common sense

Nope. What a boring Writer's Block!

My parents tell me my uncle and my grandma hit and killed a deer, and now they plan to eat it.

My reaction: OMG isn’t there some horrible cervid prion disease out there?! Fuuuuuckkkk!!!!!!!

Yesterday my city council unanimously approved a ban on plastic shopping bags. Unlike NYC's outdoor smoking ban, I support this legislation, but it's not without potential pitfalls. The obvious issue is that many households use their plastic shopping bags, and this will force people to buy them. I use them to pick up dog poop and line small trash cans, for example. Then there's the question of how much these bags really contribute to litter and pollution. It certainly seems like they play a major role, but I don't have any data to support that.

There is also concern over the implications for poorer families, although I think that the law deals with this as fairly as possible. Paper shopping bags will still be available for consumers who do not supply their own reusable bags, at a cost of 5¢ per bag. Low-income shoppers will be exempt from the tariff, meaning that they won't be forced to buy expensive reusable bags, and won't be punished for it. It remains to be seen just how individuals and families will qualify for the exemption and what they will have to do to prove it to the cashier, and these details are important.

Like so many things in politics, this is an imperfect solution to a complex problem. I'm hopeful it will have a positive impact on the environment without hurting businesses or consumers.

The New England Journal of Medicine published a non-technical article last month about New York City's recent smoking ban entitled, Nowhere Left to Hide? The Banishment of Smoking from Public Spaces. It raises some interesting questions. Nobody disputes the fact that cigarettes are responsible an enormous number of excess death and illness each year, nor that exposure to secondhand smoke can have short- and long-term health effects. What I learned in this article is that these health risks were not what inspired the first round of smoking bans in the 1970s, and history may be repeating itself without any public health benefit.

The stated rationale for these early measures was not a paternalistic one — that smokers must abstain for their own good — but rather the protection of nonsmoking bystanders. Strikingly, these early restrictions were implemented in the absence of scientific data that secondhand smoke posed a health threat to nonsmokers. Instead, the measures advanced on the premise that secondhand smoke was unpleasant and annoying.

It's hard to argue the opposite point—that secondhand smoke is not unpleasant and annoying—and the authors are quick to point out that good science eventually revealed the risks posed by secondhand smoke. The idea of a non-smoking section of an airplane now seems absurd. Can you imagine how nasty it would be if one person smoked just one cigarette during a cross-country flight?

But now NYC officials have voted to ban smoking in public places like parks and Times Square, based largely on what appears to be the moral judgment that smoking is “bad” and not on any compelling science. According to the article, brief exposure to second-hand smoke in an open-air environment has not been convincingly shown to pose serious health risks. In other words, if you're sitting more than two meters away from someone who's smoking on the terrace at a restaurant or on the beach, you don't really experience any increased risk of lung cancer. If you were inside the restaurant or an airplane, it would be a different story.

It's tempting to say that smoking is bad and that we should therefore support any measures that make it more difficult or less socially acceptable to do. If only it were that simple. But it's not:

Given the addictive nature of nicotine and the difficulty of quitting smoking, strategies of denormalization raise both pragmatic and ethical concerns. Some tobacco-control experts have questioned whether the denormalization of smoking may have unwanted negative effects on the mental and physical health of smokers but fail to lead them to quit. Also relevant are issues of social justice… Since smokers are more likely to be poor and therefore dependent on free public spaces for enjoyment and recreation, refusing to allow them to smoke in those places poses potential problems of fairness.

Furthermore, anti-smoking efforts typically experience diminishing returns. Raising taxes on cigarettes or disseminating information about the risks of tobacco products has some initial success in decreasing the prevalence of tobacco use, but after a while things even out and a certain number of people keep smoking. And start smoking each year. I don't see the social benefit in making smokers feel alienated, stigmatized and antisocial without making it easier to quit, deterring new users or protecting nonsmokers.

Finally, there's the question of how much control we want the government to have over our private lives. I'm generally pro-government. I support taxes to pay for schools and public services, I favor some form of “socialized medicine” and I even voted for the indoor smoking ban here in Washington state. But I have a hard time supporting an outdoor smoking ban that provides no clear public health benefit, to smokers or nonsmokers, just so some people can enjoy Central Park a tiny bit more. At times I've wished that obnoxious children or country music were banned from public parks and beaches, just so that these spaces would be more conducive to my happiness, but I would never want the government to actually outlaw these nuisances.

marixxa and I somehow got on the subject of Chatroulette the other day, and last night my curiosity got the best of me. Having checked the site out once before, I decided instead to visit Omegle, which I found to have fewer pervs and naked people (although they're certainly on there). Most people "rejected" me right away, presumably because they were looking for nudity. There were a few penises, and one guy asked to see mine. I had one really nice chat with a young woman who's studying biology in Washington, DC. And then there was this:

( Racial slurs and other bizarre commentsCollapse )

I don't quite know what to make of this. This was the second or third time I'd used Omegle, and I've had similar encounters on each visit. These comments frequently come from children who appear to be between the ages of 10 and 16. I had an audio/video chat with a guy who called me a "nigger" more than once and then laughed and insisted, "I'm not a racist!" He turned to his friend for support, "I'm not usually racist, right?"

This weekend I:

• GRADUATED!
• Cleaned my room
• Got a haircut

I’m feelin’ pretty good.

Adam Frank makes some interesting points in his NPR blog post entitled Science Deniers: Hand Over Your Cellphones! One passage in particular reminded me of an issue that I feel is often overlooked:

In [climate change deniers'] worldview the scientists are in it for the money or the fame or the power. Scientists are overstating the case. They are ignoring other evidence. The science itself is not just wrong, it's purposely wrong and designed only to fool the general public.

It amazes me how often people overlook the possibility that scientists do what they do because they absolutely love it, not because they're trying to get rich or pull a fast one on the general public. This comes up all the time in the discussion of controversial or emotionally charged issues, from vaccines to climate change to genetically engineered food. Scientists are not immune to greed and corruption, nor cognitive biases that prevent them from honestly assessing the evidence. But I think it's fair to say that most scientists enjoy conducting research, and are fascinated by the systems that they study. It saddens me when people dismiss science and its practitioners by assuming that financial gain and glory are the only forces that could possibly motivate research. Do these same people walk past a gallery and assume that the artist is a soulless monster whose sole interest is making a buck off a painting?

Here are a couple images I recently made in my cell/developmental biology lab:



(microtubules and DNA)

( One more after the jumpCollapse )

Michio Kaku is currently promoting his new book, Physics of the Future. Today, for the second time, I heard him make an incredible statement about the genetic basis of human longevity. In episode 94 of Dr. Kiki's Science Hour he says:

"We are 98.5 [percent] identical to the chimpanzee, genetically speaking, and yet we live twice as long. So among a handful of genes, a handful of genes, are the genes which doubled our life span since the chimpanzees."

I had immediate doubts when I heard him say this last month on Democracy Now. I agree that there is almost certainly a genetic basis to aging and longevity, but it's not the whole story. The relevant differences between a chimpanzee's life and that of a human being in a developed nation are not wholly attributable to "a handful of genes," as Kaku suggests. If chimpanzees had access to modern plumbing, mountains of food, social services, hospitals and vaccines, I have no doubt that they would live longer.

But is Kaku's statement even correct? After hearing it repeated this morning, I decided to look into it. One study (which I only skimmed) by Jane Goodall and colleagues compared hunter-gatherer societies living today with wild chimps and concluded, "Modern human foragers generally have twice the life expectancy at birth and more than twice the life expectancy once they reach adulthood." But several other sources, like this one, report chimpanzees live to be 40-50 in the wild, which puts them in line with the 47-year life expectancy of humans living in developed countries in 1900. I suspect that some of the discrepancies arise from different definitions of life expectancy. I think we should continue to investigate the genetic and evolutionary roots of longevity, but not without considering other important factors.

I stumbled upon the user dictionary on my Droid the other day and was amused by the list of words I've added in the months since I bought it:

• apeshit


• autoimmune


• BCR [bean, cheese and rice burrito]


• Bellingham


• chemophobia


• Chuckanut [a favorite scenic drive of mine]


• denominator


• electrophoresis


• eukaryote


• eukaryotic


• fibromyalgia


• Guadalajara


• Haha


• hell


• hematopoeisis [misspelled]


• Hooray


• I


• immunology


• johns517 [my university username]


• karaoke


• Mos [as in Mos Def]


• neurobiology


• patisserie


• protease


• SeaMar [a local community health center]


• sexologist


• smthg


• solubility