Take your holistic BS to your grave.

I was *this close* to not writing a post about this topic. It’s almost too easy. It’s almost like arm wrestling kindergarteners for their lunch money. It is my weakness that I write these posts. I cant let stupidity run free. Must. Attack. Idiots.

from XKCD

The cause for boiling blood? I am speechless that this website made it to the #1 spot on Reddit yesterday. I suppose it’s not surprising considering Reddit is chalk full of anti-pharmaceutical morons.

Why are they morons? They are morons because they bite the hand that feeds them. They whine about big pharma collusion and evil, profiteering, private-sector profiteers. Then they burst an appendix or contract some terminal illness and come crawling to the alters of modern medicine. They become outraged that “we” (the collective “we” of white-coated medicine/pharma researchers) have not cured their niche disease, or that their life-sustaining medicines cost them thousands a year.

Sorry, next year we’ll just skip the $100 million FDA trials and just invent the cure.

Look at the (uncited) table from the crappy website:

Cause of Death	Annual Death Toll 2005
Prescription Drugs	32,000
Suicide	30,622
Car Accidents	26,347
Firearms	29,000
Homicide	20,308
Sexual Behavior	20,000
HIV/AIDS	17,011
Illegal Drugs	17,000
Anti-Inflammatory	7,600
Terrorism	310

I want to throw up when I see a table like this. So what if 32,000 died from prescription drugs? Where are the death rates? It’s called normalization. Why not add grizzly bears to the list? Heck, there’s only 1 or 2 deaths a year from that. Better yet, ASTEROID impact. No human has ever died from an asteroid impact in 2005. Ergo, it poses no threat to our society.

A little later in the article we happen upon this beauty,

Prescription drugs don’t treat diseases; they merely disguise the symptoms, providing care for disease rather than health.

There it is. Nail, meet head. Head, nail. I better take back the claim I made earlier. Researchers don’t just try to treat the disease, they are so crafty they concoct special compounds to disguise the symptoms. My public apology now reads:

Sorry, next year we’ll just skip the $100 million FDA trials and just invent the cure and purposefully invent drugs which sidestep the disease but alleviate your symptoms.

Antibiotics? Just treating the symptoms. Cervical cancer vaccine? You have to pay for that sucker three times before you GAIN IMMUNITY FROM CERVICAL CANCER. That ain’t no treating the disease; that done gone be the sound of big pharma’s hand in my pocket.

Finally,

Dr. Fred Baughman, author of The ADHD Fraud, the pharmaceutical industry is the biggest, most evil drug cartel in history.

Ok, now I’m getting cocky (see how I picked a quote from the article which isn’t even a sentence?). Let’s put aside the validity of big pharma’s cartel status and look at the alternatives,

1. Don’t take prescription drugs (after all, they are just disguising your symptoms, right?)
2. Research, screen, produce and self-medicate with your own drugs (If Meth addicts can make their sauce, surely you too can make your own Cox2 inhibitor!)

Prescription drugs are expensive to develop, largely because the US makes prescription drugs according to strict scientific controls. It’s an unfair assumption that the pharmaceutical industry is withholding cures, charging unfair premiums and killing patients in the name of profit. As with any large body of people, some are corrupt, but most are doing a job as best as possible.

You would do well to remember this fact the next time a prescription drug saves your life.

Read this instead.

I’ve been pretty harsh on bloggers lately. Today I happened upon one that is really worth it.

I was clicking through Don’s blogroll, reading Colby Josh’s blog, where Josh has a link to this guy’s site:

http://www.fatcyclist.com/

The author’s wife has breast cancer and months to live. His blog gives an honest, candid narrative of the experience.

She says she’s sorry that I’m not getting out on rides right now. I haven’t told her…that a couple times this week, I’ve left work to go on a ride and then have skipped it so I could get home a little sooner.

I’ll ride more later.

You can read it and feel humbled, or angry, or lucky, or whatever it is his story makes you feel.  I enjoyed reading through the comments and seeing that the web can be a kind, helpful, amazing source of support, as opposed to the usual vortex of name callings, petty insults, and meaningless drama.

Good on ya, internet, and best wishes to fatcyclist and his family.

The Phallacy of Don’s Thinking.

What’s this? I haven’t even started my ad hominem retort against Don’s post and I already got a jab in. As they say in Street Fighter, “Round one, fight.”

Don is a biomedical engineer. He has been his whole life. Don has his undergraduate degree in BME at Case, which is consistently ranked in the top ten BME programs in the nation. One might say Don has been on the fast track to BME stardom since he spoke his first words at the age of 9.

*ding* Round 2, fight.

Don likes to insult me by lumping me in with physicists. He writes of my ilk,

Nobody ever said physicists are dummies. Awkward, pompous, smelly jerks, maybe, but certainly not dummies.

Here’s the problem with this. You can’t just…well…if you…it’s not fair to… Okay, he’s right. There’s no problem with these claims. Touche, Don.

The rest of Don’s post is cute in an “I fear what I don’t understand” kind of way. He thinks, cutely, that physicists are allowed to set constants =1 whenever they feel like making things easy. For instance, in Don’s magical world of unicorns and rainbows, the equation can be changed to .

This is where Bob Barker would put his hand on Don’s shoulder and ask him to spin the wheel again, because 55 cents just wont get you into the showcase showdown, if you know what I mean.

Don is referring to an old physicist trick of using “natural units” to simplify algebra. The Planck units are the most well known. A glance at the wikipedia page will show there’s a lot more going on than setting everything to unity (the pompous physicist term for the number one). What Don’s “not-at-all-lazy physicists” are doing is to cleverly redefine units so that commonly occuring combinations vanish. Physicists don’t kill constants, guns kill constants.

And so it comes to pass that the climactic climax of Don’s post is nothing more than a pack of sausages wired to a crazy man’s chest.

All fuse, no explosion.

Maybe next time you can define some variables…

Would it kill you to call something?

I pose a challenge: find a published, peer-reviewed paper with an equation with more than 12 sums.

Greetings from Spinetown

Another day, another xray. Remember how I was wondering about those specks on the previous xray? As doctor-in-training Jim correctly guessed, they are clips to hold veins shut. Huzzah.

I was most surprised, however, when the doctor zoomed in to show me a close up…

From afar.

Closeup.

Rut row.

Country star, 34, finishes high school

I kid you not.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/05/05/people.gretchenwilson.ap/index.html

Switch Statements with the Matlab Compiler

This is just a technical note I’m publishing to save others from a debugging headache.  Nothing to see here unless you are compiling your matlab code in C.

http://wcuk.wordpress.com/switch-statements-with-the-matlab-compiler/

Keywords: matlab, compiler, mcc, switch statement, switch, cases, C

Your Crappy Blog Is Crappier Than My Crappy Blog.

Offense. Let me offer you some.

I liken blogs to a inner city check cashing place. They move in to a market where they are unneeded, try to perform a job which is already performed by other businesses, and (lacking any novel business model whatsoever) go bankrupt. With their graffiti fronts and plywood visage, they remain an eyesore for the community and serve as crack houses until they burn down in a row home fire. Yes, that sounds about right

This is installment two of a mean-spirited series of posts meant to hurt feelings. In my previous attempt to insult bloggers, I failed to draw the scorn for which I so earnestly trolled. This time I decided to take a new approach.

I constructed a blog.

My Crappy Blog.

My Crappy Blog has a header!

My crappy blog has a header image. You know who is in my header? It’s me, Narcissus! I gaze longingly at my own reflection in the water. The water is a metaphor for the writings on My Crappy Blog. The image of me is so all my visitors will know that I am the author and I am good looking. Unlike a book, my blog title tells you nothing about the content of my blog.

My Crappy Blog has a Byline!

My crappy blog has a byline. My byline can be witty and it can tell you about My Crappy Blog. My byline indicates my blog will be about a very broad, unspecified topic, such as “life” or “thoughts”, for which my day job does not qualify me to be an expert.

My Crappy Blog has a blogroll!

My crappy blog doesn’t get many hits : ( To compensate, I will whore the blogroll on My Crappy Blog to hundreds of sites I never actually read! My Crappy Blogroll is an attempt to get other blogs to list me in their blogrolls out of guilt. My Crappy Blogroll is vague and I take not the time to organize its order or check to make sure the Crappy Blogs I link to actually exist. Nobody clicks the links on My Crappy Blogroll, but I add to the list everyday nonetheless!

• CDog
• Cool Kids Blog
• lolcatmakerXPRESS
• WOOO MY blogspot adventures
• Cheap viag$$ra
• Funkmasta Flex
• Grandmasta Flash
• Toby

My Crappy Blog uses the default template!

Content is king on My Crappy Blog. At least, that’s the excuse I give for the fact that My Crappy Blog uses the default template, has no original images, and makes no effort to look any different than my neighbor’s crappy blog. This is a paradox, though, because I don’t actually ever update My Crappy Blog. Do you see it? Content is king, but I never create content! The closest I come to content creation is to link to a youtube video I did not make.

My Crappy Blog shuns full sentences!

My Crappy Blog exists in the information age. Times are too fast paced for me to use full sentences. My Crappy Blog assumes it will lose its prestigious rank as the 789,987,299 best blog on Technorati if I take a breather to compose a post that has grammar, syntax, and punctuation. My crappy blog also contains
a wizardly mix of
random line break characters, so my already-fragmented
prose becomes, quite literally, even more
fragmented.

My Crappy Blog has flair!

How many pieces of flair can you find on My Crappy Blog? Lots. I fill as much of my sidebar as I can with widgets and gadgets and twitter feeds. My widgets are useless trinkets with which nobody really likes to interact. Check out my clustr map.

Well, actually, it’s not my clustr map, per se. One day I hope my clustr map will actually have visitors. Either way, it’s the idea that I really like about the above picture. Namely, I want my widgets to display so much that they actually tell you nothing.

My Crappy Blog has photos I resized with html!

I like to steal other people’s copyrighted work for My Crappy Blog, but it doesn’t fit into my cookie cutter template. I choose to resize the images with a mix of html and Microsoft Word to achieve that pixelated look for my photos. I credit the source like I credit a full sentence. Never!

It’s me, Narcissus.

My Crappy Blog is all about me (except when I’m spamming other Crappy Blogs)!

I’ll never admit it, but My Crappy Blog is a shrine to my achievements. My Crappy Blog is part MySpace, part LiveJournal, part Maispace, and part photo gallery of me. It is socially acceptable for me to toot my horn on My Crappy Blog. Sometime I will even list my achievements in My Crappy Sidebar or my image header! This is, of course, when I am not reposting other Crappy Blogs’ images, posts, and words in order to get more hits on my own site. Mankind will savor the heights of my greatness when they visit my page.

Consider the ape.

One popular misconception in our culture is that we are the evolutionary descendants of apes. People are prone to saying “we evolved from the apes.” People associate ape-like behavior as primitive and somehow assume it predates our civilized, “evolved” behavior.

People are wrong.

We did not evolve from the apes. The apes are still living! We evolved (and are still evolving) concurrently alongside the apes. Though it’s silly to compare degrees of “evolvedness,” people who assume the apes are in some pre-human stage are, to put it politely, rather misinformed.

I assume this misconception arises because non-scientists have a long track record of portraying evolution as some directed process towards an ideal form. The idea is that animals are always getting faster, smarter, and stronger, lest they be killed by those who are already fast, smart and strong. Evolution has become a stand-in for intelligence, so much so that the word “devolve” has entered our lexicon as a derogatory synonym for stupidity (e.g. the frat guy is said to have devolved from the college student).

Wrong again, people (except for the burn on frat guys, that theory holds water).

Most evolutionary biologists will tell you how poorly the phrase “survival of the fittest” describes evolution. What Darwin proposed (and biologists believe) is not in survival of the fittest, but in “descent with modification.” There are species, there are environments, and the pressure is on the species to adapt to their environment. If this means a species must shed its enormous forebrain or lose its coconut-crushing biceps, so be it. In other words, we are different than the apes, not more evolved.

You know the infamous diagram which shows the “transition” from ape to human?

Did you ever wonder about the other branch of the evolutionary tree? It’s not as cool looking, but it’s equally valid. Apes are still here. And apes have been evolving all the while.

Note: author is too lazy to research and draw the physical changes to the ape as it evolved.

Thus, it is wrong to impose some hierarchy of species or use evolution as justification for our species’ grossly inflated perception of itself. If humans are badass, its not because we are some evolutionary winner (I can make a strong argument that humans are badass because we produced the song The Final Countdown. Thanks, Europe!)

There is a (probably fake) picture going around the net right now of an Orangutan using a spear to fish. People are making a big fuss about it. They are making stupid internet comments such as “PLANET OF THE APES IS UPON US” and “THEY’RE EVOLVING!!!” The underlying assumption, of course, is that the apes are “catching up” on the evolutionary scale.

Don’t be like internet idiots. Next time you are at the dinner table and Aunt Prim&Proper makes some comment about your chimp-like manners, you can tell her where to stick her anthropocentric assumptions.

“Aunt Prim&Proper,” you’ll say.

“Such thinking is just one step removed from the geocentric silliness of yonder times. I think you owe an apology to the great apes.”

“Well, I never…” she’ll begin to respond, but silence will fall over the room.

She hath no recourse against the icy blade of science.

Cycling, now with 23% less Lance.

On a whim, I did a google trends search for “cycling.” I was not expecting the result.

I thought it was pretty cool how seasonal the trend is. Either le Tour is really popular or people only ride bikes when it’s warm. Crazy people.

I was not expecting to see the peaks getting lower. I welcome any explanations. Is it Lance related? Is it Tour de France related? Is doping turning people off? Is the sport leaving a golden era of popularity?

The trend for popular cycling n00b retailer Bike Nashbar shows similar stormclouds.

Laaaaannnccceeee.

Come back…

This Makes Sense

Our government announced it will distribute the stimulus payments early. I find the payout schedule interesting.  Only a government could come up with this:

“As of next week, 800,000 tax filers daily will begin to have their checks directly deposited Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. No checks will be distributed Thursday, and 5 million payments will be made Friday.”

How do you think they come up with this stuff? Ouija board? Consulting the bones like Pecks in the movie Willow? Did they use the Genesis story from the Bible?

On the first through third day, Bernanke created the Fed and the banks and the first 2.4 million payout checks. And on the fourth day of payout, the treasury department did rest…

I picture a roomful of Fed officials in Hawaiian shirts in a large room with a Wheel-of-Fortune wheel. Big money big money big money… Oh, and it looks like Thursday is a no-go for checks. *spins wheel* click click click click click click click click click. Oh, and it looks like we’ll do 5 million on Friday.

At least they had the decency to pick round numbers.

Two Posts for the Price of One

And if you read in the next 30 minutes, I’ll throw in the Oxy Clean and two chamois cloths…

The Day I Saved the Student Center

Yesterday, walking home from a talk, I happened upon a fire in a flower bed next to the Busch student center. A square foot of mulch was on fire, possibly from a cigarette butt. I sprang to action and smothered the fire before it could do any damage.

I’ll continue my running streak of plagiarizing The Office,

Yesterday I saved countless lives. Am I a hero? (pause) I can’t really say. But, yes.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun (and boys are twerps)

Yesterday I met up with the team to do hill repeats on Washington Ave. There were two kids, whose age I would estimate as 6 (one boy & one girl), playing outside of their house along the road. The sight of ten brightly colored people in spandex on bicycles going up and down the hill was too much for them. Judging by their excitement, I think this was the most stimulation they had ever experienced. Nintendo be damned. This was awesome.

Cute

1. Screaming the winner, runner up, 3rd, 4th, 5th place, etc., on both the way up the hill and the way down.
2. Finding flags and waving them while screaming to encourage us
3. Hiding behind a parked car and jumping out at the last moment to surprise us.
4. Assuming our finish line was only half way up the hill.
5. Giving me high fives when requested.

Not Cute (a.k.a. things the boy did)

1. Whipping me in the butt with the metal flag pole.
2. Whipping others in the butt with the metal flag pole.
3. Attacking Charlie for no good reason, repeatedly.
4. Pretending to set traps for us as we descend at 30mph.

I was happy to see young kids outside doing kid things after school. Yeah, they were acting a little stupid and playing in the road. Yeah, their parents were nowhere to be found. I guess it’s comforting to know that childhood has not been stripped completely from our litigious society. Boys still catch toads and scrape knees. Girls still find boys repulsive and say cute things. I’d like to think that we made two little tikes want to go outside and ride bicycles yesterday. Their unsupervised play session could have been dangerous, but, all things considered, it was less dangerous than an afternoon inside watching the tube.

Also, if they scratched my new bike or caused me to fall, I would have sued them.

Disagilation

Dear Work Computer

CINJ
195 Little Albany Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08903-2681

Dear Work Computer,

I left you running all weekend to perform my experiments. I did the same with my computer at home. When I got to lab this morning, you had decided to stop working. You did not have any errors. You just decided to put your CPU usage at 0% and stop executing code. My home computer, running identical code, had all kinds of results to tell me about when I greeted it last night.

I regret to inform you that your behavior over the past weekend will result in disciplinary action.  I am giving you a demerit. What does a demerit mean? Let’s put it this way, you do not want to receive three of those. Three demerits and you’ll receive a citation. Five citations and you’re looking at a violation. Four of those and you’ll receive a verbal warning. Keep it up, and you’re looking at a written warning. Two of those, that’ll land you in a world of hurt, in the form of a disciplinary review written up by me and placed on the desk of my immediate superior.

I want a results on my desk by the end of the day.  If you fail to do so, you will receive a full disagilation.

Signed,
~Wcuk

Want.