The myth of universal body standards

When you go to a doctor, whether for a routine checkup or because of a specific concern, you will usually undergo a series of tests that will give values for a variety of biological markers. Your measures will then be compared with standard benchmarks to see if you fall outside the norm, and if you do, that will be perceived as a problem to be addressed. Implicit in this methodology is that there is a ‘universal patient’ whose biometric markers represent the norm that everyone should aspire to. But where do these norms come from? How valid are they? To what extent should they be used to diagnose and treat people?

When my older daughter was a baby, she was exceptionally chubby. But as she approached her first birthday, she rapidly became skinny, so much so that people had difficulty recognizing the infant in the photograph of her that was on the sideboard (taken at around six months) with the toddler now running around the house. In the regular doctor’s visits, her weight was always on the very low end of the standardized height-weight charts. But her pediatrician, who was an older man, did not seem concerned and so neither were we.
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Top health officials resign over Kennedy’s misinformation and lies

[UPDATE: ProPublica reports that “Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging”. That has all the signs of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years peddling crank theories about vaccines and yet the Republicans in the Senate approved of his nomination to be the head of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the agencies that deal with public health, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

During his hearings he claimed that he was not a vaccine skeptic but anyone who has followed his career knows that he was being disingenuous at best, if not outright lying. And sure enough, top career people in those agencies are quitting, with one of them Dr. Peter Marks, pointing to Kennedy’s misinformation and lies as the reason.
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Science? We don’t need no stinking science!

The latest global rankings on university research by the journal Nature has been released and China has vaulted into the lead, with US universities sliding rapidly down.

In the last decade, a profound shift has taken place in global academia that has fundamentally altered the hierarchy of scientific research. China, once considered a peripheral player in cutting-edge science, has now ascended to the forefront of academic excellence. The latest Nature Index rankings reveal an astonishing trend: nine of the world’s top 10 research institutions are now Chinese, with Harvard University being the sole Western presence in the upper echelon.

This seismic transformation, while the Trump administration is instituting deep cuts in funding for research and shutting down the Department of Education, underscores not only China’s scientific prowess but also its strategic vision for global leadership in innovation and technology. To fully appreciate China’s meteoric rise, one must look back at the academic landscape a decade ago. When the Nature Index Global rankings were first released in 2014, only eight Chinese universities made it into the top 100. Today, that number has more than quintupled, with 42 Chinese institutions now ranking among the world’s best, surpassing the 36 American and four British universities in the list.
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Finding cause and time of death is messy

The story about Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa has thrown up new complications.

A private healthcare clinic in New Mexico has cast doubt on official findings about the timing of the death of Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, claiming that she rang them on 12 February – the day after police say she died.
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Postmortem results indicated that Arakawa died of hantavirus, a rare rodent-borne respiratory disease, on 11 February, a week before her husband is believed to have died from heart disease. His pacemaker showed no activity after 18 February; he is also believed to have suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
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Dr Child cast further doubt on the official cause of death of his clinic’s prospective client, saying: “I am not a hantavirus expert but most patients who have that diagnosis die in hospital. It is surprising that Mrs Hackman spoke to my office on the phone on 10 February and again on 12 February and didn’t appear in respiratory distress.

A Los Angeles-based doctor told the Mail on Sunday: “Respiratory failure is not sudden – it is something that worsens over several days. Most people get admitted to the ER [emergency room] because they are having trouble breathing. It’s exceedingly rare for a seemingly healthy 65-year-old to drop dead of it. In fact, no one’s heard of such a thing.”

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Can there ever be real ‘closure’ after a tragedy?

It is interesting how words and concepts that originate in fields like psychology and psychotherapy seep into general public discourse and are used by regular people. One such word and concept is ‘closure’, something that is often invoked after some awful tragedy.

Take this report following the deaths of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa.

It’s the light that draws people here, Gürler, a photographer, mused, and then they find a deeply inclusive and welcoming community. Hackman and Arakawa fitted right in, she said.

“He was the kindest man. He would smile at everyone,” she said. “Everyone I’ve talked to since yesterday is genuinely sad.”

For many years, people would see the couple walking around downtown, visiting the library or eating at local restaurants. Some residents have begun sharing stories online about their interactions over the years. One man described how he helped Hackman as a library worker, and how the actor later invited him to join him and Arakawa for dinner. Now the community waits to learn what happened.

“Something is missing. I hope we get closure, but I’m hoping [their] family get closure even if we don’t,” Gürler said.

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Creating chatbots of the dead

The short film I’m Not a Robot that I posted about recently, told the story of a woman who suddenly learns that she might be a bot. While that was fictional, the ability for AI to create bots that simulate real people is already here.

In 1970, a 57-year-old man died of heart disease at his home in Queens, New York. Fredric Kurzweil, a gifted pianist and conductor, was born Jewish in Vienna in 1912. When the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, an American benefactor sponsored Fred’s immigration to the United States and saved his life. He eventually became a music professor and conductor for choirs and orchestras around the US. Fred took almost nothing with him when he fled Europe – but, in the US, he saved everything. He saved official documents about his life, lectures, notes, programmes, newspaper clippings related to his work, letters he wrote and letters he received, and personal journals.

For 50 years after Fred died, his son, Ray, kept these records in a storage unit. In 2018, Ray worked with his daughter, Amy, to digitise all the original writing from his father. He fed that digitised writing to an algorithm and built a chatbot that simulated what it was like to have a conversation with the father he missed and lost too soon. This chatbot was selective, meaning that it responded to questions with sentences that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life. Through this chatbot, Ray was able to converse with a representation of his father, in a way that felt, Ray said: ‘like talking to him.’ And Amy, who co-wrote this essay and was born after Fred died, was able to stage a conversation with an ancestor she had never met.
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Film: “I’m not a robot” (2024)

The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short was the 22-minute Dutch film I’m Not a Robot. It starts with a woman in an office working on her computer when she is faced with one of those CAPTCHA tests (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) where you are given a grid of boxes and asked to click on just those boxes that have show some particular item, such as a traffic light or a car or something similar to prove that you are not a robot. We have all encountered these things many times. So she does it but fails the first test. Again nothing unusual. It shows a different grid and she tries again. And fails again. And again. And again.

Frustrated, she calls tech support and after the person asks her some questions, raises the possibility that the reason she is failing may be because she actually is a robot. The film deals with how she reacts to that.

You can see the full film.

Readers will be familiar with the idea that we may actually be avatars in an advanced computer simulation. The reasoning behind it is that as computer simulations become ever more sophisticated in creating virtual worlds with avatars who look and behave realistically and as if they have wills of their own, at some point they will create one in which the avatars think that they are autonomous humans. How would we know if we have not already reached that state and we ourselves are indeed those avatars, thinking that we have wills of our own when we are merely doing what our controllers tell us to do?

The film reminded me of Black Mirror episodes that speculate on where technology might be taking us. Almost all of them show a dystopian future that rarely ends well for the protagonists. Apparently a new season of Black Mirror is expected to be released this year.

Fear of spiders

At my university, the secretary in my office was a woman who had previously served in the army. She was young, strong, and tough but let her find a spider, however small, anywhere in the office and she would freak out, rushing to my office to tell me to get rid of it while she stayed as far away as possible. It was no use my saying that spiders are harmless and that they are actually helpful in getting rid of other insects that are actually harmful, like mosquitoes. She didn’t want to hear it. She wanted it gone and I had no choice but to comply.

But spiders are ubiquitous so arachnophobes have a tough time because there is no habitable place on Earth where you are free of them. This article in the February 17 & 24, 2025 edition of The New Yorker by Katheryn Schulz, a self-described arachnophobe, reviews a lavishly illustrated book The Lives of Spiders by Ximena Nelson that takes a comprehensive look at the immense variety of spiders who occupy pretty much the entire world. The statistics are staggering.
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News you can’t use?

A new study finds that the ‘quality’ of a man’s sperm correlates with their longevity.

Sperm may be the canaries in the coalmine for male health, according to research that reveals men with higher-quality semen live longer.

Danish scientists analysed samples from nearly 80,000 men and found that those who produced more than 120 million swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5 million.

The men with the highest-quality sperm lived to 80.3 years old on average, compared with 77.6 for those with the poorest-quality sperm, the researchers report in Human Reproduction.

“It really seems to be that the better the semen quality, the longer the survival,” said Dr Lærke Priskorn, an epidemiologist at Copenhagen university hospital, who led the study with Dr Niels Jørgensen, an andrologist at the hospital.

This is a major longitudinal study with a large sample of 60,000 people done over 30 years. I hesitate to critique scientific research based on newspaper reports but what one is to do with this information beats me, and the report’s only statement about possible benefits is rather weak.

The researchers now want to find out which diseases are more common in men with poor semen quality. If particular conditions are identified, doctors could ultimately advise men on preventive action should sperm analysis show they are at risk.

You. can read more here.

Women have long complained that much more time and money and effort is spent on research on even relatively minor aspects of men’s health while research on women’s health is underserved. This kind of news will lend support to that belief.

Coincidences and brain connections

One day, the name Gracie Fields suddenly popped into my head for no apparent reason. Fields was an extremely popular British singer and actor who lived from 1898 to 1979 and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. But all that was before my time. My only memory of her was that as a little boy in England, one night I was watching the popular TV variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which was must-watch TV in the UK those days, and she was the headliner for that week’s show.

The British had the endearing practice of taking some beloved performers to their bosom and still enjoying them long after their prime (I do not know if that practice still endures) and ‘Our Gracie’ (as she was fondly referred to) was considered a national treasure and could do no wrong in their eyes. Anyway, I remember as a little boy watching her sing and being intrigued by this great affection for an elderly performer. (In looking up her age now, around that time she must have been just about sixty, but to a little child, anyone over forty seems ancient.) That is my only memory of her. So it was strange indeed for that memory of her singing on TV to not only survive for so long but to suddenly pop into my head a few weeks ago after decades of being submerged in my deep unconscious.
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