Pandemics are bad for economies. Vaccinations are an important bulwark against pandemics. But all viruses and all vaccines are not alike. In the case of the annual flu vaccine, annual vaccination against flu variants can be a problem: antibody-producing memory cells crowd out new antibody-producing cells, and people develop relatively few neutralizing antibodies against the […]

One of the challenges with aging is keeping up with, and adapting to, change. Stuff you believed is true at one time can be falsified by additional experiments. That’s how science works, and how science is different from religious dogma. And thanks to the intertubes, checking for updates is fast and easy. I posted here […]

For all the dads and old guys, one of my favorite John Hartford songs: Let him go on mama

We recently received a letter from the City of East Providence water utilities division asking us to check whether our service line contains lead. Since our house was built in 1935, this was a reasonable possibility. In the event, our line is galvanized iron or steel, not lead. But this ongoing effort to purge lead […]

One of the climate change denialist memes is that, since plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen during the day, then increased CO2 will be *good* for trees. Setting aside the facts that increased desertification and increased coastal flooding are decidedly *not* good for trees, a recent study suggests that it more CO2 doesn’t necessarily […]

I grew up in Oak Ridge TN, the “atomic city.” It was where the uranium was enriched for the Hiroshima bomb. After the war, uranium enrichment found peaceful application in nuclear power plants. Many of the kids I knew growing up had dads who worked at one of the plants–X-10, Y-12, K-25–that researched and developed […]

In her book “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman uses the myth of Laocoön as her first example of folly. The Trojans ignored Laocoön’s warning not to admit the Trojan horse. That didn’t end well for the Trojans. Ignoring Laocoön was folly. In his recent substack essay, The Coming Alliance Between Billionaires, Tech Giants, and […]

Russ Vought is a Trump loyalist who believes we live in a “post-Constitutional” nation: ““We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not […]

The Biden Administration executive order setting a numerical threshold to shut down asylum is a performative exercise in futility. It is also cruel. “This “asylum shutdown” will deny, in most cases, the right to seek asylum for migrants apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. It goes into effect at 12:01 AM […]

One of the major considerations for us in where to settle when we moved to New England was being near high end health care. We lived for 40 years in St. Louis, which has multiple tertiary/quaternary care hospitals, including two academic health care centers. On the other hand, I watched as my parents, who lived […]