/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derekb.lowe@gmail.com 2012-01-26T12:50:16-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/26/science_a_zerosum_world_and_the_state_of_the_union.php I always regret it when politics creeps into this blog. But I just finished reading this post over at The Economist's "Free Exchange" glog, and I can't resist linking to it. The author focuses on a few lines from the... 75407@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2012-01-26T12:50:16-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/15/more_on_chinese_pharma_espionage.php Well, a lot of comments have come in about the last post on Chinese industrial espionage - some temperate, some not. I wanted to fill out another post responding to some of these, so, in no particular order: 1. "Everyone... 75334@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Business and Markets 2011-12-15T17:03:05-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/10/21/the_force_of_cluelessness.php I would like to heartily recommend the policy outlined in this post: that anyone advocating some political, economic, or social proposal should first be required to write a short essay explaining what the hell it is, and thus demonstrating that... 75235@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-10-21T06:39:40-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/05/02/a_brief_note_on_current_events.php John Donne's observation does not, it seems, hold for every case. I don't feel particularly diminished at all.... 74972@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-05-02T06:20:46-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/21/a_radiation_chart_to_clip_and_save.php If any of you haven't seen it, here's a fine radiation-dose graphic from xkcd to help keep your Sieverts straight. And yes, it does have the banana-equivalent dose.... 74913@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-03-21T09:52:47-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/16/potassium_iodide_pills.php Well, the nuclear crisis in Japan seems to be causing a run on potassium iodide (KI), and not just in Japan. If news reports are to be believed, people in many other regions (such as the west coast of the... 74905@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-03-16T07:22:37-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/15/quick_japan_update.php Just a quick note that the Japanese chemist I mentioned a couple of days ago, my old colleague Masanori Yamaura, has reported in. He and his family made it through the quake (he reports that his labs are pretty well... 74904@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-03-15T21:51:32-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/15/bias_and_how_to_deal_with_it.php The coverage of the Japanese reactor situation reminds me of the coverage of many other technical issues when they overlap with serious breaking news stories. I wrote a little on this subject a few years ago, talking about the Merck/Vioxx... 74903@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-03-15T11:22:10-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/14/japan.php Like everyone else, I spent the weekend following the events in Japan. A great many organic chemists have or have had Japanese colleagues; it's a field with a strong history in that country. I've heard from several people, but one... 74900@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-03-14T06:42:11-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/02/22/science_and_revolution.php GIven everything that's happening across North Africa and the Middle East, I thought a quick geopolitical note might be in order. This is very far from being a world politics blog, but there is a connection to science. Specifically, it's... 74874@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-02-22T08:10:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/02/17/health_care_reform_and_the_drug_industry_how_goes_it.php We haven't had enough controversy and arguing around here this week, have we? Let's talk politics for the morning, then. Here's a piece from a former VP for public affairs at Pfizer, arguing that PhRMA got thoroughly snookered during the... 74869@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Regulatory Affairs 2011-02-17T07:14:15-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/01/28/and_a_quick_political_note.php One of the authors (Mostafa Fekry) of the paper mentioned in my last post is at Cairo University. Which means that things must be rather uncertain for him right now, as it is for everyone in Egypt. Readers will recall... 74844@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2011-01-28T13:31:50-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/10/27/lethal_injection_a_case_for_the_fda.php I had trouble believing this headine today, but it's a real one. A convicted murderer was set to be executed in Arizona, but there's apparently been a shortage of sodium thiopental, which (I have to say) I didn't know was... 74737@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2010-10-27T06:56:59-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/05/24/martin_gardner_rip.php I note with sadness that Martin Gardner died this weekend at the age of 95.. Many will know him from his longtime "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American (where I first encountered him while I was growing up in the... 74487@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2010-05-24T04:32:12-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/05/20/floyd_landis_the_isotopes_werent_lying_after_all.php This post from 2006 on the science behind Floyd Landis's suspicious steroid blood tests set my blog record for comments - the debate went on and on about Landis, about the lab that reported the results, about how the samples... 74481@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Analytical Chemistry 2010-05-20T11:07:45-05:00