Obama and McCain on autism-vaccine pseudoscience

Both candidates talk about an autism-vaccine link. Schmuck Talk Express™ John McCain is far, far worse, indicating that a link is proven (it’s not) and that this link is the thimerosal preservative (disproven more than once, with links within the Post link above).

Obama isn’t nearly as bad, but he too says the science is inconclusive and is either ignorant or is schwaffling.

Kevin Drum has a hot and pretty solid discussion of this, which is getting a lot of comments.

For more of my earlier blogging on how this is a combination of a rediagnosis of schizoid disorder of childhood as Asperger’s syndrome, with a rising overdiagnosis of Asperger’s as full-spectrum autism (which is, IMO given the amount of hysteria about autism, a reasonable assumption), see here.

Over at Huffington Post, David Kirby has an excellent overview of a March conference call that was, as he says, held “between vaccine safety officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several leading experts in vaccine safety research, and executives from America's Health Insurance Plans, (the HMO trade association) to discuss childhood mitochondrial dysfunction and its potential link to autism and vaccines.”

Now, while not endorsing quackery, he does show how much quackery is out there on this issue:

They say that corn oil and syrup are inflammatory.

Really? Then why didn’t Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors find a continent full of autistic American Indians?

As for “childhood mitochondrial dysfunction,” that’s a new enough subject matter that Wikipedia doesn’t even have an entry for it, and even Google only has 721 hits.

As for what may cause “childhood mitochondrial dysfunction,” this blog lists:

mercury, aluminum, pollution, pesticides, medicines
and prenatal alcohol exposure have all been shown to damage mitochondria.

So, why don’t we ask moms if they were spraying chemicals on the lawn or garden while they were pregnant, or had a toddler in tow?

Or, why don’t we ask how much they drank while they were pregnant?

And, this blogger has no link(s) as to where this is “shown,” sorry.

House sales and prices drop again

And the price drop on existing homes was kind of steep. A 7.7 percent falloff says to me that potential buyers are going to hold out for a while, “two-tracking” potential home buys by watching how much further new home prices drop, and how much further that depresses existing home prices.

The decline in sales volume wasn’t as big, at 2 percent. That, to me, says that more homeowners are either accepting lower prices. Whether that fuels even further drops, or puts a bottom on the floor, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the local scene was interesting. Here in Dallas-Fort Worth, prices only dropped 1 percent, but sales dropped more than 25 percent. As DFW isn’t a pricey market anyway, prices on existing homes really don’t have far to fall. But, the sales drop makes me wonder if the housing crunch is going to gather steam here.

Language can shape our perception of the world

This has been a back-and-forth in both philosophy and psychology ever since Benjamin Whorf mythically claimed the Eskimos had 100 different words for snow. (He didn’t, actually.) For a long time, in relatively recent years, well, ever since the discovery of DNA and the crumbling of Skinnerian behavioralism, Whorf’s ideas were cast by the wayside.

But now, a Cornell researcher has partially resurrected them.

At least with color discrimination, Gary Lupyan says a specific language background does make a difference:

Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.

This fits well with the general idea of “man the category-making creature.”

But, not everybody is ready to buy into even a limited version of Whorfian linguistics redivivus.

On the contrary side? Evolutionary Psychologist (yes, with the double capital letters, see my tages) Steve Pinker. (That, of course, means there’s a good chance the theorizing is right and he’s wrong.)

This separation of language and thought is emphasized in a recent book by Steven Pinker, at Harvard University, a skeptic of “neo-whorfianism.” In “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature,” Pinker explores the complicated ways that language and thought relate to each other. He cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways. With numbers, the importance of language evidence is much clearer. It appears that the ability to count is necessary to deal with large, specific numbers. And the only way to count past a certain point is with language.

He’s overstating the case. Lupyan didn’t say anything about forcing. Rather, as with human genes, we might say that in certain categories of reasoning, one language may create a predisposition (and perhaps no more than a mild one) toward reasoning in one way rather than another.

Clinton – we can ‘totally obliterate Iran’

Man, is Hillary Clinton on drugs or something? Every week, she seems almost perversely determined to sound more hawkish than ever.

Of course, it’s all related to pandering for Jewish votes in Pennsylvania.

Hawking still clueless about the problems with manned space travel

I’ve blogged about this before, but since Hawking continues to bring up the idea of trans-lunar manned space travel, it needs to get shot down again.

Recent research has indicated that current-level spacecraft are FAR from adequate to protecting humans from cosmic rays on a trip as long as going to Mars and back. And, already in earth orbit for six months, long-term astronauts have shown a tendency toward psychological problems rearing up in close, yet isolated, quarters.

It’s a year round-trip to Mars, and that’s if you just spend a couple of days actually on the planet. If you opt to have astronauts stay there until the next return-favorable alignment of Mars and Earth, you’re six months or so past that.

Hawking claims that, in terms of global dollars, this wouldn’t cost that much. Well, let’s address arresting global warming, and dealing with the non-arrestible effects, first.

Then, let’s take note of designing a spacecraft to be safe enough to go to Mars, and what we have to do to address psychological issues, whether through crew size, a psychiatrist crew member or whatever, and let’s retotal the bill.

Yes, Hawkins is a nuclear/particle physicist, and a cosmologist of some sort, too. But he is NOT an astronaut, a planetary astronomer/physicist, nor an astronautics engineer. People who believe that he knows what he’s talking about on this issue, take note that this is a good example of the fallacy of false appeal to authority.

I don’t blame Indonesia on this

Indonesia and the U.S. were still unable to renew an agreement over allowing a U.S. Navy medical lab to operate in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.

The hang-up? U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says Jakarta won’t give the lab H5N1, or bird flu, virus samples, or to give them to the rest of the world. (Yes, for once, this is not an anti-U.S. thing!)

But, the holdup isn’t as simple as Leavitt puts it. As the story notes:

Indonesia fears pharmaceutical company may use samples of Indonesian virus to make a highly profitable vaccine that might not even be available to Indonesians.

Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of a national commission dealing with avian flu, said in March that Indonesia would only send virus samples on a case-by-case basis until a new virus-sharing mechanism currently being drawn up by the World Health Organization took effect.

Hey, that fear in the first paragraph is no idle one. Developing nations have seen Big Pharma practice “nature piracy” for decades. If the U.S. Navy won’t provide the Indonesian government with ironclad-enough assurances against that, well, then it will just have to wait.

And, Leavitt admits that is a holdup:

“(Indonesian health minister Siti Fadillah Supari’s) main point is that what she wants should not be considered ‘royalties’ or ‘compensation,’” Leavitt said. “What she says she wants is for the contributing countries to be eligible for some share of the value commercial companies create out of the influenza samples they provide.”

And, the shame here isn’t just on the U.S. on the other side of the table, either. After all, a number of members of Big Pharma are headquartered in European Union countries.