Well, maybe, but probably not. Even though milk allergies in infants and very young toddlers are the most common food allergy, they still occur in only about 2.5 percent of the population in the US and other Western groups. For this reason, I was rather perplexed some months back when I encountered a group of eight mothers randomly assembled, three of whom had infants with milk allergies. Two of the mothers had started to eliminate all dairy from their diets, including eggs, in order to reduce the effects of the milk allergy on their infants. Who were breastfeeding.
Continue reading Milk allergy is the most common form of food allergy found in humans, but you don’t have one and neither does your baby
Monthly Archives: January 2011
The US House has just voted to repeal the health care reform law
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 245-189 to repeal President Obama’s health care law.
I’m sure I’m speaking to the converted here, but if you happen to live in a US Congressional district with one of those representatives who voted to repeal this law, I’d like to pass on one whopping big “Fuck You” for not doing enough in the last election.
And, if you don’t like that, feel free to send me one as well, because I live in one of those districts. My representative is a virtual clone of Michel Bachmann but without the big hair. And he will be hearing from me.
Two items of interest.
Of these three items, two will be of interest to you. Can’t tell which two, though:
“My roomate lives like a horseradish” … check out this web site that accumulates funny auto-correct mishaps.
Bill Gates beats Pope, Dali Lama in Popularity Contest (see this) just as Windows stops being THE operating system (see this).
Did you know that Joan Rivers got tossed off of Fox for criticizing Sarah Palin? See this.
The Genetics of Pesticide Resistant Bedbugs
Bedbugs (Insects of the Cimicidae family, commonly Cimex lectularius) are annoying, might carry diseases (though this is unclear, so probably nothing importat1, and are apparently becoming more common in the US. Interestingly, there has been very little study done of their genetics. A new study just out in PLoS ONE looks at the bedbug genome in an effort to better understand pesticide resistance in these pesky critters.
Continue reading The Genetics of Pesticide Resistant Bedbugs
Command line unit conversion
The Linux command ‘units’ may or may not be installed on your system. If not, if you use synaptic or apt, type (at the prompt)
sudo apt-get install units
or equiviliant for other distributions. Then type in the word “units” and play around. Here are a few sample outputs:
The program is a little clunky. You have to know the specific codes for each type of measurement, though ‘units’ will figure out what you mean sometimes. To exit, type ctrl-D. There is a way to use this utility in a script. That and other details are found in the manual.
14 year old kills most of his family with a butter knife and a small piece of twine
Since he is a minor his name has been withheld. The 14 year old boy in South Carolina called the police to tell them that he had attacked his father, his grandmother, and his great aunt. He told the police he’d be there when they arrived, possibly waiting outside. When police appeared on the scene they found the boy with his hands in the air out in front of the house, and inside were his dead father and dead great aunt, and a critically injured grandmother, all three attacked with a dull butter knife and a small piece of twine.
Continue reading 14 year old kills most of his family with a butter knife and a small piece of twine
Eocene Florida Plant Remains = Rethink Local Geology A Little
Sometimes interesting scientific evidence shows up in unexpected places. Years ago, there had been discussion of the possibility that immediate post glacial climate in the North Atlantic coastal region was unusually warm, but the evidence was spotty. Then, I was looking through material taken from a geotechnical boring placed to assess the geology of a part of Boston Harbor where a new tunnel was being planned, and found a large fragment of a clam embedded in clay. The clay was deposited during the last glacial maximum and later, and was associated with the melting of glaciers in the region. As a matter of routine, I gave it to Russell Barber, a mollusk expert and, at the time, my boss. He identified it as a species of razor clam found these days no farther north than the Carolinas. And thus, yet another piece of spotty evidence!
Continue reading Eocene Florida Plant Remains = Rethink Local Geology A Little
Xfce 4.8 released
Xfce 4.8 released after nearly two years of development. Hopefully, there are no added features or functionality! (That’s a joke.)
(In fact, there is a loss of functionality for BSD users who implement the *nix desktop environment. But let’s not even talk about that problem because it opens a whole ‘nuther can of worms.)
Xfce is a Linux desktop enviornment like Gnome or KDE, but supposedly leaner and meaner, and thus more suitable where few bells and whistles are required, or older hardware is being used. If you are a Ubuntu user or otherwise familar with Linux, you’ve heard of Xubuntu. Xfce is the “X” in Xubuntu.
There are all kinds of improvements and changes, and you can find out more about it here.
There was an interesting article in Linux Journal comparing desktops in which memory use was compared between a pristine instantiation of Gnome and a pristine instantiation of Xfce (i.e., turn the computer on and don’t do anything yet). They were essentially the same. Despite what everyone seems to say, Xfce is not a stripped down desktop environment. A distribution like Xubuntu gets its leanness and its meanness not from the desktop being highly efficient, but from the applications that are default to the distro being selectively low-demand.
I’ve tried Xfce a few times but noticed that there was no palpable improvement in efficiency on an older machine compared to Gnome, but certain functionality was missing, so I’ve not gone back. I am toying with the idea of skipping the “desktop” thing entirely and going with a simple window manager and nothing more on my laptop. However, now that Xfce is out in a new version, I suppose I’ll give it a try.
Gervais on Last Year’s Rejected Godwinning
At the expense of Mel Gibson:
Continue reading Gervais on Last Year’s Rejected Godwinning
Vaccination vs. Disease: Which is worse?
It is very reasonable for a parent to worry about vaccines. For one thing, most of them involve sticking the baby or child with a sharp object, thus making the little one cry, and it would be abnormal to not have an automatic reaction to that. For another thing, they are drugs, in a sense. When the little one is ill, and you call in to the health care facility in the hopes that there will be some useful advice, most of the time you hear “No, we no longer recommend giving [fill in the blank with a medicine you thought might work] to children under [one or two months older than your child]. But if [symptom] persists for more than [amount of time that is 12 hours longer than the symptoms ever persist], call back.”
Continue reading Vaccination vs. Disease: Which is worse?
4 ur amusement
Firefox 4 Beta 9 bodes well sucks
Firefox Four is nearing readiness for your use. There are a massive 661 bug fixes, a number people are very excited about, but you’ve got to ask: How do you get that many unfixed bugs to begin with??? One of the features I’m looking forward is tabs in the title bar. I’m tired of giving up vertical screen real estate to the title bar, a few tool bars, a menu bar, a tab bar, and then within the web site, a banner add, a fancy decorative banner I don’t need to see, etc. etc. When I look at my own blog on my lap top, I have to scroll down to see the title of the post! Tabs in the otherwise useless title bar will be nice start.
It is said by those who have tested it that Firefox 4 will start up very quickly and run very snappily.
Unless you use Linux. Check out this and links therein. Blaming the victim. There is nothing wrong with X in Linux. It’s the oldest most stable GUI’s in use. Linux desktop effects and bells and whistles are copied by other OS’s. This is Firefox not caring about Linux or the Open Source community. Time to switch browsers.
Current Carnivals in Nature and Science
A blog carnival is a moving periodic blog posting collecting current entries in a particular topic, designed to give blog readers a list of things to do that they really do want to do. Current carnivals of which I’m aware are Berry Go Round, which is about plants; Carnival of the Blue, which is about stuff in the ocean; I and the bird, which is about birds, Festival of the Trees, which is about, you guessed it, trees; and Circus of the Spineless, which is about invertebrates such as insects and slugs and so on.
Visit these carnivals, click on the links therein, and enjoy.
Interesting technology news items
Virgin Mobile’s “unlimited broadband” will be limited, as the communication company goes back on its deal with customers. “Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices…” I don’t see that as a difficult choice at all. Drop Virgin Mobile, or, if you don’t use it, don’t consider it. Details here.
The first computer that stored apps to run on itself, EDSAC, will be rebuilt at Bletchley Park. “The EDSAC was two metres high and its 3,000 vacuum tubes took up four metres of floor space. It could perform 650 instructions per second and all data input was via paper tape.” Details here.
Steve Chang, the Chairman of Trend Micro, is a moron. He makes the stupid old and disproved claim that Open Source is inherently insecure.
Don’t mess with Sarah Palin or you will be sent to prison. “A man who broke into Sarah Palin’s e-mail has been imprisoned – despite being told he might be spared jail… David Kernell, 23, was found guilty last year of illegally accessing Mrs Palin’s e-mail during the 2008 presidential campaign. At the time, a judge suggested he should serve his year-long sentence in a halfway house.” But he’s going to the big house anyway.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, the JFK library will release the largest on line digital presidential library ever. Details.
Interview with Tom Clark, Center for Naturalism
Tom W. Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism and author of Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses
Free will, as you know, does not really exist, and this has important implications for thinking about morality and so called “world views.” Naturalism is a philosophy that addresses this seeming difficulty. The interview will be conducted by Atheist Talk Radio producer and host, Mike Huabrich. With Miked in the interview seat, Scott Lohman will host the show. Details are here.