NSFW? NSFP!

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I had a premonition that this would happen: that when I wrote about The Strange Case of the Woman with a Breast on her Foot someone would suggest that I should have put a “Not Safe For Work” warning on it, even ironically, perhaps. It’s such a common thing, that we voluntarily self-censor; I’ve done it a few times myself, and have felt weird about it. Why should we be at all concerned about linking to a website that might have a picture of a bare breast (or even stranger, a nipple on a foot)? It’s not as if it should be regarded as hideous or offensive, and it’s a bit creepy that we so willingly denigrate the appearance of the human body.

At the same time, would anyone regard that ghastly video in the Rivers of blood post to be “not safe for work”? Probably not. We get all hypersensitive about a little healthy exposed flesh, but animals getting their throats cut? Nah, you aren’t going to get fired for seeing that.

Fortunately, Susie Bright has an excellent post on this very subject. Go ahead and follow that link. I promise, there are no eviscerated animals, horrific traffic accidents, corpses, videos from Iraq, or photos of factories belching toxins into the atmosphere at that site. It might not be safe for prudes to read, but there’s nothing to offend people with healthier attitudes. And it’s a good message: don’t be embarrassed by normal, healthy, positive images of people.

Anti-vaccination foolishness in Minnesota

I got a request to spread the word around Minnesota—the anti-vaxers are gearing up again to push a silly bill in the Minnesota congress. I’ve put the letter below. If any of these people are your representatives, contact them and tell them they are being very, very silly.

There’s supposed to be a hearing next week on a bill that would limit the use of vaccines containing thimerosal, because of the belief that they may cause autism. This is the third year that this bill has been presented, and it keeps failing, but they keep bringing it back up, even though it’s clearer now than ever that there is no connection between the two – there’s been no more than trace amounts of thimerosal in childhood vaccines made since 2001, and more autism than ever in kids too young to have been exposed to it. This isn’t just bad science: it’s the Legislature telling parents they can’t trust their pediatricians, and giving credence to the quacks who want to treat autistic kids with chelation, homeopathy, hyperbaric oxygen, high-dose vitamin supplements, and all manner of other dubious remedies.

Perhaps you would be willing to spread the word that the committee members who will be voting on this bill (Senate File 1780) need to hear the scientific viewpoint? Especially the ones who are co-sponsors of the bill – including John Marty, committee chair, who just went down about four hundred notches in my estimation. I’ll append a couple of links for background and the committee list. I imagine you have a lot of MN readers who may be constituents of the committee members.

Thanks!

Lisa Randall

(an amateur immunization advocate who has experienced the lunacy first-hand)

Background and statements by the American Academy of Pediatrics

Bill text

Committee (co-authors’ names are in bold):

Chair: John Marty* (DFL-54)
Roseville
651-296-5645

Vice Chair: Patricia Torres Ray* (DFL-62)
Minneapolis
651-296-4274

Paul E. Koering (R-12)
Fort Ripley
651-296-4875

Linda Berglin (DFL-61)
Minneapolis
651-296-4261

John P. Doll (DFL-40)
Burnsville
651-296-5975

Sharon L. Erickson Ropes* [RN] (DFL-31)
Winona
651-296-5649

Michelle L. Fischbach (R-14)
Paynesville
651-296-2084

David W. Hann (R-42)
Eden Prairie
651-296-1749

Linda Higgins (DFL-58)
Minneapolis
651-296-9246

Debbie J. Johnson (R-49)
Ham Lake
651-296-3219

Tony Lourey* (DFL-08)
Kerrick
651-296-0293

Ann Lynch (DFL-30)
Rochester
651-296-4848

Yvonne Prettner Solon (DFL-07)
Duluth
651-296-4188

Betsy L. Wergin* (R-16)
Princeton
651-296-8075

Now on top of my usual creationists, I can thank Lynn Margulis for drawing in the HIV denialists that plague Tara‘s site, and this for the anti-vaxers from Orac‘s. Obviously, I need to put up something about global warming next. I’m going to call this little game Poketroll — collect them all!

The Strange Case of the Woman with a Breast on her Foot

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Stevie C sent along this article on
An unusual presentation of supernumerary breast tissue (just what were you googling for, Stevie?), in which a woman reports an annoying growth on her foot, and when examined, is discovered to have a breast growing there, complete with nipple and fatty tissue (but in this case, no glandular tissue).

It’s in the Dermatology Online Journal, not the Onion.

I hadn’t heard of this before myself, but it’s fascinating. These supernumerary breasts can pop up all over the place, including the face, back, and thigh (and foot, obviously). They can be functionally complete, and can even lactate. The authors report some weak and sometimes contradicted associations with other oddities, but no causal mechanism is known. These cases of autonomous self-organization and recruitment of organs are extremely interesting—it suggests that a breast would be a fairly easy tissue to grow in a dish. I’d love to know what the molecular signal for initiating differentiation—I suspect it’s something simple and common.

Some sick atheist demeans kids!

Members of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association are furious—they’ve ripped down the posted photos from the 2007 Creation “Science” Fair “Because Some Sick Atheist Used Them To Demean Kids”. Before you all jump to any conclusion…I didn’t do it.

It was Greg.

You really have to read the comments on that article. The uncle of one of the kids at the Creation “Science” Fair makes several comments, and the poor man is just nuts—incoherent and condescending at the same time. Ross Olson, a Twin Cities creationist and board member at TCCSA, makes an appearance. It’s like a whole collection of fruitcakes! (oops). I’m a little jealous that our local creationists don’t seem to show up here at all.

Unfortunately, in looking over the article and the comments, I could only find one instance of Greg demeaning kids. It was horribly egregious, though, an offense so great that I’m not surprised the creationists were shocked.

Funny, I don’t remember ANY of the 200 exhibits or so at the Brimhall Fair (see this on Julia’s entry) held earlier in the year just down the street at a Real School addressing creationist ideas. But when the kids enter into a creationist fair, they can’t seem to help themselves from doing some actual science.

Science. It’s like a disease that can infect your children.

That didn’t take long

The demonization of Pete Stark begins. Wouldn’t you know it would be Michelle Malkin (“imprisonment for being brown is OK!”), and it would be in WorldNutDaily (your daily source of raving right wing lunacy), and she’s appalled that he has called someone a “fruitcake” in the past. Why, that’s a homophobic slur! He’s as bad as Ann Coulter!

She’s really reaching. I’ve never heard “fruitcake” used against gays, although I imagine practically every word has been used as an insult against them—I’ve mainly heard it to express one’s opinion of another’s sanity, as in “nutty as a fruitcake”. It’s too bad no one ever told Stark that the godless are never, ever allowed to get angry.

Alas for Malkin, she has short-circuited any attempt to call shame on someone judging another as crazy by titling her article “Pete Stark: Raving Lunatic”.

Rivers of blood

Some have complained that my post on the snake slaughter gave them nightmares. If that’s you, do not click on this next link! I’m usually fairly tough about seeing grisly gore, but this video of a dolphin harvest in Japan is extremely unsettling. A slaughterhouse is always going to be an ugly piece of work, but what’s on display there is also callous indifference to the suffering of the animals, and methods that increase stress and pain. This video shows animals in agony. Even if I were to accept the argument that they are “mere” animals being processed for food, there is no excuse for the brutality of the methods.

Encephalon #18

At last, it’s time for Encephalon, the carnival of neuroscience. There were a lot of submissions, and I’ve tried to organize them into four categories: basic and cognitive neuroscience addresses the problem of understanding brains, more medically and psychiatrically inclined work tries to fix brains, a few crazy dreamers think about technological ways to improve brains, and some rare individuals wonder about how brains evolved. I should mention that brains are incredibly complex and all of these efforts are struggling against the immensity of the problems…but it’s fun to try and to watch, and sometimes we actually make progress.

I also need to complain that the last Encephalon was done pirate style, depriving me of a creative schtick I could have used. Curse you, Jake Young, you scurvy dog.

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Evolution of the jaw

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What do you know…just last week, I posted an article dismissing a creationist’s misconceptions about pharyngeal organization and development, in which he asks about the evidence for similarities between agnathan and gnathostome jaws, and what comes along but a new paper on the molecular evidence for the origin of the jaw, which describes gene expression in the lamprey pharynx. How timely! And as a plus, it contains several very clear summary diagrams to show how all the bits and pieces and molecules relate to one another.

The short summary is that there is a suite of genes (the Hox and Dlx genes, which define a cartesian coordinate system for the branchial arch elements, Fgf8/Dlx1 genes that establish proximal jaw elements, and Bmp4/Msx1 genes that demarcate more distal elements) that are found in both lampreys and vertebrates in similar patterns and roles, and that vertebrate upper and lower jaws are homologous to the upper and lower “lips” of the lamprey oral supporting apparatus.

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What a waste of some fine reptiles

Why not slaughter snakes? The bible says it is their fate to be ground under our heel, after all. Laelaps has a story about a town in Texas that turns butchery into a fun family event — warning, there is a photo, and if you decapitate enough snakes, you can get a lot of blood spattered around.

I was most disgusted at the rationale; I heard this kind of stupid excuse a lot when I was a young fellow, in the country around Eastern Washington:

According to Yahoo!News, some justify the atrocities by claiming that it keeps livestock safe from the dangerous snakes, and although I haven’t seen any numbers, I wouldn’t imagine that rates of mortality by snakebite are very high among livestock.

Think for a moment. Can you imagine a rattlesnake hunting down and swallowing a cow? Then maybe you can swallow that story. Snakes don’t prey on cows. They might rarely bite one that stumbles across it, but that’s not going to be a major health hazard to a cow.

I’m hoping the lovely town of Sweetwater, Texas experiences the sweet justice of a plague of rats and mice.