Presto Agitato

Van Allen Crankery

I recently had a conversation with a fellow who insisted that man could not have gone to the moon because astronauts would have been irradiated (he assumed the ‘to death’ part) traveling through the Van Allen radiation belts.  I tried to explain that the belts' radiation isn't x-ray or gamma, and that in any case the hazard depends on intensity and time, but I didn't know the full details myself and he wasn't convinced.  But he was quite dedicated to his opinion and angrily resistant to the idea that details matter, so I'm not sure that more information would have helped. 

Anyway, I was delighted this weekend to discover this:

Calling Bullshit

From the Anti-Defamation League:

The 4chan site is an anonymous discussion board with an outsized cultural impact on the internet.  It has been responsible for everything from the ‘I can haz cheeseburger’ cat meme to the concept of Rickrolling.  There is little that 4channers like as much as a hoax, and in recent months, they have served up a number of fakeries with white supremacist themes to largely credulous online audiences.

The ‘OK’ hand gesture originated as one of these hoaxes in February 2017 when an anonymous 4channer announced ‘Operation O-KKK’, telling other members that ‘We must flood Twitter and other social media websites…claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.’  The user even provided a helpful graphic showing how the letters WP (for ‘white power’) could be traced within an ‘OK’ gesture. …

SJW types are easy marks.

 

This Week in Meaningless Science (and Bad Journalism)

The headline says ‘Bermuda Triangle mystery "solved", scientists claim’.  Short version: High seas in an area susceptible to extreme weather, a sort of maritime analogue of Moore, OK.  But how to explain the missing airplanes?  Were they also taken in by 100-foot waves?

Truth is, the whole Bermuda Triangle thing is a myth.  The ‘Triangle’ isn't counted even among the top ten most dangerous shipping areas worldwide, because ships and airplanes don't go missing there any more frequently, on average, than in other areas that are prone to tropical cyclones, i.e. hurricanes and typhoons.  This particular area has a lot of traffic, so the body count is high, but the rate is not.  No mystery, but it does make a great booga-booga story to fascinate idiots and news reporters – some significant overlap there.

Note to Dr. Boxall: If you wish to be taken seriously, don't be an ass.

Artificial Sweeteners and Artificial Science

Hannah Sparks notes that ‘Diet Coke might not be so bad for your health after all.’  Or at all:

[Aaron Carroll, MD] was completely unprepared for the backlash and scrutiny he experienced after first writing on the subject in a 2015 New York Times column.

‘There were people who thought that I should have my [medical] license revoked [and] people who questioned why I hadn’t had my children taken away from me.’  One California-based reader went so far as to invoke open-records acts in Indiana to go through his e-mail.  ‘They were convinced I’d been paid off’, says Carroll.

He hadn’t been.  He just believes the notion that artificial sweeteners are the enemy is misguided — and often perpetuated by the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of scientific studies.

There was never any good scientific evidence that artificial sweeteners are hazardous to humans, despite bad popular reporting of the observational and mouse studies.  ‘Observational studies’, btw, are exercises in data mining, i.e. crunching existing data that was collected without controls (commonly epidemiological data) to see if any correlations show up.  But if you crunch enough data, spurious correlations will appear, so such studies are of limited use except to point researchers to things that might merit better, controlled studies.

In this case, it was noted that people who drink a lot of diet soft drinks tend to be overweight, etc., which led to speculation that artificial sweeteners might cause obesity, and yet more speculation about a possible biological mechanism for that effect.  But it was obvious to scientists – and anyone else who thought about it – that obese people might switch to diet sodas in an attempt to control their existing issues, so the correlation proved nothing.  When controlled studies were done, the Evil Artificial Sweetener Hypothesis failed definitively.  (Including the notion of a phantom glycemic effect.  Aspartame, aka Nutrasweet, might have a small but negligible glycemic effect in humans, but no other artificial sweetener shows even that much.)  But that story didn't make the evening news because it's not so interesting as ‘OMG!  Diet sodas are killing people!’.

Saving the Planet

Repealed, Replaced, and Refractory

Repeal of Obamacare, ironically aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is finally in the works in D.C.  As with anything significant, there be dragons, but the worst danger of repeal is in the cowardice and charlatanry of Congress, especially of congressional ‘leaders’.  (See, for instance, the current ‘repeal’ bill in the House.)  True repeal will require courage, a commodity in very short supply in D.C.  All the same, the dragons should not be ignored.

The problem with repeal – actual repeal, I mean – is that it would, as Obamacare itself did, force millions of people to new health-care plans, thus converting many existing medical conditions to pre-existing for purposes of the new plans.  As temptingly simple as ‘clean’ repeal may seem, that's not a good outcome.  Rand Paul, in an uncharacteristically sensible moment, proposed that the new law should extend the ACA's prohibition against uprating or denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, or some similar protections, for two years past enactment.  That should be enough time for the transition, and the idea is far better than permanent extension, so far so good.  

But repeal must also deal with the fact that individuals (via the exchanges and Medicaid, which Obamacare expanded) and states (via Medicaid) have made plans relying on the current system.  Naive of them, perhaps, but it does place a moral burden on Congress not to just yank the rug out.  Changing Medicaid to a ‘per-enrolee’ block grant to states might have some merit, at the risk of encouraging enrollment-gaming (this means you, California), but it could help states to pick up the slack of transition with less perversity and expense than in the current system.  Maybe.  Wherever government is involved, trouble begins, but shrinking government will require incremental battles and here we have a great start.  (The Trump Administration's war against the ‘administrative state’ is also a good start (god speed!), but that's a topic for another day.)

Following repeal of the ACA (caveated and tweaked as above), the most important things that Congress can do to ‘replace’ it are to:

1. Allow people to buy their health-care insurance from anywhere, nationwide, that they can find it, so ending the current state-by-state (and, in some cases, county-by-county) nature of the market;
2. Reform or repeal the pre-ACA tax advantage for employer-provided health-care insurance, or more precisely the tax disadvantage for self-purchased insurance;
3. Allow robust medical savings accounts, possibly tax-exempt or partially so; and
4. Reform medical liability law to reduce the risk to providers (e.g., doctors, hospitals, manufacturers, and their insurers) of outrageous jury-ordered medical jackpots, and (I dream) require judges and, especially, juries to take better account of the relevant medical science.  No, your baby doesn't have Cerebral Palsy because the obstetrician misused his forceps, your ovarian cancer probably (almost certainly) wasn't caused by talcum powder (and talc had nothing to do with it in any case), your polycarbonate water bottle didn't give you man-boobs (it was your diet, dummy, and a little exercise wouldn't hurt), and your headaches and rashes aren't caused by radio waves.  Sorry, and good luck, but go home.

Anyway, I would do as many of these things as politically possible in a single bill, because the idea of a ‘Phase 2’ (as President Trump promises) has, historically, been a loser; once Congress can say that they ‘did something’, they chicken out and stubborn up and refuse to do anything more.  President Reagan learned that lesson from TEFRA in 1982 (Congress promised future spending cuts that never materialized), and Bush 42 learned it – again – in 1991.  (Actually, I don't think that GHWB learned anything from either experience; he was too busy patting himself on the back for his ‘statesmanship’ in making the deal, and butt-hurt that conservative voters held him to account.)  No honest conservative should ever make that mistake again.

Chemtrails at Night

Really, Now, Just Stop

I really resent it when people force me to defend Hillary Clinton, but they can't seem to stop.  In an article dated from yesterday, I read of one Dr. Wolf declaring that Hillary's warfarin (aka Coumadin) prescription is very odd because it's never prescribed to someone who is otherwise healthy and can afford ‘safer’ anticoagulants:

Dr. Milton Wolf, a board-certified radiologist, writes, ‘Coumadin carries a substantial risk for patients, particularly those with fall risk. Spontaneous hemorrhage common, intracranial and elsewhere.  I see it commonly, including life-threatening brain bleeds. Normal, healthy patients are NEVER, NEVER prescribed Coumadin.’  There are safer anticoagulants.  ‘Coumadin is typically given to those who can’t afford the newer drugs or reserved for cases that are refractory to the safer drugs.’  Wolf speculates that Clinton probably has a hypercoagulable blood disorder.  Coumadin would otherwise be given only to patients with chronic atrial fibrillation (like the vets) or with prosthetic heart valves, both of which can cause hypercoagulation.

With apologies to Jay Michaels, the author of this article, this is bullshit.  (It's not clear that Dr. Wolf's observations are out of line so much as Michaels' context.)  I have two friends who are permanently on warfarin, both of whom are ‘otherwise healthy’ and can afford other anticoagulants.  In the case with which I am most familiar, my friend had a stroke and a dvt within short order.  Having solved the immediate problems, doctors determined after a short trial that my friend's dosage and results were stable with warfarin (sometimes that's a tough thing to accomplish with warfarin due to its interactions with various food and drink), so that's what they stuck with.  On the other hand, neither of my thick-blooded friends requires help getting up a short flight of stairs or from sidewalk to limo, and neither is subject to random faceplants, so maybe the guy is on to something.

Anyway, in the real world, most doctors go with the least expensive effective medicine.  The problem is well solved, so why spend more even if the patient can afford it?  But that's the real world, not the febrile world of political commentary.

Jumping to Conclusions

The Internet was hot yesterday with video and screenshots of Hillary Clinton's eyes supposedly tracking strangely while she gave a speech, even seeming to point, momentarily, at different targets.  Some people took it as proof that she has a serious neurological illness.  I call bullshit: The farther the target (say, toward the back of the crowd), the more parallel her gaze would appear to be.  The closer she looks, say at her teleprompter or a fly on her nose, the more her eyes would seem to cross.  Shifting from a far target to a near target (e.g., from crowd at left to text slightly to her right) would cause her eyes to seem not to track.

People need to get a grip.  Yes, she's hiding health info that most voters would consider relevant, and her campaign's lies about the subject are often self-contradictory, but video and the Internet speculation are not reliable diagnostic tools.  Any doctor who would pretend to make a diagnosis like that from video or, worse, from a snapshot, should be drummed out of medicine.  Tar, feathers, and rails are optional but recommended.

Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong

Late last week, a partial study (it's only half-done, or should I say half-baked) was released, claiming that cell phone radiation, i.e., the radio signals, causes brain and heart cancer in rats, specifically in male rats.  The news takeaway was that cell phones may cause cancer in humans.  Quelle surprise, the study itself is bad work and the news reporting was the usual incompetent bullshit.  (And that's not counting Mother Jones and Natural News!)

The study subjects these rats, beginning in utero (!), to ‘doses’ of 1.5W (watts)/kg minimum and as high as 6W/kg.  Modern hand-held cell phones have an effective radiated power of about 0.6W max (never mind watts/kg), much less if the phone is within reasonable range of a tower.  (They're designed to transmit only so much power as is necessary to get the job done, which saves batteries and reduces jamming of other towers.)  I'm not sure what these guys thought that they were studying or what possessed them to release ambiguous results from an unfinished study.

Btw, so far the exposed rats have had lower mortality than the ‘control’ (no radiation) rats, especially those receiving the higher-level doses.  ‘Cell phone radiation makes male rats live 8% longer on average.’  Report that!