Scare "tactics"

Hi Folks.

Been a while.

Let's jump right back in:

The movie-of-the-week is clearly getting ahead of the facts on the Times Square Bombing story. And that's because the movie version is clearly an order of magnitude more interesting than the reality, which, as I see it, boils down to this:

1. Some guy gets it into his head, somehow, to blow up Times Square.

2. He acquires a vehicle, and does much less to disguise its origins than your average high school car thief.

3. He buys some firecrackers, a couple of jugs of gasoline, and the propane tanks from a BBQ. Then, for good measure, he puts some dirt in the back of the car.

4. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't prove effective.

5. The entire US government mobilizes, to a degree you'd never see with even the worst case of non-"terrorist" mass murder, and catches the guy quite fast. Whereupon he confesses.


Instead, we get:

1. Muslim terrorist sleeper agent gets activated by the Taliban

2. He uses his months of training in terrorist camps in Pakistan to assemble a deadly WMD.

3. Only thanks to the eagle eye of one (two? three?) simple yet patriotic sidewalk vendors is America saved from cataclysm.

4. Obama tries to pin it all on a white man, while the Evil Terrorist plots his escape.

5. Massive fumbles almost allow Bin Laden Jr. to escape, and then, horror of horrors, he's allowed due process.


Taken together with the Christmas Day event in which the nation panicked when a man set his groin on fire, I don't know whether to be thrilled that this is the best our enemies can do, or to mourn the fact that this seems to be all they have to do to utterly destabilize the national discourse.

We demand that Iraq and Afghanistan, nations where real bombs actually detonate on a scale that's almost unimaginable, adopt a perfect democracy. But at the same time, we allow a couple of non-functional explosives wielded by borderline incompetents to derail our own democracy. When The Terrorists get us this excited with an M-80, they've won.

JEK
Calvinist outlook makes every day left unexploded into something of great wonder.

Cute little nothings

JEK
Wishes color choice was his only obstacle

The Senator from CT

Yup.



JEK
Unlike Joe Lieberman, looks more like himself than a sock puppet

Decision Tree (h/t L. Blair)



Re-linked

Hi Kids,

Facebook has been...not deactivated or disabled, exactly, but gravely injured by the IT department at my place of employment. The benefit to Science may be marginal, though, because the result is not a sudden uptick in pipetting, but a return to this blog as a repository of ripostes.

And thus, a backlog:

This is an essential piece of reading from the NYT re: the mathematics of preventive care and screening. Bear with the arithmetic...it's worth it for the comprehensive understanding of how Positive Predictive Values can change your life.

And this is a nice little shout-out to the cutting edge of modern surgery. Pointless? Probably. But fascinating all the same.

How 'bout that Lieberman?

-JEK
Say it ain't so, Joe

Spider Bites

This was sent my way by GD, a fellow surgery resident from Seattle. She and I both have spent many long nights tending to the epidemic of "spider bites" among a certain ungroomed set in that fair city. Those things are bad news. They cause horrible abscesses that drain terrible, terrible things onto the resident's shoes. On the upside, they inject heroin directly into your bloodstream.

These are its cousins:



JEK
Arachnophobe

Eric's Blog

My old friend Eric has moved to Berkeley for a Ph.D., but he's taking good advantage of his extracurricular time by growing an organic garden in his back yard. And blogging all about it. He's a regular Michael Pollan.

JEK
Irregular Michael Pollan (but just had some killer grass fed beef)

UBG Part 2

The saga continues...



JEK
Gotta learn to play an instrument (but not the tuba)

Sublimation 101

Attaboy.



JEK
Should learn to play the guitar

Lucky

JEK
Not Lucky

TJ

Back in my Chicago days, POHS and I used to take improv classes. POHS did a better job of it than I, and for much longer at multiple places. But when we first started out together, we went to ImprovOlympic and had the masterful TJ Jagodowski as our teacher. He's the guy on the left.

And now he's the well-deserving subject of a movie all his own!

JEK
Makes stuff up, but poorly by comparison

A little dash of hope for us all.

JEK
Glad to see that even as an older, single, cat owner, he may still have potential