.  Perhaps truly great photographers are able to somehow capture more that what the eye sees.  I’m not there yet.  But I’ll keep on trying.  In the meantime, enjoy these pale, washed-out reflections of a vivid, vibrant country.

Obligatory shot with the Lunch Lady of Saigon. This is a badge of honor for Vietnamese foodies.

This story and its close cousins have already been followed extensively in the blogosphere, skeptical and otherwise (see here and here for examples), but I’m glad to see CNN picking it up, even if it underplays the huge negative consequences.

What it boils down to is that governments around the world - including Thailand, Mexico, and Iraq -  have been duped into purchasing glorified dowsing rods as bomb detectors.  Apparently, since dowsing for oil, gold, and buried hoards of cash wasn’t proving profitable for the manufacturers of these devices (gee – I wonder why), they have chosen instead to defraud national governments.  I guess it was just easier.

As sad as it is that some malicious groups out there are trying to profit off of people’s gullibility (and don’t get me wrong – these people should absolutely go to jail), it’s just as disheartening that there are national governments falling for this crap.  If you’re Iraq, for example, not only are you tens of millions of dollars poorer from purchasing these carnival gadgets, but you’ve failed to prevent an unknowable number of deaths.  All from placing your faith in a woo-toy to sniff out bombs.  This is the true cost of pseudoscience and stupidity.

As if I needed something else to suck up my time.  I’ve been inspired by the fabulous idea pictured here.  I kind of like the idea of using my own slides instead of buying used, so this gives me an excuse to dust off the old film camera and take lots more pictures.  I figure you could even create a sort of photomosaic if you weren’t after anything too high resolution.  Now to find some cheap slide film…

This is great news.  It’s a little late in coming – well, actually a lot.  But truth and the self-correcting nature of scientific inquiry have finally won a little victory.  There has still been irreparable harm done to autism research and treatment as a whole, not to mention the fight against vaccine-preventable illness, but hopefully this is a reflection of the turning tide.

The NEJM had an interesting study this month on managing health care expenditures.  The prevailing wisdom has been that cost-sharing (making people more reponsible for the cost of their care) reduces expenditures while not harming health in the general population.  This study looked at a population of Medicare recipients and found otherwise.

When you raise the copays for Medicare enrollees, you end up making a little more money off of copays, and you reduce the total number outpatient visits.  This saves Medicare money.  This is good.  Unfortunately, you also increase the number of hospital admissions and the length of those admissions, with the end result being that you spend much more money than you save or bring in.  This is bad.

This is a prime example of why studies like this are crucial when deciding how to spend healthcare dollars.  The interplay of economics, health, and human behavior are so complex that there’s no predicting which way an intervention will take you.  Great study.

Great gutsy opinion piece from Barbara Ehrenreich of the LA Times.

Choice quote:

What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly lifestyle) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments such as chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from “early” to “late” stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)?

What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.

Regardless of how you feel about Bart Stupak’s amendment to the health care bill, I think Ehrenreich makes a very valid point about the need for skepticism and reason.

Some people go crazy with Christmas decorations, a rare few do both Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it’s only the very elite hard core decorator who goes for the end-of-year trifecta of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.  Our across-the-street neighbor is one of these people.  Behold:

The picture can’t really do it justice.  The skeleton inside the glowing coffin on the first floor moves around.  The dude on the organ at the far right plays scary music.  And there are speakers that play all manner of screams, cat yowls, and other scary sounds.

My favorite costume of the night: a family of three little girls, the middle one dressed up as Dorothy, ruby slippers and all.  The little one was the cowardly lion, which was very practical since it looked very fleecy and warm.  The eldest (maybe about 4 years old) was dressed as the wicked witch, and she had ruby slippers, too.  Clearly she was the Wicked Witch of the East, pre-house-crushing.

Carisa’s favorite costume of the night: three little girls, maybe about 6 years old, dressed up in ripped up cheerleader costumes covered in blood.  Yeah.

Ah – a topic near and dear to my heart.  Like many of you who have traveled around with world with electronic equipment, I’ve been flabbergasted by the panoply of power plugs I have to navigate to get some juice back into my gadgets.  110V?  240V?  Two prong?  Three poles?  It’s enough to drive a man batty, I tell ya.  And it forces me to lug around a heavy voltage convertor, which stinks doubly for someone who prefers to travel light.  If, like me, you’ve always scratched your head and wondered how the world ended up this way, now you can finally learn why here.

Before this theme gets too old, I want to reserve a special shout-out for Wired Magazine.  Thank you, Wired, for having the bravery and integrity to do what the rest of mainstream media was unwilling to do: put “Vaccines don’t cause autism” on your cover, highlighted in fluorescent green, for the whole world to see.  And not only that, you backed that statement with a well-crafted, reasoned, non-hysterical article inside.  It makes me want to go out, buy extra copies, and put them in my hospital waiting rooms.  Bravo.  The rationality is very, very refreshing.