Derek Lowe

Pure inadvertent comedy gold #IDSky

Controversial Danish vaccine research group faces new allegations Researchers say they couldn’t find complete data for 10 trials that together enrolled tens of thousands of children in Guinea-Bissau

Have I ever mentioned how surreal it is to be an Editor-in-Chief of a journal called Vaccine right now?

www.science.org/content/arti...

It’s pretty wild, at least by typical academic journal editorial office standards.

And I have that exact Jules Verne paperback that’s pictured in the NYT article. Bought it in 3rd grade back in 1970!

That’s how I grew up as well. And you would see the stripped paperbacks for sale even cheaper - I have quite a few of those from back in the 70s and 80s.

I have attempted to play Wordle all week, but I seem to ended up playing the far-less-entertaining “Guess Those Consonants” instead.

Spoke with a PI whose postdoc is trapped abroad because of social media vetting. It appears the postdoc missed disclosing one account and it's unclear if they can come back… ever.

This is the country we live in now.

They’re trying to run the Kilmar Abrego Garcia playbook with a five year old boy in a bunny hat because nobody can find peace if they embarrass the Trump administration publicly. Normal people didn’t like it with Garcia and they really aren’t going to like it for Liam.

Photo of 7 year old Diana Crespo sitting with her parents at a table in a restaurant. Her dad is giving a thumbs up.

The public made noise for Liam Ramos and it got him released from Dilley.

Now we must make noise for 7 year old Diana Crespo.

Her parents were taking her for emergency medical care when ICE grabbed them, and she’s rotting in the camp sick and exposed to measles.

Get them out!

To all our international friends attending the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Milan tomorrow:

Please loudly boo JD Vance and his delegation. Make him feel like shit. We encourage it. We wish we could be there to boo him, too.

Signed,
the American people

That was enough time for a skin of ice to have formed on the lemonade - I would break through that with a spoon and drink it while standing in front of a window-unit air conditioner!

In the yard it was like mowing inside a giant dishwasher. Just brutal. (2/2)

When mowing the lawn in high school, I would pour a pub-style pint mug full of cold limeade or lemonade with a few ice cubes in it and put that into the freezer. Then I would go mow the front and side yards, by which time I definitely needed a break (1/2)

Oh, but the lemonade, pink lemonade, and especially the limeade were some of my favorite things to drink in the summer. . .

Don’t leave out Tamerlane (Timur). Not as famous in the West but amazingly destructive.

RFK is using his position to push things that have never shown any benefit in autism & have shown serious harms, including numerous dead kids thru the years. Why push for things known to harm instead of looking for things that could actually provide benefit? Because the harmful things are profitable

"The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives. (The pattern persists among some self-employed—artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students—today, and provokes the question whether it is not a "natural" human work-rhythm.)"

Preach, EP Thompson.

Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, no. 38 (December 1967): 56–97. www.jstor.org/stable/649749. 73.

Absolutely. Everyone with a working brain and a working heart is getting reallllly familiar with this feeling.

As many have said, the starting demand should be to totally abolish ICE. You work down from there. If you work down from this instead there won’t be much left.

These are all totally reasonable. My hope is that when the Republicans reject them - as they are very likely to - that Schumer and Jeffries just walk out until they’re met.

My fear is instead that they’ll use this list as a starting point and negotiate a lot of it away before caving.

We shouldn't put all "AI-based tools" in the same bag. Grammar editing, yes. Translation tools, yes. All with some checks. It's not the same as using GenAI to create text from prompts.

Farooq Sher is a papermilling fraudster at Nottingham Trent University in UK. He also runs a predatory conference scam. Farooq the Crook even sent lawyers to threaten me.
forbetterscience.com/tag/farooq-s...
forbetterscience.com/2022/10/17/n...

I would be very glad to see examples of this, if anyone knows of some.

FDA Removes Warning Page About Dangerous Autism Treatments Autism researchers question motivations for latest HHS changes, including the new IACC

I am not exaggerating: Removing this webpage warning against fake autism "treatments" will kill autistic people.
www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/au...

I get to review journal articles sometimes. Can confirm, it’s getting pretty sloppy.

It astonishes me that people ask these things scientific questions at all. You should see what the citations look like in a paper generated by a plagiarism robot. Utterly worthless.

First author Farooq Sher is well-known :) at least in the pubpeer crowd. Here is a collage from some of his best work! pubpeer.com/search?q=Far...

Bailed out of Twitter (as it was) a few years ago and ended up here!

What the Literature is Filling Up With

Welcome, piles of slop filling up the journals with clouds of useless wordy garbage. Case in point:

Jeffrey Bezos is destroying the Washington Post for the same reason Musk destroyed Twitter and Ellison is destroying CBS—oligarchs oppose the free press when if it threatens their wealth and power.

They don’t want normal people to see what is happening in America.

A Complex Cancer-Alzheimer's Connection

It seems that cancer has a preventative effect on Alzheimer's - but turning that phenomenon into something useful is not going to be straightforward:

This cannot be something a civilian law enforcement agent is allowed to wear in the US — and an agency that has a culture that tolerates this cannot be saved.

my two asks for electeds (reasonable ones, imo):

1) what can you demand in this current budget fight to free the hundreds of kids in DHS concentration camps?

2) will you pledge to dismantle DHS, abolish the paramilitaries, and close the concentration camps for good, once democrats are in power?