Ranting and Roaring

This one’s for you Joey:

CBC:

A vegan couple in Atlanta have been sentenced to life in prison for the death of their malnourished six-week-old boy, who was fed a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice.

Superior Court Judge L.A. McConnell imposed the automatic life sentences Tuesday on 27-year-old Jade Sanders and 31-year-old Lamont Thomas.

Their son, Crown Shakur, weighed only 3½ pounds when he died of starvation on April 25, 2004.

Sanders and Thomas were convicted on May 2 of charges of murder and cruelty to children.

Defence lawyers said the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to the lifestyle of vegans, who typically don’t consume or use any animal products.

Savage retards.

Barack Obama (via Kathy and a cast of thousands):

In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser.

But Boosh is still #1 Hitler!

The Faithful Heritic:

[Reid] Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

CBC reports:

Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy was elected as France’s new president in a runoff election Sunday, according to partial results that led his Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, to concede defeat.

Defeated challenger and Canadian-politics-interferer Royal issued the following statement:

It’s so much more interesting this way! (Via Dynamist).

I’ve now exactly quantified how rich and famous I want to be.

The Globe and Mail this weekend reported on what may be a major breakthrough in stupidity cancer prevention:

But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren’t caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are “looking for a bogeyman that doesn’t exist,” argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world’s top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor “is more likely a lack of vitamin D.”

[...] A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn’t take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

There you go: quit smoking, take an aspirin every day and make sure either by supplements or by sunlight exposure make sure you get sufficient Vitamin D and you’re likely to live longer and healthier. The beautiful thing is that the latter two items are pretty easy to do. What has the establishment been focusing on in the meantime? Statistically meaningless improvements to our life, such as banning home use of pesticides and reducing your exposure to second-hand smoke, all more about hairshirt-morality than health or science.

And on the subject of the establishment:

In light of emerging research on the benefits of vitamin D, the Canadian Cancer Society said Monday that Canadians could consider brief, unprotected exposure to the sun, increased dietary intake of the vitamin and the use of supplements.

Keep in mind that, if the Vitamin D science holds up, various cancer societies 30-SPF sunblock no-sun-is-too-much-sun recommendations puts them in the same place as doctors who developed and prescribed thalidomide in the late 50′s/early 60′s.

An interview with Derya Unutmaz, on the process of how life extension could be achieved. Unutmaz writes one of my favorite blogs, Biosingularity.

We might be alive a lot longer than we think after we die:

Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn’t lost blood. All that’s happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of “clinical death”—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller “How We Die,” the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn’t be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that “astounding” discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine’s newest frontiers: treating the dead.

[...] mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body’s primary defense against cancer. “It looks to us,” says Becker, “as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die.”

[...] When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he’s lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? “We give them oxygen,” Becker says. “We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it’s taking up more oxygen.” Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

There may be chemical angles opened for exploration here too, i.e. to temporarily suppress apoptosis.

Brief notes on Sixteen Candles:

• the movie is much more on sweet and a lot less on story than I remember
• funny that I remember Long Duk Dong so well, considering how inessential he is to the movie
• Molly Ringwald really didn’t act that well; very self-consious
• considering the period, the music is totally forgetable
• cultural changes in the last 23 years are amazing (no wonder social engineers feel empowered!):
• • it looks like Mike is setting up Farmer Ted to date-rape his girlfriend
  • the family smoking at the breakfast table!
  • no one puts on seat belts
  • wood paneling on cars
• on the other hand, Ringwald says “aces” which is still pretty cool
• funny that the male lead really didn’t make much of a career of it
• the technology is funny:
• • floppy disks are expensive (this day will come again, from rarity)
  • the camera is a Polaroid instant
  • the car phone is huge and clunky (and a sign of wealth)
• the DVD forces you to watch ads, with no option of fast forwarding or going to menu or skipping. It’s unbelievable how I see red when this happens.

We’d probably see Elizabeth May giving a speech like this in a few years, if she become leader of a combined Liberal, NDP and Green party:

CBC reports:

British doctors say they have made the world’s first surgical attempt to treat a human sight disorder using gene therapy.

The patient, Robert Johnson, 23, has an inherited disorder called Leber’s congenital amaurosis. The disorder, linked to a mutation in a gene called RPE65, is thought to lead to degeneration in the retina — the layer of cells at the back of the eye that detects light.

[...] The doctors — Prof. Robin Ali of the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and his colleagues at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London — said they injected non-defective copies of the RPE65 gene under the retina in one of Johnson’s eyes.

A harmless virus was used to deliver the gene into the cells.

[...] However, it will be months before the team knows whether the approach worked for Johnson.

If I remember correctly from earlier gene therapy tests, the real trick is whether the genes don’t get spliced into the wrong spot and cause nasty cancer. Maybe they’ve worked around this, which would be great news as there’s many nasty diseases that may be treatable by gene therapy.