PZ Myers helpfully posted on the decline of shark populations due to oral cartilage pills. Apparently, the pseudoscience idea that cartilage works as a cancer cure, promoted by this book, has created a cottage industry of shark cartilage pills (unsurprisingly led by the author of the aforementioned book), which in turn has led to overfishing of sharks to harvest their cartilage. And for nothing, since all the reputable studies on the matter agree that shark cartilage does not cure cancer.
It’s always nice to see PZ raising awareness on issues like this, but unhappily shark cartilage pills are undoubtedly only part of the problem. Like so many other creatures around the world, sharks appear to have committed the ultimate sin of being tasty to humans, and so were doomed to extinction as well. Shark Savers is an organization dedicated to saving the shark population, and their primary campaign right now is against shark fin soup (for which sharks are apparently caught so that their fins can be removed, and then dumped back into the ocean). Their site gives similar 80% decline figures to the post PZ linked to, which leads me to believe that it’s not clear is primarily causing the decline. It does leave only one pretty obvious solution, though: stop catching sharks.
Obviously, the majority of the people reading this blog don’t have advanced cancer and aren’t regularly confronted with the opportunity to eat shark. So for good measure I’ll just throw in that the same logic more or less applies to other tasty animals we eat more frequently, like bluefin tuna. So next time you’re look over menu choices or in the supermarket, it may be worth considering that in three years we may eradicate their breeding population.
This post brought to you as part of our continuing series on uplifting observations about the environmental impact of humanity.
Do you ever worry that your genitals are retracting into your body? Ever worry that your vitality might just disappear with your vanishing member? If so, you are not alone. Koro (as it’s known in China and Southeast Asia) is recognized as a kind of social or mass hysteria where individuals become convinced that their genitals are shrinking and will ultimately disappear completely, and seemingly may injure themselves trying to prevent that. Unsurprisingly, the Wikipedia article notes that this tends to occur among poorly educated populations who fear supernatural forces, and notes that in China mental health campaigns and improving economic conditions have reduced epidemics (Wikipedia cites to this study, which I cannot access).
Beyond the worry that someone might harm themselves, this condition can also potentially can create hostility against others accused or blamed for causing it. For example, this case recently reported in Nigeria demonstrates how penis disappearance will manifest in a culture that believes in witchcraft that can be used by one person against another. A report from Harper’s followed up by traveling to Nigeria to try to understand the belief that your penis is disappearing. He doesn’t do a bad job of it, but one wonders if he couldn’t have saved himself a trip to Nigeria and just watched this German remake of Jekyll and Hyde where Jekyll is a novelist who awakes to find that the character he created (Hyde) has stolen his penis. (No, I haven’t seen it. But yes, I want to).
Incidentally, if you’re curious how I ever came across Koro, I’ll just say it had something to do with this xkcd strip.
Today I learned of independent documentary, Orgasm, Inc., which examines the current race by pharmaceutical companies to develop a female sexual enhancement drug. The idea is that with the remarkable financial success of Viagra, there must be a market for a drug to offer women sexual satisfaction, to which end medical researchers have been aggressively promoting the idea of widespread female sexual dysfunction. As explained in Newsweek piece on the film, “The selling of the female orgasm,” Liz Canner, the filmmaker, was approached by Vivus, a company whose suppository for erectile dysfunction lost its market dominance with the advent of Viagra and wanted her help with their female sex research. Another article in the Guardian identifies the drug (which they subsequently gave up on developing) as an “orgasm cream“, which sounds all kinds of disgusting.
Conveniently, I learned of this film but three days after it debuted in NYC at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, so it looks like I won’t be able to watch it for the foreseeable future without coughing up $30 for a DVD. So I figured I’d help other people avoid making the same mistake and encourage anyone interested to find a screening this summer – the filmmaker is showing it on various campuses in hopes of building up to a nationwide theatrical release. It also looks to be coming to Netflix, although it’s not there yet.
I thought it fitting that I followed up todd’s last post with something from rational side of the meatless agenda. Although I don’t eat meat (besides fish or eggs), I try not to proselytize, even though I think there are good arguments for taking on certain dietary restrictions. Since I’m now reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, those arguments are a bit nearer the surface than is usual, and so I was well-primed for reading this appeal to meat eaters everywhere:
What if a group of people collectively signed a contract that said one of them would be vegetarian everyday of the year? More specifically, say a group of 7 people signed a contract saying that each of them would go meatless on an assigned day each week. Thus, within the group each member could eat meat 6 days a week, but there would be one vegetarian at all times.
This strikes me as a good way to capture a certain kind of consumer. I’ve known friends over the years who, while accepting lots of the merits of vegetarian eating, are unwilling to embrace an outright ban on meat in their diet. (Of course, one of the big holdouts caved last year.) And I would hope that the arguments for such a mild restraint have grown even more compelling in recent years:
The effect may seem marginal, but I have seen tons of sources which say that just a bit less meat consumption could have immense environmental benefits. Here is one: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.
Seems pretty obvious to me, but then after reading Michael Pollan it’s pretty baffling that, with all the petroleum it takes to produce corn and all the corn it takes to feed cows, anyone still eats beef.
My RSS reader is full of the killing of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas today. A lot of it is worth reading. I don’t have anything to add, so straight into the links.
Coates has Bill O’Reilly spouting off about the doctor in 2006. Obsidian Wings has a series of incredibly touching stories to answer this question:
I cannot imagine the courage it takes to go on doing what you think is right in the face not only of consistent harassment and death threats, but of actual attempts on your life.
This Daily Kos diary is by a woman whose mother Dr. Tiller saved twice.
And, most usefully, Feministe has a list of pro-choice organizations to whom you can donate. As PZ suggests, “[D]o something to infuriate the women-hating anti-choicers and do something positive in honor of Tiller’s work? Donate!”
Here’s a transcript of a nice speech on “the hook up culture” by Jessica at Feministing. I wanted to pull out a representative passage, but the whole thing is uniformly good. So I’ll just ruin the end, and hope that makes you want to see how we get there:
Let’s be clear, this was an FDA official holding up a safe contraceptive because of the fear of teen sex cults.
So really, all of this writing and talking about hooking up is about a lot more than just wanting young people to have less sex, or to date more. This is about a return to traditional gender roles – a world where women go to college not to get an education, but to find a husband; a world where women don’t really like sex but just do it to have babies. A world where women have no reproductive choices.
[...]
For a young woman living in poverty, spring break isn’t even an option, let alone a concern. For a young woman who has no health insurance, the “moral” debate over STDs won’t do anything for her the next time she needs to see a doctor. And for a young single mother, hearing about herself as an unfortunate statistic isn’t going to make her life any better or easier.
I’d only like to add that I feel discriminated against. Why haven’t any conservative organziations produced shady statistics saying that young men who participate in the hook up culture are all depressed and warty? Men have feelings too, you know.
(Edit to add: I got this from Cosmic Variance.)
(Edit again to add: Ta-Nehisi is also on this, and adds:
I deeply suspect that at the bottom of it all lay the sexual insecurities of people who wish they’d been a little more carefree in college. I strongly suspect that they don’t resent hook-up culture–they resent that they didn’t get hooked-up. Wouldn’t be the first time. Hell if I knew in college, what I know about the opposite sex now, I’d have been Denzeling fools. Alright probably not. Wait, what was I saying?
)
Tonight, I was scanning a paper in a respected medical journal. The paper was a clinical study that tested some claims of alternative medicine. Halfway in, I came on a paragraph that jumped out at me. It went like this:
The test procedures were explained [to test subjects] by 1 of the authors (E.R.), who designed the experiment herself. The first series of tests was conducted when she was 9 years old. The participants were informed that the study would be published as her fourth-grade science-fair project and gave their consent to be tested.
That’s a pretty bad-ass 4th grader, right there. I always thought that the Disgruntled Chemist’s scientific take-down of Dr. Frank’s No-Pain Spray was pretty cool. But TDC is a professional scientist, and an adult, and the results of his No Pain Challenge have never been published in a peer reviewed journal. None of which can be said about the completely awesome Emily Rosa, who at the age of 11 parlayed a 4th-grade science fair experiment into a publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Rosa’s mother was a nurse, and was frustrated by the widespread adoption of “therapeutic touch” — a form of alternative medicine which involves channeling of life energies. Curious herself, Emily designed an experiment to determine whether or not there was any merit to the claim that practitioners of therapeutic touch could detect life energies.
During each test, the practitioners rested their hands, palms up, on a flat
surface, approximately 25 to 30 cm apart. To prevent the experimenter’s hands from being seen, a tall, opaque screen with cutouts at its base was placed over the subject’s arms, and a cloth towel was attached to the screen and draped over them. [...]The experimenter flipped a coin to determine which of the subject’s hands would be the target. The experimenter then hovered her right hand, palm down, 8 to 10 cm above the target and said, “Okay.” The subject then stated which of his or her hands was nearer to the experimenter’s hand.
The subjects identified the correct hand about 44% of the time — a result statistically no different from random guessing. The moral here should be pretty simple: your techniques are in trouble if a nine year-old can design and execute an experiment to debunk them. Unfortunately, therapeutic touch still seems to be moving units on Amazon.com.
The paper is a real hoot; I just want to point out two more bits that I liked. First, details of a previous experiment:
[A University of Alabama at Birmingham] project compared the effects of TT and sham TT on the perception of pain by burn patients. The final report to the funding agency noted statistically significant differences in pain and anxiety in 3 of 7 subjective measurements, but there was no difference in the amount of pain medication requested.
“So, do you feel better?”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure. Can I have my meds now?”
Then, one of the excuses made by a failed test subject:
[The subject argued that the] experimenter should be more proactive, centering herself and/or attempting to transmit energy through her own intentionality. This contradicts the fundamental premise of TT, since the experimenter’s role is analogous to that of a patient. Only the practitioner’s intentionality and preparation (centering) are theoretically necessary. If not so, the early experiments (on relatively uninvolved subjects, such as infants and barley seeds), cited frequently by TT advocates, must also be discounted.
That’s right — our techniques are no good on skeptical little girls, but they work wonders for barley seeds.
For more good skeptical content on the interwebs, see Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance on how modern physics has ruled out the possibility of telekinesis.
Maybe it’s a sign of how jaded I’ve become, but I thought Over-the-Counter Plan B was a lost cause. Happy to be corrected.
(Via Crooked Timber)
People (especially my fellow Bostonians) are probably already aware of this, but it’s still pretty remarkable that Massachusetts will require residents to have health insurance. While that sounds scary, the structure of the legislation is interesting:
Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not purchase it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will allow more of the working poor to buy insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. Businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed up to $295 per employee per year.
Basically, it seems that a lot of individuals and businesses not paying for insurance will be fined, with those fines going back into insurance. This will then subsidize people who actually can’t afford insurance.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about “requiring people who can afford insurance to buy it,” but at the very least, this sounds like an interesting experiment. Plus, it sounds like they’ve been doing they’re homework on this issue:
Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor’s communications director, said that for those people with incomes above 300 percent of poverty, “our assumption was that these would be mostly single mothers who just did not have the wherewithal to get insurance. It turned out it was mostly young males. In some cases they are making very attractive salaries. These are people who just don’t imagine themselves needing care, but of course when they break a leg when they’re out bungee jumping they go to the hospital and we end up paying for their care anyway.”
Yes, I know the sentiment all too well. I like to think of it as machismo, although I suspect others would just call it being a damned fool.
No, not the ones Todd posted about below, but an even more startling assault. Courtesy of Lindsay Beyerstein, I’m now informed that it’s National Caffeine Awareness Month. But more importantly, she points to an article describing the Caffeine Awareness Alliance and their War on Coffee:
“Most caffeine addicts have no idea that they are addicts. But, with as little as 200 mg of caffeine, you can experience typical addictive symptoms such as irritability, restlessness, tension, insomnia, excitement, and gastrointestinal disturbance,” says [CAA founder Marina] Kushner.
I don’t know what she’s talking about. I’m aware of everything she mentioned, and I’m not convinced in the least. Wait, what does that mean again?