pgcudahy

This is frustrating that it's marketed as FDA approved but people won't recognize that it is regulated as a medical device, which have to only show safety, rather than as a drug, which have to show safety *and* efficacy.

OMG, I went down the rabbit hole on this paper and it is bonkers. Their methodology is amateur hour. It's just an uncontrolled non-validated survey sent out by an activist group. What is their list of survey recipients based on? What were the demographic differences between responders and nonresponders? It's the science equivalent of a political push-poll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll)

The first author is a business executive who launched a huge class-action against Merck without disclosing it in this paper, the only veterinarian in the authors has been cited for practicing without a license (https://www.ocregister.com/2021/10/26/founder-of-hemopet-in-...) and the senior author is an orthopedic surgeon with no relation to the field and has maybe one other publication.

Come on, this is not a serious paper.

Not at normal doses. The therapeutic window is narrow, but they're used in millions of animals and we're not seeing an epidemic of seizures. https://www.merckvetmanual.com/toxicology/insecticide-and-ac...

They target gamma-aminobutyric acid chloride channels (GABACl) that aren't present in mammals. There is a relatively narrow therapeutic index in animals, but generally felt to be safe at approved doses. They're given to millions of animals, so we'd probably know if there was a problem.

"I have not witnessed one machinist harmed by lead in 40 years." Do you know what you're looking for? Lead poising can be subtle but eventually devastating. This is like the asbestos industry saying that miners didn't get harmed because they didn't follow up with them years later when mesothelioma slowly strangled them.

Has anyone tried the new anker or ecoflow lithium portable power stations as a UPS?

To get full approval they could combine this with animal efficacy studies like they did for the smallpox treatment tecoviromat, since you can’t give smallpox to trial participants either. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6663070/

It turned out to be really useful to have tecoviromat for the recent mpox outbreak

I've got it running from a Pi3 with no issues serving to multiple roku clients simultaneously. I'm also really happy with how the roku client has gone from just working to well polished in the past year, even on my first gen device.

I would think of Henry Ford and the assembly line just prior to this period as the birth of modern manufacturing. Moving from artisans doing most or all of the work on an item to individuals repeating one process repeatedly as the product moves down an assembly line. So I think it was a very relevant question for the period of how designers could adapt to it. The article just claims they didn’t really have any experience with these new methods.

There seems to be no analysis of whether these are neutralizing antibodies. The idea of using serology for immunity certificates or "golden tickets" is never going to go well. Even with 99.9% specificity, if the population prevalence is 1%, 10% of positives will be false positives. If in real world testing, specificity is 99% and population prevalence is 1%, then 50% of positives are false positives.

I think the last elections argue against that https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/world/asia/taiwan-electio...

With only 58% sensitivity and 2 false positives for every true positive, this is going to be like the automated drug interaction checks that we all click through because they are too many false positives

These articles are posted monthly and I love them. Great in-depth histories.

In this article and others I've read, people complain about the tidyverse's lack of performance, but I think that places too much emphasis on speed of execution versus speed of development. As an academic, most of the R users I know only code as a portion of their scientific projects. Besides data analysis we're doing data collection, manuscript writing and grant writing. The tidyverse's more english-like syntax (eg select() versus `[`) and following a series of pipes rather than unnesting ten sets of brackets makes it so much easier to come back to my code after a few weeks or months and pick up where I left off, or to work with other people's code. My time is more valuable than computer time so the tidyverse is my choice.

This article is based on the work of Richard Weller who is trying to monetize them at Relaxsol[relaxsol.com]. I didn't find any disclosure of this in the article.

The mainstream view is in a paragraph buried deep: "“I don’t argue with their data,” says David Fisher, chair of the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But I do disagree with the implications.” The risks of skin cancer, he believes, far outweigh the benefits of sun exposure. “Somebody might take these conclusions to mean that the skin-cancer risk is worth it to lower all-cause mortality or to get a benefit in blood pressure,” he says. “I strongly disagree with that." It is not worth it, he says, unless all other options for lowering blood pressure are exhausted. Instead he recommends vitamin D pills and hypertension drugs as safer approaches."

This series of longform articles is incredible. The first batch are on the history of the switch and probably add up to a shortish book in length. There's a nice focus on how at several steps there were many who discovered a new innovation, but there were fewer who had a clear grasp of what their innovation meant and could carry the field forward. Can't wait for this author to publish a book.

Looks like it's at stage two in the science hype cycle. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174 I'll pay attention when a randomized control study shows that supplementing vitamin D lowers rates of autism.

For biomedical research supported by the US NIH they require it to be posted to PubMed central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) within 6 months of publication. Since so many biomedical papers have at least some NIH funding the journals all went along with it.

It won't be catastrophic but it could affect them. Most pacemakers have a mode that if you put a magnet on them they revert to pacing at 60 beats per minute (VVI mode) like a metronome rather than more advanced adaptive modes (like DDD mode). That's how if a doctor suspects it's malfunctioning due to bad sensing they can get it into a basic mode. I've done it in the ER when a pacer was freaking out and going way too fast due to bad sensing.

"Its well established that no vaccine has an effect that lasts longer than seven years"

Wrong. Every vaccine has a different level of immunigenicity that effects how long it is protective for but some certainly last longer that seven years. Factors such as whether the vaccine is protein conjugated or has other adjuvants can determine this. This article is about measles and one study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2393239/) found that immunity lasts at least 15 years

"The reason we immunize children is because their hygiene practices are poorer than most adults and they are a marginalized class" No, we immunize children because they are often more vulnerable to disease. It is an adult parent's duty to protect them and vaccines are part of that

"For a recent example look at Ebola. Many people simply can't get it because they are too healthy. This is why ebola never went anywhere in the USA and many other countries." I don't even know where to begin. Two nurses who went to incredible lengths to wear protective gowns still contracted the virus in Texas. It was only due to a massive public health effort in keeping track of every contact that the virus was contained.

"It was known by pharma companies that the live attenuated virus would become a full strength virus in the child's stool. Look it up, I remember at least one American woman catching it from changing a diaper and it was in the news. Now we use dead virus because of people like her" There is distorting the use of the Salk live vaccine and the Sabin killed vaccine. In very high incidence areas a live vaccine is used since it is transmissible so that even without perfect vaccine coverage, the vaccine strain will spread further in the population. This does very rarely cause clinical disease but the feeling is that this is much safer than letting the wild-type strain circulate. Once a population is polio free and the wild-type strain is no longer circulating, the killed vaccine is then used to stop spread of the attenuated live vaccine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Oral_vaccine)

"Vaccines are a great tool. Like any tool they should be voluntary." Would you argue that parents should also have a voluntary choice whether to place their children in car seats?

"please note that no one died" The ones at risk of dying are infants and thanks to a robust public health effort they were able to be quarantined. It would have saved a ton of time and effort if people had simply been immunized. Prior to the measles vaccine there were dozens of deaths each year to measles. No one has ever died from measles vaccine.

Why did Blackstone agree to go through this shady guy rather than just make the deal themselves? What does he bring to the deal?

The link is not to Damien's AnkiMobile which is the legit Anki for the iphone (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id3734...) but to some other Anki I've never heard of.

These calculators aren't just pulled from thin air, they use studies of various populations over time to derive a mathematical model that predicts the cardiovascular risk of a patient. The article is pretty muddled but it appears that two authors of a commentary in the Lancet are arguing with which studies were included in making the models. The big problem is that the commentary hasn't been published yet so there's no way to evaluate whether their criticisms are valid or not. So long story short, this is a crummy summary of an article that we're not able to read yet so not really worth your time.

This is pure quackery. The cholesterol -> heart disease framework was developed by the Framingham studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Heart_Study) that showed a strong correlation between cholesterol and heart attacks and strokes. Now correlation does not equal causation but decades of subsequent studies have shown that cardiac event rates drop linearly with decrease in LDL (a form of cholesterol) (http://www.nature.com/nrcardio/journal/v8/n12/fig_tab/nrcard...). It has culminated so far in the JUPITER trial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JUPITER_trial) where people with "normal" LDL levels and no history of heart disease were able to decrease their heart attack risk with statins by driving their LDL even lower. The whole inflammation stuff came into play because JUPITER also looked at an inflammatory marker called CRP. Now, that angle is still controversial but could play a role. However, it does not invalidate the dozens of studies linking cholesterol to heart disease. Plus there is nothing linking this guy's quack theories on nutrition to inflammation/CRP or ultimately to heart attacks.

I'm surprised that it made it this high on HN. Maybe people just love feeling that "freakanomics" feeling of mental superiority that they're willing to swallow any alternative hypothesis that challenges the norm. Maybe people just don't trust medical science.