Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

G-dspeed to Angela Merkel

Tomorrow are election in Germany, and Gerhardx Schroeder is widely expected to lose to CDU-leader Angela Merkel. In its deperation, Schroeder's campaign is plumbing previously unfathomed depths.

Somewhat more benign are comparisons to Margaret Thatcher --- both women politicians running on conservative tickets, both of fairly humble middle-class origins (Thatcher's a grocer's daughter, Merkel a parson's daughter ["een domineesdochter"]), both pro-market (although I think Merkel is well to the "left" of Thatcher in this), both Atlanticists --- and both with degrees in physical chemistry. (Maggie did some research in crystallography, Angela in quantum chemistry.)

Everything I've read about her so far makes me like what I read. Here's wishing G-dspeed to Angela.

insterile Lancet

If this is how a responsible editor of a scientific journal behaves, I am the Pope.

The self-anointed "elite" has apparently come to the conclusion that all means fair or foul are acceptable to stop Bush from getting a second term in office, and for getting the UNolater running opposite him elected. (I am repeating again and again: if he does get elected against all my hopes, I pray that I am as wrong about him as I was about Bush.)

UPDATE: Medpundit has more on the politicization of The Lancet.

UPDATE 2: The article gets fisked. And fisked.

UPDATE 3: Michael Totten (guestblogging at Instapundit) notes that even several prominent anti-war bloggers see the "paper" is a crock from start to finish. The moneygraf of them all comes from Fred Kaplan at Slate:

[Lancet authors:] "We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period."

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

And this one can get published in a reputable scientific journal?

I rest my case.

Israelis win Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Back from a business trip, I just learn that for the first time in history, two Israeli scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Two Israelis and an American won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for helping to understand how the human body gives the "kiss of death" to faulty proteins to defend itself from diseases like cancer.

Israelis Aaron Ciechanover, 57, Avram Hershko, 67 - the first Israelis to win a chemistry prize - and Irwin Rose, 78, were honored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work in the 1980s that discovered one of the cell's most important cyclical processes, regulated protein degradation.

[Jerusalem Post coverage; Haaretz coverage (whence quote); announcement on Nobel Committee website]

Most fittingly, the announcement came on the eve of the day Israeli Jews celebrate the holiday of Simchat Torah, which can be translated as "rejoicing in learning". (Diaspora Jews observe it one day later.)

Aaron and Avram's magnificent achievement however does not make them the first two Jewish Nobel laureates in Chemistry: that list has twenty-four entries (this year's three included). [Not to mention the 47 in Medicine and Physiology (a.k.a. biomedical sciences), the 41 in Physics, and 17 in Economics --- the latter including expat Israeli Daniel Kahaneman. There are no Nobel Prizes for Mathematics or for Computer Science: the top awards in these fields are the Fields Medal and the ACM Turing Prize, respectively. One-third of all Fields Medal laureates are Jewish, as are one-quarter of all Turing Prize winners. The latter list includes three Israelis so far, namely Michael Rabin, Amir Pnueli, and Adi Shamir.]

Who said chemistry is boring?

Look here and here. If you're a chemist and know enough English to catch the puns ("woordspelingen"), I challenge you to keep a straight face for more than five seconds. And non-chemists will wonder why they always thought the subject was boring...

Eco-renegade

WIRED (via LvB's Dutch-language weblog) has a feature about Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace founder who is now advocating genetically modified foods and nuclear energy. The PC Sandalistas and the neo-Luddites call him a "traitor" or a "corporate wh*re", he calls himself a "sensible environmentalist" ("groene met gezond verstand"), and claims that his own positions have not changed much since 1971, except on the subject of nuclear energy. Echoes here of "I did not leave the Democratic Party --- it left me. ;-) Very much worth reading.

Will libraries disappear?

A librarian proudly forwarded me this "10 reasons why" article about why conventional libraries are unlikely to disappear in the future.

While in general I would be inclined to agree, the article had me shaking my head in a few places. For instance:

Yes, we need the Internet, but in addition to all the scientific, medical, and historical information (when accurate), there is also a cesspool of waste. When young people aren’t getting their sex education off XXX-rated sites, they’re learning politics from the Freeman Web page, or race relations from Klan sites. There is no quality control on the Web, and there isn’t likely to be any.

First of all, putting the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies (a pro-Israel thinktank) on the same plane as the Ku Klux Klan and hardcore pornography would not reflect any political biases on the part of the writer, huh?

Secondly, it's clear that the writer never spent any amount of time in the more serious parts of the blogosphere, where relentless fact-checking is common currency.

Try reading an e-book reader for more than a half-hour. Headaches and eyestrain are the best results. Besides, if what you’re reading is more than two pages long, what do you do? Print it.

Well, buddy: I routinely read books on my Palm m515, which is actually gentler on the eyes than many printed books (particularly softcover editions with small print on yellowed paper). For straight text I prefer it over hardcopy, since I can read wherever and whenever I have spare time. Any material I print out for reading is liable to be scientific papers with oodles of tables and equations: and guess what, those I used to xerox from the journal so I could spread the pages out in front of me on my desk!

The great boon to libraries has been the digitization of journals. But full-text sites, while grand, aren’t always full. What you don’t know can hurt you: (a) articles on these sites are often missing, among other things, footnotes; (b) tables, graphs, and formulae do not often show up in a readable fashion (especially when printed); and (c) journal titles in a digitized package change regularly, often without warning

I guess I must be living in an alternate universe. All the scientific journals I read offer papers for download in PDF format, which is identical to the printed page. Many of them offer HTML versions of the paper as well, and there criticism (b) applies to some extent --- but thanks to two marvellous initiatives known as CrossRef and Digital Object Identifiers, the "references" thing is changing beyond recognition. In many online papers of recent vintage, you now not only have full footontes, but you can directly jump to the paper being referenced!

This is only one reason why scientific publishing is undergoing a metamorphosis right now. One publishing house (American Institute of Physics) is offering not just its usual journals, but also a number of "virtual journals" which aggregate, from their entire journal pool, articles that focus on a single (often interdisciplinary) subject.

And then there is the Open Access Initiative, which strives to offer freely accessible online editions of scholarly journals.

Indeed, when I was first introduced to the more advanced weblogging tools, I was struck by --- with some authentication and supervision to prevent crank-posting --- how adaptible this format could be to open peer-reviewing of scientific papers (preferably after they have undergone an anonyous reviewing cycle). There are enough issues with the reviewing process as it stands that this may actually be a change for the better.

The cost of having everything digitized is incredibly high, costing tens of millions of dollars just in copyright releases. And this buys only one virtual library at one university. Questia Media, the biggest such outfit, just spent $125 million digitizing 50,000 books released (but not to libraries!) in January [2001].

I don't know how much Amazon spent to digitize tens of thousands of books for which it is offering both full-text search and "look inside" features. But having some acquaintance with such matters, I would venture to say that the cost has dropped sharply since then --- especially if one is willing to outsource to "developing countries". And besides, it's a onetime cost.

Furthermore, online editions allow the presentation of material that cannot be presented in a book. A (bio)chemistry paper may, for instance, include manipulable 3D images of molecules or enzyme active sites, which the reader could rotate, zoom,... at will.

For reference works that obsolesce rapidly, a frequently updated online edition is probably a better investment than hardcopy.

I could go on for hours...

Corante on Pharmaceutical R&D (really RD&A)

Derek Lowe of Corante comments on how the RD&A (research, development & [FDA] approval) cycle for drugs affects drug prices.

Fear of flying on the reactionary "left"

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight. (The first working glider plane was invented some years before by a German Jew named Otto Lilienthal.) Best of the Web has this absolute howler from George Moonbat Monbiot:

We've often observed that today's political left has largely abandoned its faith in social progress and become almost entirely a reactionary movement. George Monbiot, a columnist for the London Guardian, provides a nice example in a piece on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight, which is today.

The anniversary "should be a day of international mourning," moans Monbiot. "December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine." Monbiot calls flying machines a weapon of mass destruction; after all, have been used to drop bombs, including nuclear ones (though as the late Bob Bartley pointed out, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a lot of Japanese lives). More recently, al Qaeda used planes in their attacks on Sept. 11. Monbiot's conclusion: "Just as Alexander the Great worshipped his horse, George Bush, the new conqueror of Persia [sic], will [today] worship the aeroplane. Our societies are built upon these technologies of war: the current world order fell from the hatches of the aeroplane. At 10.35am, North Carolina time, George Bush and the other enthusiasts for domination will bow down before it. The rest of us should observe 12 seconds of silence, in commemoration of the deeds wrought by those magnificent men in their killing machines."

But wait. Monbiot glosses too quickly over Alexander and his horse, though he does note earlier in the piece that "in the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens." Plainly the trouble began with the invention of horses. Horses go "neigh," it's time to say "nay" right back to them.

Yearning for a pristine pre-industrial past, of course, can no more be "progressive" than fire can be cold. Except, of course, that "cold fire" is the Dutch term for gangrene, the intellectual variety of which has been affecting the "left"-ist chattering class for some time...