Aargh. Why does verizon insist on running their stupid ads on my blog, just because I use their phone.

I have pocky!

Almond wasn't very good, and there wasn't a lot of it, but chocalate was better on both counts.

Giant squids

First ever pictures of live Giant Squid. Check out Baltimore Tales.

e

Praying Mantis on a car.

I had a dinner at a Thai restaurant on 18th and Sansom. They claim to have the best fried rice in the city. It was good, but I didn't think it was outstanding.

ENT

I started ENT rotation today, but the attendings were only there until noon so I got off early. Otherwise its pretty quiet.

Economics Jokes

Here are a few economics jokes I found on the web. They have professional economists rolling in the aisles.

Use only under the direction of a trained economist. Results may vary.

We thought Annie had some ticks today, but it turned out they were just burrs. So she got a bath.
PhillyMikec73e

Shampoo
PhillyMikec73e

Rinse
PhillyMikec73e

Drying
PhillyMikec73e

The End
PhillyMikec73e

Dave give me a call. Nothing important.

opera

Firefox was giving me some trouble so I switched to opera. They can make a free duplicate of this blog so I made one over here.

Palestinians raze a synagoogue andthen convert it into a museum celebrating mass murder, run by terrorists who are still trying to commit mass murder. I wish I could be shocked.

On the nature of reality

On the nature of reality and jolts to it.

Cynic's Conundrum

My friends seem to think I'm ever so slightly cynical, when of course I'm not. It's just that people are unreliable and selfish. Nevertheless here's a link to the cynics conundrum which would certainly bedevil me if I was at all cynical. Which I'm not. Really. And anyway if you don't believe me doesn't that make you just as cynical as well?

Thud

Stupid Blogger. Duplicating my posts. This will show you. Ha.

Thud

So Terry Pratchet has come out with a new novel. I've only read the first few pages (In a bookstore. I'm waiting for the paperback edition.) but so far it looks to be just as funny as all the rest. Police Chief Vimes now has a son and finally allows vampires into the watch, giving up his last prejudice and thus completing his transformation from low class ruffian to modern middle class dad. Bwahahaha! Soon, even Nobby Nobbs will be respectable ahahha!
The title is also blatant advertising for his board game, of the same name which is a few years old. Strangely enough the Thud website does not give a good description of what the game is actually like. They claim that this is because the game would be incredibly easy to dublicate with a pencil and paper and a few markers, and they don't want lose any money on sales. As much as I am always in favore of people making money, I still think it's stupid. No other board game company that I know of is so paranoid and they seem to make money. Also, this being the internet age you can find the rules in about 5 seconds if you search. Out of respect for terry pratchett however, I will not link to them here.








Instead, I will link to them here.


Thud the game


Live Thud from Wadfest 2003

Bad Firefox

Firefox ate my bookmark list again today. That makes three times in a month. It's incredibly frustrating as I always bookmark a few pages I want to read later and now I can't find them. So, bad firefox. You don't get a cookie.

Arrrr. It be talk like a pirate day. Yarrr.

Annie's favorite shows are sports and movies with lots of gunfire and expolosions. Comedies and romances not so much. Here she is watching "A Fistful of Dollars," but so far her favorite movie was "Chronicles of Riddick." (which I personally can't stand, but life is made of compromises.)

Annie's favorite shows are sports and movies with lots of gunfire and expolosions. Comedies and romances not so much. Here she is watching "A Fistful of Dollars," but so far her favorite movie was "Chronicles of Riddick." (which I personally can't stand, but life is made of compromiese.)
PhillyMikec73e

6 blade razor

I thought for sure we had reached the end of multiblade razor silliness when Schick came out with a 4 bladed razor, but apparrently I'm not even close. Gillette has skipped completely over 4 and 5 and is now advertising a 6 blade razor, which will be very useful if you ever meet a man with 6 faces. Seriously, I have no clue where this will end now. Seven, eight a hundred? And does anyone really believe that adding all those blades improves anything besides advertising revenue. I mean, once you have a close shave without cutting yourself, what more can you do? You can't cut back to negative hair. But if you do believe in multiple blades, I have a helpful sugggestion that will put you light years ahead of everyone else and make you the envy of other close shaver. Just fix two of the new six bladed razors together and shave with that. It will be years before your friends who use unaltered blades catch up and then you can just take those future razors and attach them together. Bwah ah aha ha!

Any color as long as its black

I was reminded of Henry Ford's famous saying today when I read about the sad case of Doron Almog. He is an Israeli general and he was visiting Britain to raise funds for a charity for severely disabled children. Unfortunately, some busybody jackasses in Britain thought it would be a lot of fun to indict him for war crimes on the charges that he bulldozed houses hiding terrorist smuggling tunnels and (unbelievably) for a bomb that killed Salah Shehadeh the militry head of Hamas and 14 other terrorists with him. But don't worry says International law expert James Crawford "Israel has the right to defend itself, even in occupied territory". That is as long as they don't bulldoze homes ("war crimes"), build a defensive wall ("apartheid") do careful border controls ("economic genocide") send soldiers into the territories to find terrorists (real "genocide") or even aparrently just drop a single bomb from afar that just kills terrorists. So as Henry Ford would say, Israel has the right to defend itself as long as it doesn't do anything that would actually be effective.

(hat tip: Jewlicious)

Friends from afar

Annie and -in the background- her neighbor Sweeper.

1000 visits

Its a weekend for landmarks. First I reached the top of google, and now I have 1000 visits!

Applebees Ugh

We went out to dinner to Applebees last night. We were going to go to Fridays but it was just too noisy and crowded, whereas Applebees was quieter. Of course, there was a good reason for that. The food was very mediocre and when they brought out the dishes for the appetizers, they still had remnants of the previous meal on them! We sent them backe and the next set was just as dirty. Finally, the third time they at least looked clean, but who really knows if they were. The manager came out and asked us if the plates were dirty. We said they were so he just said OK and left, without even an "I'm sorry. This won't happen again." Sheesh. We're certainly not going there again.

The area by our back steps never grows grass well and always gets muddy, so we dug a few inches of soil off and laid out these stones and tiles. It looks OK for an amateur job.

Woo hoo! I have finally reached my goal and mounted to the top of Google's search list for
drexelmed. Thanks to everyone who has linked me. I couldn't have done it without your help especially Dave and Heather

Ill wind may not blow to the Whitehouse

This article by Newton Emerson in the Irish Times is hilarious. Go read it.

SLC too boring for refugees

Over at Organic Baby Farm there's an odd story about refugees refusing to go to Salt Lake city because they thought it was too boring.

Cabinet repair

These cabinet doors were sticking so I put up 2 door magnets.

Both my brothers and my sister were home today, so we went across the street for some quality frisbee time.

The Eelery

The Eelery

My older brother has now started a blog.

The Eelery

Are most published research findings false?

John P. A. Ioannidis argues here (summary here) that from knowledge of statistics alone most published research findings are false. Basically the idea is that of the hypotheses tested, on average, most will be false. Since we use a p=.05 as a cutoff generally, if even 95% are in fact false, than false positives should equal true positives. If more than 95% of tested hypotheses are in fact false, than false positives would outnumber true positives. False negatives would have an even worse rate because journals normally only publish negative results if they are very unexpected (and therefore more probably wrong.)
Another way to look at it is that most hypotheses have a low prior probablity of being true only increase their probability of being true a little from positive results. For example if a hypothesis only has a 5% chance of being true at first, a study with p=.05 will only increase its chance of being true to about 10%. That's almost worthless.
I just read a month ago Jery Avorn's Powerful Medicines, which gives all the other reasons why we can't trust drug data (bias, fraud, poor study design, selective information from pharm companies etc.) and basically says that we will never satisfactorally answer most questions we have about drugs. Somewhat depressing. It seems that the lesson from this is that we should raise our standards for studies a lott as individual studies are not very reliable and we should mainly look at studies that are very large, are meta analyses, have dramatic results or high prior probabilities of being true. And that we should get used to the fact that trials can only answer a small fraction of the questions that we want them to answer. Anyone have comments?