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I think the Q in QAnon stands for "quantum physics." I will never understand quantum physics and, accordingly, I'll never understand QAnon. Here's the latest in conspiracy theory quantum superimposition: "In yet another sign of an apparently fracturing QAnon movement, extremist attorney and QAnon conspiracy acolyte Lin Wood is now claiming that the “Stop the Steal” campaign complaining of vote fraud in the presidential election is a concoction of the “Deep State.” “After doing the research and connecting the dots, I have reached the conclusion that the Stop the Steal organization is a Deep State organization to raise money for purposes other than to FIX 2020. … WATCH OUT for anyone affiliated with Stop the Steal. Every lie will be revealed,” Wood wrote on the right-wing social media platform Telegram Friday, Rolling Stone and Newsweek reported." "Stop the Steal" is the Schrödinger's cat of conspiracy theories. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/li...

As a geneticist, I am troubled by the promiscuous use of the word "mutation" to describe amino acid or nucleotide differences from a reference sequence. In nearly all cases, there is no known functional significance attached to these differences. Accordingly, the differences are best referred to as "variants," not mutations. I've had my genome sequenced and I have a variant call file based on that sequence. I know all the amino acid variants in my genome compared to the reference human genome, and I've checked for variants associated with risk for disease (mutations); so far, none detected. But our ability to detect variants runs far ahead of our ability to assign significance to them (or alternatively, to confidently say they are neutral). There's a lot of concern and chin scratching over the Omicron variant of COVID that was recently discovered in Africa: "Dr. Dan Barouch, head of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deacone...

“ . . . researchers looked at the average cognition scores of over 30,000 adults in the US aged 50 and older. The scores were then broken down by generations: the Greatest Generation (born 1890 to 1923), the Early Children of Depression (born 1924 to 1930), the Late Children of Depression (born 1931 to 1941), the War Babies (born 1942 to 1947), the Early-Baby Boomers (born 1948 to 1953), and the Mid-Baby Boomers (born 1954 to 1959). “Cognitive sharpness appeared to improve generation after generation, starting with the so-called greatest generation (born 1890-1923) and peaking among war babies (born 1942-1947). However, scores started to slip in the early baby boomers (born 1948-1953) and further decreased in the mid-baby boomers (born 1954-1959). This remained true across people from all races, ethnicities, education levels, and financial wealth.” *snip* “So, what could explain this trend? The researchers suggest that the lower cognition scores among baby boomers in the study were mos...

  I think we should all take a few moments today to remember the -true- meaning of Thanksgiving. How a small group of intrepid people crossed a storm-tossed North Atlantic Ocean in 1776 aboard the SS Minnow under the brave leadership of Captain Merrill Stuebing to finally land and set foot on the Rock of Gibraltar. And how if it weren't for Tonto and his gift of corn, there wouldn't have been any tortilla chips for the salsa to munch on during the football games.

  There have been a few GOP politicians who have been willing to stand up to Trump and his win-at-any-price cult. Most of them are either out of office, announced that they are retiring or refusing to run for Congress. Liz Cheney is a kind of exception, although she voted with Trump over 90% of the time when he was in the WH. Chris Sununu is saying some good words, but since he's opted out of a Senate run, he's an outsider. Until there are Republicans willing to stand for country over party, things won't improve. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/new-hampshire-sununu-republicans-backlash-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-gosar-censure?fbclid=IwAR03Q6-_rvU6GhRNhkmNk4RNo27BHCb2l62k_-JklRKsC-GvE9AChTsYNfA

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) immunotherapies are transforming leukemia therapy. My Lovely And Talented Wife® has been working with the FDA on CAR-T trials at Washington University. Now, they appear to be providing transformative results with autoimmune disease as well: "Following the therapy, the CAR-T cell numbers rapidly increased and remained circulating in her system. This then resulted in a rapid depletion of B-cells and autoantibodies thought to be the cause of the autoimmune symptoms. Just six months after the treatment, Thu-Thao V is in complete remission and has returned to sports, something that she was unable to do while the joint pain, heart palpitations, and renal issues were present. She no longer requires drugs, and all her symptoms have disappeared. "This is a massive breakthrough in immunotherapy, presenting an in vivo use of CAR-T cell therapy to put a young girl with a severe autoimmune disease into complete remission for a long period of time a...

Curious about the supply chain problem? Wonder when it will go away? Read this. Yes, it's long. But if you really want to understand, this will repay the effort. Here's a teaser graf: "People who want their deliveries in a reasonable time are going to have to start paying premium rates. There will be levels of priority, and each increase in rate premium essentially jumps that freight ahead of all the freight with lower or no premium rates. Unless the lack of shipping infrastructure is resolved, things will back up in a cascading effect to the point where if your products are going general freight, you might wait a month or two for delivery. It’s already starting. If you use truck shipping in any way, you’ve no doubt started to see the delays. Think about what’s going to happen to holiday season shipping." https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-i-will-tell-you-why-america-s-shipping-crisis-will-not-end-bbe0ebac6a91

I just finished reading “The thistle and the drone” by Akbar Ahmed. I learned about this book when Noam Chomsky endorsed it in an interview I watched recently online. I wanted to learn more about the circumstances that led to 9/11 and the current “war on terror.” The author is a former civil administrator in Pakistan charged with managing tribal affairs in Waziristan. He has built on the lessons he learned by immersing himself in the tribal culture and avoiding violent confrontations between the government and tribes through a deep understanding of the needs and circumstances of the people under his administration. In this book, he surveys the global conflicts of the past few centuries through this lens. The “thistle” in the title refers to the prickly tribal people who have inhabited for centuries the deserts and mountains on the peripheries of modern nations. In isolation, they have devised their own laws, judges, and problem-solving strategies. Often, they are linked by lineage and ...

Chris Christie is trying to burnish his political image by dumping on Trump now that Trump is out of office. But the memory of the intertubes is long, and it remembers Christie as a Trump enabler and apologist. So has Christie changed his tune and admitted regrets? Not at all: "So the responsibility I'll take is I voted for him twice. I admit that and I wouldn't change my vote." Feh. https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/stop-helping-chris-christie-rehabilitate-his-image

Everybody knows that the WSJ editorial pages are just GOP propaganda. But the reporting, we're told, is solid and reliable. Uh, no. While not blatantly dishonest, the WSJ cherry-picks data to support conservative views. Today, Kevin Drum nails them on some clickbait on gold prices as evidence of inflation fears. The article shows a five-month chart that makes it look like gold has spiked dramatically. Kevin shows a graph of prices since January of 2019, which makes the latest "spike" look pretty unimpressive. But even Kevin misses the story on gold. The price of gold in nominal dollars is only slightly up over 10 years ago. In real dollars, that's a loss. I'm not sure what gold prices tell us on a day-to-day basis, but as a long term investment, this graph tells me to stay away. YMMV. https://jabberwocking.com/yet-more-inflation-hysteria-from-the-wall-street-journal-today/?fbclid=IwAR1u_ABnTBuGQtKSHREa5R_SzyQSm94GHAaUKItXnqCsK-PfFnIESg0GKGM

It’s always surprising to me when a term of scientific/medical jargon becomes part of public discourse. A recent example is “herd immunity.” Historically, epidemics like plague or smallpox would rage through a naïve population until enough survivors, who acquired resistance because of infection, made it impossible for the bacteria or virus to jump to another naïve victim. The epidemic would end, but it would re-appears when the next generation of unexposed people reached adulthood. A concomitant of herd immunity through natural infections is death, and in the case of polio, the survivors often have lifelong disability. Enter vaccination. Thanks to vaccines, herd immunity can be achieved without the massive loss of life that attends herd immunity through infection. Smallpox was eradicated because of vaccines. Polio is close to extinction because of vaccines. The anti-vaxxers have hijacked the idea of herd immunity for political purposes. Setting aside some the more risible claims—the va...

You may have read that palm oil production is bad for the environment. But in the latest issue of Nature, there's another reason to avoid palm oil--it promotes cancer metastasis. In case you don't know, in most cancer cases, it's not the primary tumor that kills, it's the metastases. So now two good reasons to be on the lookout for palm oil, at least in processed foods. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/palm-oil-encourages-cancer-to-spread-through-the-body-suggests-mouse-study/?fbclid=IwAR1IamATyo9XhOBK29OlGAuf5V7KIhrUBDp0mn8Rgna8mlGB9NYUpikF2Eg

Quote from a New Yorker article entitled "The Green Dream": In 1976, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration published a study predicting how quickly nuclear fusion could become a reality, depending on how much money was invested in the field. For around nine billion a year in today’s dollars—described as the “Maximum Effective Effort”—it projected reaching fusion energy by 1990. The scale descended to about a billion dollars a year, which the study projected would lead to “Fusion Never.” “And that’s about what’s been spent,” the British physicist Steven Cowley told me. “Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there.”

I haven't seen the polls on how many people "believe" in gravity, a heliocentric solar system or the second law of thermodynamics. "Over the last decade, the percentage of American adults who believe in evolution has risen from 40 percent to 54 percent in 2019. This newfound acceptance, the authors suggest, is due to an increase in education. “Almost twice as many Americans held a college degree in 2018 as in 1988,” said co-author Mark Ackerman. “It’s hard to earn a college degree without acquiring at least a little respect for the success of science.”" https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/majority-of-americans-now-accept-evolution-according-to-new-study/?fbclid=IwAR2mT6hA3-Kwe0LVW6lF5F9DeefGW_JxoWgZmVJu80lzqlRrtD2dORgz9mM

Apparently Rafael "Ted" Cruz thinks America's problem is Big Bird. And Josh Hawley thinks America's problem is the leftists are causing men to cower, give up work and turn to porn. I guess Joe Biden *has* really solved the nation's problems if the GOP leadership has to resort to bleating about Sesame Street and testosterone. Seems like "leftism" is the new "communism" and everybody on the right wants to be Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. A few years ago, a colleague in our history department published a screed about the threat of leftism on college campuses. It got a shout-out from the Wall Street Journal, so my chairman sent the link to the WSJ to me and our VP for Research. I read the book. Like Cruz and Hawley, our Professor sees "leftists" at the gates, sapping our precious bodily fluids. I found it amusing in a pathetic sort of way, so I wrote an Amazon review which still has the largest number of "helpful" clicks. Here's ...

I'm old enough to remember double-digit inflation. Compared to that, current "inflation" is nothing. Furthermore, inflation is great if you're a borrower. If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, you're paying it off in cheaper and cheaper dollars as the years roll by. Who's worried about inflation? Lenders. The people controlling the hyperventilating inflation narrative are bankers who *never* want any inflation because they are borrowing short and lending long. And their lobbyists and PR folks can always find some "real working Americans" to complain about the price of milk. Funny, nobody ever complains that their house went up in value while their mortgage payments stayed the same. Everything I've read by responsible and knowledgeable people suggests that this current uptick in inflation is temporary. If you're a retired boomer on fixed income, your SS payments are corrected for inflation. So don't fall for the right-wing GOP propaganda that...

One of the things my Lovely And Talented Wife® and I agree on is the clock change. It's just not a big deal. We both grew up on the western edge of the Eastern Time zone, with the temporal distortion that implies. Fifty miles west meant an hour earlier. A one hour change is nothing. I've traveled across eight or more time zones many times, and jet lag is a thing. Less daylight in the winter, though, is a latitude problem. If it bothers you, the answer is to move closer to the equator.

I've seen a few posts recently on FB accusing democrats of being socialist and/or warning of encroaching socialism. Sorry, folks, but socialism is already here and has been living in our midst for decades! Indeed, many of those who warn us of socialism have lived under it gratefully, and continue to live under it even as they bleat about it. The US military is a socialist institution. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/06/09/want-socialism-try-us-military

Predictions are hard, especially about the future. I love reading predictions, with the hope that I'll live long enough to find out whether they were true and if not, why not. Here's a prediction about increased food prices next year: "Looking toward next year farmers are now scrambling to find the inputs, figure out what the best thing to plant for the return will be, how much they can afford to plant, and ultimately thinking about the dramatic increase of overhead costs and the loans associated with all of it. . . .short term base inputs into all manner of the food system will increase again. Sustained inflation in food costs is likely going to stick around a lot longer than anticipated. To top it all off, we will most likely see operations cease, go bankrupt as their return on crops might not be enough to cover their loans. Interesting times ahead as the interconnectiveness of energy, food, and consumer spending shows pains from a broken system." https://angrybear...

  Turning the corner (and not in a good way) Looks like COVID-19 cases are starting to increase again in the cooler states. However, we're reaching 70% of adults being fully vaccinated, and some indeterminate number of adults who are at least partially protected by having recovered from infection. ". . . there are significantly fewer people susceptible to infection at present than there were 4 or 12 months ago, so I strongly suspect this winter’s wave will not be as bad as either last winter’s, or Delta." https://angrybearblog.com/2021/11/coronavirus-dashboard-for-november-2-the-winter-wave-has-begun#more-82104

OK, it's the day after Halloween, so if you're reading this, you survived. Back in 2017, I published a review of the book "The Science of Near-Death Experiences" by John Hagan, III. John is the editor of Missouri Medicine, and asked me to review this book, which he edited. I'm a skeptic, and the book is heavily skewed towards the subjective, metaphysical explanations, so writing this review was one part science and one part politics. To his credit, John published the review with minimal edits. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140209/?report=classic&fbclid=IwAR1zzU54C3s71b6QQiQaU7Q7kissj5Y01lT1SDm40AlS7HJO2d3NOgIy5oY