The MMR Vaccine and Autism

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I never knew how the vaccination/autism link first started. It seemed to be ridiculous: a plausible idea that was tested and found lacking, but that a few very loud voices insisted on believing anyway. So I was interested to hear about The Facts in the Case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a short comic-strip-panel-style treatise which tries to explain exactly what happened and when.

It explains a lot about the anti-vaccination movement. I understand where they’re coming from now, and even sympathize with them. But in this case, they’re completely misguided: “Big Pharma” doesn’t have the kind of power their fevered imaginings assign it. No one does. You can’t hide a conspiracy that big for that long, too many people would have to be involved, and there are too many ethical people who would blow the whistle on it even if it destroyed their lives. The only people doing any purported whistle-blowing here stand to profit from it.

This whole thing is appalling, but I’m deliberately not putting it into the Amusing/Interesting/Appalling category. It’s too appalling for that.

(Via the always-interesting forgetomori)

“Meet Darius, the world’s biggest rabbit”

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The old joke goes: “lucky rabbit’s foot? It wasn’t so lucky for the rabbit!” But it looks like having four of them is lucky for at least one. 😉 But the owner… $16,000 in plastic surgery, just to look like a character from a one-off eighties movie? I guess she thinks it’s worth it…

(Hm, maybe not so one-off… there may be a sequel in the works. We’ll see.)

“Cybercrooks befuddled by Icelandic volcano name”

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Malware authors are always trying to trick you into opening their craptastic payloads, often using the latest news headlines. But it seems that they didn’t care for the volcano story a few weeks ago:

Eyjafjallajökull, despite being arguably the biggest news story of the year so far, is simply too difficult to spell for most surfers, let alone virus writer types not known for their mastery of grammar and punctuation.

So all we have to do to solve the virus problem is ensure that any news story includes a vital term that nobody can spell or pronounce. Sounds like a plan to me. 😉

“$3 hand-powered suction device quickly heals wounds”

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Thus proving that it’s a good thing that life sucks. 😉

(Seriously, I can’t wrap my head around the idea that suction like this could help wounds heal faster. I don’t know of any mechanism that could possibly explain it. And as Isaac Asimov is quoted as saying, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'”)

“Hone Your Eye for Fake Online Reviews”

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It’s always a good idea to be on the lookout for fraud, of any kind. Where there’s money to be had, there’s incentive to make your product look a lot better than it really is, or to try to cover up flaws.

When I look online for a product, I generally look for bad reviews, and read those carefully to see if the things that the reviewer are complaining about would affect me. It usually works out quite well, as it did when GoddessJ and I recently helped her mother pick out a new printer.

A primary advantage is that it avoids any kind of fake-review fraud. No one is going to post bad fake reviews for their products — they’re a lot harder to fake, because you have to be very specific about what you didn’t like, and it’s hard to come up with things that could be called bad, but that people wouldn’t care about, without sounding very artificial. And if you do get a nasty customer who posts bad reviews for no reason, it’s generally pretty easy to spot by comparing them with legitimate bad reviews.

Also, sometimes you’ll find the bad reviews on the manufacturer’s own site, along with their rebuttals, which can be very informative… I tend to trust a manufacturer that accepts public criticism, and defends against it in public, a lot more than one that deletes any post or article critical of their product. The former are as rare as hen’s teeth, and there are far too many of the latter.

“Australian seniors ask Pirate Party for help in accessing right-to-die sites”

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This is exactly why organizations like the Pirate Party or Wikileaks need to be kept around — because even if they espouse illegal or semilegal behaviors, or provide a safe haven for whistleblowers to air the proverbial dirty laundry, they act as a check to governments and the corporations that essentially run them. If they weren’t around, there’s a lot better chance that our laws would be dictated entirely by Microsoft, Apple, the RIAA and MPAA, the big banks, and other large and well-heeled organizations.

(And no, they aren’t already, though it may seem like they are. Those organizations are trying to dictate laws in their favor at our expense, but they’re kept somewhat in check because we know about them. If they could operate in secrecy, they’d be far worse. I’ve said it before, if governments and big corporations had known just how much power the Internet would give the average Joe, they’d have strangled it in its cradle.)

“Researchers Rediscover Duh”

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From the Dilbert Blog:

[…] I have a related hypothesis. I believe that political conservatives can be identified by their faces, even after you control for haircuts and eyeglasses. Not all the time, of course, but more than chance. (Another way to say the same thing is that political liberals can be identified by their looks.) Have you ever noticed that?

Duh again. 🙂 Here’s my take on it: hard-core conservatives are afraid of everything different — that’s what makes them conservative. That fear triggers the fight-or-flight response, and habitual expressions leave traces on a person’s face, so hard-core conservatives inevitably bear the traces of being habitually afraid or angry, or at least disapproving. (I don’t know my mother’s political orientation — she’d never tell us — but she’s habitually disapproving of anything different, and her face shows it, so I strongly suspect she’s a political conservative. GoddessJ and I also knew a hard-core conservative family at one point, before they decided that we were too different for them and cut us off, and all but the youngest son definitely had the habitually-angry-or-afraid thing down pat.)

By the same token, I’ve noticed that liberals don’t feel threatened by things that are different, and even when they have no interest in practicing the differences themselves, they tend to want to know something about them. Hard-core liberals (of which I know at least one — c-square, you know him too, and I’ll bet you can identify him with no more clue than that 🙂 ) are habitually interested, and that tends to leave detectable traces on their faces as well.

It wouldn’t work all the time, and it wouldn’t work reliably on more middle-of-the-road people, but in my experience it’s pretty accurate.