The twitter ban on Keith Law has been lifted, and ESPN’s reputation sinks lower into the gutter. He was told to stay off Twitter after arguing with Curt Schilling about evolution (really, Schilling is an obnoxious idiot on the subject), and now ESPN says this:
Keith’s Twitter suspension had absolutely nothing to do with his opinions on the subject.
All I can say is,
I was out for my morning walk, and stopped by the lab to take care of fish, and then by my office to grab another stack of papers that need grading. They were unexpectedly heavy. I think my weekend is about to get longer and more miserable.
Chelsea Polis and Kathryn Curtis wrote a paper that asked whether hormonal contraceptives affected your likelihood of being infected with HIV, Use of hormonal contraceptives and HIV acquisition in women: a systematic review of the epidemiological evidence. Here’s the abstract:
Whether or not the use of hormonal contraception affects risk of HIV acquisition is an important question for public health. We did a systematic review, searching PubMed and Embase, aiming to explore the possibility of an association between various forms of hormonal contraception and risk of HIV acquisition. We identified 20 relevant prospective studies, eight of which met our minimum quality criteria. Of these eight, all reported findings for progestin-only injectables, and seven also reported findings for oral contraceptive pills. Most of the studies that assessed the use of oral contraceptive pills showed no significant association with HIV acquisition. None of the three studies that assessed the use of injectable norethisterone enanthate showed a significant association with HIV acquisition. Studies that assessed the use of depot-medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) or non-specified injectable contraceptives had heterogeneous methods and mixed results, with some investigators noting a 1·5—2·2 times increased risk of HIV acquisition, and others reporting no association. Thus, some, but not all, observational data raise concern about a potential association between use of DMPA and risk of HIV acquisition. More definitive evidence for the existence and size of any potential effect could inform appropriate counselling and policy responses in countries with varied profiles of HIV risk, maternal mortality, and access to contraceptive services.
In short, hormonal contraceptives don’t affect your chances of getting AIDS, with the possible exception of DMPA (better known as Depo-Provera), which a few studies with different methods found to elevate the risk. So, basically, it’s saying that there’s not a problem with contraception endangering women in this regard, but that inconsistent results with Depo-Provera warrant further investigation (later, they would publish an update (pdf) that suggests women ought to be warned about the uncertainty of this side effect of Depo-Provera). It seems reasonable. So they sent it off to The Lancet for review and publication, and that’s where the mess began.
It’s going to suck, isn’t it? My expectations are pretty much pegged at zero on this one.
If you’ve ever wanted a Nobel Prize, you can bid on one: James Watson is auctioning his off, with a starting bid of $2.5 million dollars.
He says he needs the money.
Wow, but Ursula K. LeGuin is good.
I had this unthinking impression that all of Scandinavia was far more liberal and progressive than the US, and I generously included Finland in that category (yeah, I know, it’s not actually part of Scandinavia proper, but it is one of those Nordic countries). But I just learned that only today did the Finnish parliament approve same-sex marriage.
Have you called her lately? Look at this mother octopus, clinging to a deep-sea cliff, hanging over the abyss, guarding her clutch of eggs.
Alexis Madrigal taste-tested five frozen turkey dinners — you know, those sad little plastic packages that you microwave and unwrap and find yourself face gelatinous goo and reconstituted turkey scraps — so that even if you over-ate yesterday, you can feel good today that at least you weren’t stuck with that stuff.
Liberia is suffering a serious Ebola outbreak — people are dying, treatments require intensive efforts from medical personnel, and there aren’t enough doctors. So you’d think they’d welcome a team of four doctors flying in to help. But then it was discovered how they planned to treat critically ill patients dying of a viral disease.
We are blessed with 110 remedies in 3 to 4 potencies ( from 30 to 10M) from Hahnemannian, Gudjons & Remedia. How Could we have dared to go here without our most valuable tools???
…
There we are : tired ( Richard travelled for nearly 36 hours), hungry but spot on: we finally reached after so many weeks of struggling to be able to travel to what we had decided to do. We are destined to help the people of Liberia to fight Ebola Virus Disease with an effective means of fighting epidemics : homeopathic remedies.
They were going to treat a deadly epidemic with…water?
