Responsibility - I

I created a video of 50 pictures (out of 800 that I have collected) of Iraki children, but for some reason the video won't load. So,I will just have to give samples here. I will intersperse them in what I have to say.


We have destroyed a large part of the life for these children.


In addition to the physical pain and suffering, often of unimaginable magnitude, we have been responsible for the destruction of a large part of the underpinnings of their society.


The next time you are in the hospital, just think about how much pain this child had to suffer without respite. The mother does not even have the luxury of an IV pole.


This child might never see again (if he is alive).

Yet the children of Irak are not monsters. They are part of a culture that stretches back thousands of years. They act and behave like children everywhere.




Except for the grief and anxiety that we have inflicted upon them.


In the sixty years since WWII, the World has learned a lot about responsibility, particularly at Nuremberg.






Who is responsible for these children's burns?

Is it Saddam Hussein? A despicable man to be sure, but still the leader of a sovereign nation whose principal fault in 2003 on the international stage was not to order his army to roll over and play dead. Yes, it is possible that he has some responsibility for the death and destruction of "Shock and Awe" and the subsequent American invasion.




Is the responsibility with the World at large? With the United Nations which failed in its mandate to stop America from invading Iraq (for crying out loud, it is one of the major tenets of the Charter for that organization, preventing aggression of one country against another. How smug we were in 1948 when we finally got approval of the Charter, the shadow of the League of Nations that Congress had denied Wilson.)




Maybe the World is more responsible than we might believe. There are those who charge all non German nations with not stopping the Holocaust of Jews during WWII. I am going to have to think about this for a while.....

The Rule of Law

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post (once again) this AM about the Rule of Law. If you care about your country, whatever country and wherever you may be, you owe it to yourself to read this column. It sums up so much of what has gone awry in America in the last six years. The observation is an elementary one: The very bedrock of a free and democratic government is the rule of law administered by an independent judiciary. The current effort by Bush, many in Congress (including Democrats, including Hillary) and now the media (the Washington Post as cited in Greenwald's post) to pass a law exempting large telecom firms from law suits in the warrant less wire tapping scandal most certainly flies in the face of the rule of law.

As a country, America is now in the position of having followed a Constitution protecting individual liberties for 200 years. It is in the position of having passed a law in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which protected Americans against the abuses of its government by the Nixon and previous administrations. But because of George W. Bush unilaterally deciding to violate the Constitution and break the law, involving the telecoms in his perfidy, we are now in the position of passing another law to counteract both the Constitution and FISA.

America will then be in the position of having to pass yet another law overturning the law that overturned the FISA law, if we are to come out of this with our Constitution bruised but intact.

This is just too damn many acts of idiocy.

Friday Crab Blogging

There are several interesting things about this crab. I call your attention to the Hersey Bar and the strange thing in the other claw. Wire rimmed glasses are also a first. Also, I was not aware that Crabs favored the Steelers but, since I know little about football, I guess everyone has their idiosyncrasies.

It was explained to me that this was a dog. OK.



There is a wealth of information in a child's picture. The presence of the sun (with clouds) is a good indicator. The presence of ground, with a tree is also good. The windows have panes but the crossbars are accentuated. This is questionable. I wish there was a roof with a chimney with smoke. Something to tell me someone was home. The door is small, which may be significant. And so on.....

Just a little tardy, don't you think?

Four years later:

UN questions contractor shootings
By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD - U.N. officials in Iraq stepped up pressure on the United States on Thursday to prosecute any unjustified killings of Iraqi civilians by private security contractors, saying such killings could amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity if "done in cold blood." (emphasis added)

What about the other 999,980 Iraki civilians that have been killed by this War?

Iraq Cholera Trucks and Snow

See UPDATE below:

There is a cholera epidemic in Iraq. In my opinion, this has been well documented by Gorilla's Guides from which I have taken this map of the current distribution of the disease:

(Click on Map to enlarge)

And from the WHO here:

Cholera in Iraq - update
14 September 2007

Between 23 August and 10 September 2007, the cumulative number of cases of acute watery diarrhoea reported from Sulaymaniyah province stands at 6,142 including 9 deaths (case fatality rate, CFR: 0,14%). Of these reported cases, Vibrio cholerae has been laboratory confirmed in 392 stool specimens.

Pretty awful, you will say. Just one more insult to the Iraki people. But why haven't we heard about this? I mean, after all, it is a major epidemic in a land where we hold the power. (Any contention that Irak is being governed by its "government" went out the window a long time ago and has only been reinforced by the inability of that "government" to deal with the slaughter of Iraki civilians by Blackwater and Otherwater mercenaries.)

Cholera is a disease that is transmitted in contaminated water as described by John Snow in London in 1854. Although apocryphal, it is said that they stopped the epidemic by taking the handle off the "Broad Street Pump." With the advent of chlorine treatment of water, there has been little or no cholera in countries that use this for many years. Irak, of course, being a relatively advanced land before our invasion, chlorinated the water in its larger cities. This chlorine was transported by rail and trucks.



Insurgents discovered that blowing up a chlorine truck was a particularly nasty way of delivering a suicide bomb with many people dying from the escaped chlorine (this is an incorrect statement; see below).

This led, of course, to the American Military interdicting the trucks as they tried to cross the border into Irak.

No chlorine -> no water treatment -> cholera. Pretty simple.

It is long past time for America to leave Iraq.

UPDATE: Commenter Dubhaltach from Gorilla's Guides(who has expertise in this field) has corrected my statement about civilians dying from this particular toxic gas escape:

Nobody died of chlorine poisoning during any of those attacks. Many people were poisoned and made ill - but nobody was killed by the chlorine. In that concentration you would have to be in a relatively enclosed space for the chlorine to kill you

I apologize for the error.

The Banality of Banality

To paraphrase Maryam: "What are we going to talk about this morning?"

Women and children killed in US raid
AFP Published:Oct 05, 2007

BAGHDAD - At least 17 Iraqis including women and children were killed in a US air raid near the city of Baquba today, Iraqi officials and witnesses said.

"Seventeen people were killed, 27 were wounded and eight are missing including women and children," a defence ministry official told AFP.

US helicopters attacked the village of Al-Jaysani, near the mainly Shiite town of Al-Khalis, around 2 am (2300 GMT), destroying at least four houses and killing up to 25 people, witnesses said.

Yet the "Top Stories" are:

AP
Beef recall forces Topps to shut down AP - 7 minutes ago
Tests help mutt owners find identity AP - Sat Oct 6, 7:18 AM ET
Jena mayor calls song inflammatory AP - Sat Oct 6, 7:19 AM ET
Ramirez's homer in 9th lifts Red Sox AP - Sat Oct 6, 7:20 AM ET
New prototype phone gives fitness check AP - Sat Oct 6, 7:17 AM ET

And yet, we still don't "get it."

The Banality of Evil is a phrase coined in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal (emphasis added).

It may seem paradoxical to any who have followed the posts here on Free Will that I should be concerned about guilt. For surely, if there is no Free Will there supposedly would be no guilt. But, the lack of Free Will actually demands a revised Ethics, and in that Ethics there is responsibility. But I have to think about this before we look at it further.

Friday Crab Blooging

This is an excellent representation of the Chesapeake Bay. However, there is only one crab. A happy critter, he. Oh, and I am not sure how the spider got in there and mess up this idyllic setting.



This is an unknown entity floating above your usual crab. Perhaps it is a CIA agent?



Soooooo handsome!

Who Uses "Socialized" Medicine?

The one on the right uses the Naval Hospital in Bethesda for all his health care needs, as does the members of Congress. The Naval Hospital is entirely supported by your tax dollars. Seniors on Medicare are covered by socialized, i.e. government run medicine.

The one on the left has private health care, but would be better off under a comprehensive, Medicare like program for children (why seniors and not children?)

On the other hand:



This poor child in China probably doesn't have any health care at all.

Homage to Maryam

I have wanted to write about this for a long time. If you relied on the main stream media (MSM) for information on the occupation and destruction of Irak, you would never hear about or meet this courageous woman. You would also have a completely distorted view of the ongoing horror there. But, thanks to the availability of the net, one can readily get first hand accounts from her and her colleagues. They write at one of the most observant and informative sources of this type, Gorilla Guides.

This web site is several years old and it owes its existence in large part to an interesting gentleman who goes by “markfromireland.” Mark and his progeny (dubhaltach) were, for a while, the principal contributors to the site but now it has, as it should, a number of Iraki of whom one is the outspoken Maryam. There are posts in both Arabic (which I can’t read) and English. This in itself is important. The majority of us cannot even communicate with Maryam and her colleagues in their own language. It is one more example of our cultural imperialism.

Here and here are links that will tell you something about Maryam.

Maryam is a pediatric oncologist. That is, she is trained to deliver care to children with cancer. I have practiced pediatric oncology in the past and will have more to say about this in a bit. Clearly Maryam is not able to practice this specialty at this time in Irak. American forces have reduced the land to primitive conditions. There has been little or no respect for the medical community and many physicians and nurses have left the country. The hospitals are overcrowded and in shambles, there is a cholera epidemic, yet we hear nothing about this on the NBC Today show. As someone said, we live in a seismic disconnect.

Maryam recently (22 July 2007) participated in a long dialogue on FireDogLake. She has nothing but disdain for the American forces occupying her land and, by extension, to us who have done nothing about that occupation now in its fifth year. For instance, when asked if she was in Baghdad she replied:

I am in Europe buying and arranging for supplies of medications to be brought. When I am in Irak I live in and run a refugee camp for children whose parents have been murdered by the American war against my people. I will be back there in a few days. For obvious reasons I will not under any circumstances detail my movements to any American.

And again when asked if the Iraki people still liked the American People as opposed to its soldiers:

Stop telling lies to yourself American. We know that your racist brutal murdering war criminal troops came from your society and reflect its values. We know that because we see how they behave and have to bury their victims. If you are stupid enough to think we feel anything but hatred and contrempt for your soldiers and the country that sent them to make war on my people then you are a fool.

She continues:

As I am an Iraki and as my job is to treat children maimed and deformed by the weapons your country uses and then prevented me from getting the medicines used to treat those cancers you will forgive me if I tell you that you too are telling lies to yourself. What we konw is that when it comes murdering Iraki civilians that there is no difference between the cynical and corrupt party called the Democrats and the cynical and corrupt party called the Republicans. Both are infected with the belief that America has the right to behave as it wishes especially when the people being killed are not white.

Irak is for the Irakis the murdering pigs who have boiled my people alive in a sea of their own blood are the government and people of the USA. Expecting us to tolerate the presence of your war criminals in uniform on our soil is too fucking stupid to be worth refuting.

When a commentator asked:

In your opinion, Maryam, why did America invade Iraq?

Her answer:

Because you’re an empire now and you can make your own reality. Working really well isn’t it?

Many commentators tried to engage Maryam at FireDogLake. In my estimation they all failed. It is simple; we cannot speak to the evil we have loosened in Irak in any way. We can’t say “sorry.” We can’t say “forgive us.” We can’t say anything to her. There is nothing to say.

Pediatric oncology in the best of times is peculiar and difficult specialty. I have a small tome written by a pediatrician at Harvard that was the textbook relating to this field in 1948. It is about 50 pages long and for the disease acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL, the most common childhood cancer) it has only one page. It says that children diagnosed with leukemia will all die within one month of diagnosis. End of story.

Over the years, the treatment of leukemia has progressed to now almost all children diagnosed with ALL and receiving modern treatment are long term survivors. The treatment is 2-3 years and is long, arduous and intensive. It is also very expensive.

Just imagine that you are Maryam. She states, and I believe her, that under Saddam that if you were not involved in politics you could live your life unmolested. The mere fact that Maryam is a pediatric oncologist means that Irak had reached a level of sophistication in its medical facilities where it could deliver therapy to children with ALL. While I am sure that the sanctions imposed on Irak during the 1990’s took their toll, I am still confident that she was seeing results in her clinic. (I say this because I have worked with pediatric oncologists in both Siberia and Romania setting up treatment protocols for ALL in the mid 90’s. In spite of severe financial constraints, the care was delivered and long term survival occurred.)

But now? Nothing. That is all gone. Maryam is reduced to running a medical facility in a refugee camp. I doubt seriously if children with leukemia are treated at all in Irak, certainly not by the American Army (although the Army has pediatric oncologists at Walter Reed and other large bases.) This is just one more tiny example of collateral damage in this obscene occupation.

Again, there is nothing to say. The career of an obviously talented physician that was caring for very, very complex patients has been irrevocably altered. The children with ALL are allowed to die without benefit of therapy that the world has invested billions of dollars developing. It is just one small piece of a gigantic tragedy.

Let me say one final thing about pediatric oncology. The way in which we got from 0% survival to >85% survival with treatment was using protocol based therapy. Always taking the best known therapy, this was compared to a new, possibly better therapy. This boot strapping has produced the treatment schedules of today. The most recent treatment in the United States is COG-AALL-0331.

This protocol has four arms, i.e. compares four slightly different treatments. With the survival rate using standard therapy being so great, there would have to be a major difference in survival between that and an experimental arm to notice a difference. There has not been this difference in over 20 years, yet we continue to run these protocols. Why? Because running protocols means support for the academic institutions and, God forbid, we should not pay these institutions to do basically useless studies. Anyway, what would we do with the money? We certainly wouldn’t pay for children to receive therapy in Irak, would we?

So, on the one hand we have a courageous and outspoken Iraki pediatrician who is trained as a pediatric oncologist delivering basic clinical care to refugees in a camp somewhere near Baghdad. On the other hand we have a lot of academic pediatric oncologists in the US making minor changes in a treatment that hasn’t really changed for 20 years so they can keep the bucks rolling into their institutions.

Somehow this discrepancy points out for me all the tragic insanity of the American involvement in Irak.

In summary, I have nothing but admiration for Maryam. As I said above, there is nothing to say to her; we can only listen.

Let me close with a quote from 26 September 2006 (a year ago) from here:

What of Maryam? Well I got one piece of good news today. My friend Maryam phoned me. She got another death threat the day before yesterday. A very detailed and specific death threat. It detailed every movement she'd made over the last few days, it detailed every one of the many different routes she took from her home to the hospital where she worked. It gave similar details for her widowed mother and for her children. It was so specific and so detailed that she knew it was time. She and what remains of her family didn't bother to pack. They piled into their cars and drove hell for leather through the night. Through al-Anbar on what is the now the most dangerous highway in the world. They were shot at three times during that trip.

At least they made it. At least she's alive.

markfromireland

Quiz

This woman is:
A) The White House entry into the Mardi Gras Drag Race?

B) Paris Hilton at 40 (with Harley-Davidson Iron Cross Award)?

C) A Pentagon "counsellor" coordinating Coalition (of one) Forces who "Hates all Iranians?"

D) Lead singer for the Rolling Stones?

E) The real Jenna Bush?

And the answer is:

Ta Da

Friday Crab Blogging

Our President the Black Pot

Bush: Kids' Health Care Will Get Vetoed

By JENNIFER LOVEN
The Associated Press
Saturday, September 22, 2007; 11:04 AM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush again called Democrats "irresponsible" on Saturday for pushing an expansion he opposes to a children's health insurance program.

"Democrats in Congress have decided to pass a bill they know will be vetoed," Bush said of the measure that draws significant bipartisan support, repeating in his weekly radio address an accusation he made earlier in the week. "Members of Congress are risking health coverage for poor children purely to make a political point."

Let's just see. Bush is asking for $50 Billion, again, to fund his Wars (I still think he will bomb Iran). Yet, he can't even come up with $7 Billion a year for poor kids. Kids who were stranded out there in the ragged American econoscape because their parents lost their jobs when all the factories were sent to Mexico or China (happened in our town).

This strikes close to the heart and, given the rubberized spine of this current crop of congressional Democrats, I may be in for some serious decisions. You see, Bush can veto and Dems can waffle, but when the bill hits the pavement the person who ultimately has to pay the cost is, you guessed it, me. Either I see the patients who have lost coverage for free, or they go to the obscenely crowded ER.

We'll see them for free.

Friday Crab Blogging

Yes! The Crabs are running again! (but not in Pamplona)

Data and Vision

I have been very remiss in replying to the rather overwhelming and diversified posts that come my way via The Growlery and Jim Putnam. I am sure I am so far behind that I'll never catch up; but I'll try.

I owe the Growlery a reply to his recent post on data, and still to comment on the interesting exchange about racism last month.

The Growlery has some pithy comments concerning my rant questioning the commitment of young people, especially those that want to be scientists (a decreasing number, to be sure, too much work) to the gathering of data hands on. This is interesting in many ways because the fascination with the data processing step is a far cry from the fascination with data (collection) as exemplified by Darwin in his voyage of the Beagle. Of course there was an entire class of well to do Victorians who devoted their lives to doing nothing but collecting beetles (this thread runs through the Aubrey-Maturin sea series by Patrick O'Brien). On the other hand, I am sure that if a Victorian data collector had access to the mathematical analysis tools we have today they would have felt that they had died and found their 70 virgins (what an awful metaphor, bad boy, Dr. C.).

Then I got to thinking that human beings are essentially the quintessential data collectors. We collect billions of bits of data every minute via our senses. And, yes, The Growlery is right, this data collection that we call experience has been greatly blunted by the modern world. But, it is still true that students are in a daily data collection experience; teachers collect, distill, and distribute; doctors must rely on instantaneous interpretation of data. When it comes to data, though, scientists are supreme.

All of us learn data collection and interpretation on our mother's knees, or have it built into the neural circuits determined by our hox genes. Our ability as humans to do this, and to project the future, is why we have taken over the world. (I would cite this as the reason for our ascend ency rather than the ability to communicate as postulated by the author of "The Singing Neanderthal.) The Australian bushman lives so close to his data, and is so facile in its interpretation, that when he reflects, he considers it an entirely different world (c.f. the Aboriginal Dreamtime experience).

Many years ago I was asked to give a talk to a conference of teachers (professors) of Organic Chemistry at a well known school. The topic was one that really struck a nerve with these worthies. The question was, why the medical school establishment used the Organic Chemistry course to weed out prospective medical students causing Chemistry departments to become "service" departments for the hoards of premeds. I tried very hard and was very unsuccessful in conveying to them that to study Organic Chemistry was equally about thinking scientifically as much as it was about conveying the basics of biochemistry.

I won't bore you with any more anecdotes because the situation has changed so dramatically in the ensuing years. I'm sure that the remaining premeds still take Organic Chemistry. Hopefully, they learn to think. But the numbers of these students is so decreased and their orientation so changed from either our training, or even that of 25 years ago, that it isn't worth talking about.

Is this to to information overload? Possibly. Is the rise of the radical right and its trashing of science (particularly that inanity of "Intelligent" Design) a rebound effect? Probably. Is there anything to "do" about it? Not!

The End of Discourse

Glenn Greenwald has one of the defining post of our era up at Salon:

Friday September 14, 2007 09:10 EST
The endless, meaningless blather from the Washington establishment

In a nutshell, Glenn reviews all the whoop t'do for the last 9 months about the "surge" in Iraq and comes to the conclusion that what comes out of the mouths of the politicians and MSM is totally meaningless. (Not that this is surprising, mind you). In example after example, a leading politician or pundit will say one thing only to directly contradict it at a later point, sometimes within the same week!


That this is a characteristic of propaganda of the worse sort. Clearly, a country cannot function if there is this complete inconsistency in its discourse.

So, if you are wondering why I haven't been blogging for a while, it is because I simply do not know what to do. Ranting and raving about the disaster in Irak or the impending disaster in Iran is like all of those light beams heading out into interstellar space from the events on earth. Gone, irretrievable, irrelevant and ultimately meaningless.

Friday Crab (Caterpillar) Blogging

Every year about now the caterpillars metamorphize into crabs. It is a little known but beautiful example of Nature at her best!

Nose deep in the Big Muddy

From here:

On the eve of the long-awaited US progress report on the key benchmarks in Iraq, the weekly civilian casualty figure in the country was its lowest of the 12-week monitoring period to date.

The civilian death toll for the period 30 August to 5 September was 175, with 117 wounded civilians. This means the total number of civilian casualties was below 300 for the first time since the BBC World Service began monitoring the surge (emphasis added).

Since when did any sane person greet the death of 175 innocent persons (including many children) as good news?

And the worse is yet to come. The following is a letter to the editor that the local paper refused to print. Why, I don't know:

To the Editor:

There is growing evidence that George W. Bush plans to launch a massive bombing attack on Iran and, if that does not happen, then Israel, our supposed ally, will carry out such an attack without our protest. It is hard to speak dispassionately about such an impending horror. First and foremost, such an attack will result in the killing or maiming of an untold number of innocent children. No matter how allegedly “surgical” such a strike, collateral damage (a euphemism in this case for murder) would be high. There is a good chance that the military would have to resort to nuclear weapons to achieve their mission. We need to do everything in our power to stop this disaster.

Please remember that this is the same group of people that brought us “Shock and Awe,” the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent killing of up to a million innocent civilians in that devastated country. Please remember that the invasion of Iraq was based on a four flush of untruths, including the presence of WMD (never found) and support by Iraq for al Qaeda (never documented).

It is my humble opinion that if George W. Bush orders such a military strike, especially without the full concurrence of our elected representatives in Congress, this will irrevocably and dramatically alter the lives of everyone. We cannot let him do this.

Friday Crab blogging

All Quiet in Anbar Province

As quoted in today's Juan Cole:

' "To say Fallujah is quiet is true, and you can see it in the city streets," said Shiek Salim from the Fallujah Scholars' Council. "The city is practically dead, and the dead are quiet.' (emphasis added)

Although Erich Maria Remarque's best known work is "All Quiet on the Western Front" I prefer his "the Black Obelisk" which tells you what happened in Germany after the War.

Friday Crab Blogging

Again, from the archieves.

Attacking Iran - The Ultimate Folly

There is ample evidence that George W. Bush intends to attack Iran. The New Yorker article from April 2006 by Seymour Hirsch, The Iran Plans, was a wake up call for many of us. (We should have taken Mr. Hirsch very seriously since he has frequently been right about these things. He was particularly prescient about the current disaster in Irak.) More recent studies and articles have suggested that the Iran attack will come before the end of the Bush presidency, maybe even as soon as this fall.

Considering a war with Iran:
A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East
by Dr Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher
September 2007
(Dr Plesch is Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (London). Martin Butcher is an international consultant on security politics.)

There seems to be little concern in our Main Stream Media (MSM) about this horror. While historical precedent is overwhelming in its judgement that superpowers court disaster in their hubris (e.g. Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August, and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam), almost every politician of note, including the current frontrunner Democratic presidential candidates, has been rattling their swords along with the most obnoxious neocons. Who can forget McCain's refrain: "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb; Bomb Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys "Barbara Ann." (I don't know about you, but in my pantheon, this is a sacrilige.)

Very simply, an attack on Iran would result in the deaths of thousands, if not millions, of innocent men, women and children.

Be very sure about it, such an attack on Iran would alter the life of everyone on this planet.

The worst scenario of all is that the Air Force, given the mission to destroy Iran's hardened nuclear facilities, would have to resort to tactical nuclear weapons. And, if our Air Force didn't do so, Israel would do so. In the Mid East chaos that would follow the first attack, there is no doubt in my mind that Israel, with its two hundred nuclear weapons, would feel "threatened." There is also no doubt in my mind what would then happen to israel's neighbors, nuclear or not.

Is Iran a credible nuclear threat? Let me just suggest that you review the history of the runup to the invasion of Iraq if you doubt that what is going on now is not exactly the same thing.

And then there's:
IAEA: Iranian cooperation significant
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, Austria - The U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday that Iran was producing less nuclear fuel than expected and praised Tehran for "a significant step forward" in explaining past atomic actions that have raised suspicions.

The assessment is expected to make it more difficult for the United States to rally support for a new round of sanctions against Tehran.

Data, data, everywhere, enough to drown a fish…..

The Growlery has linked to his article in Scientific Computing, Making child's play of power tools.

I found this article both interesting and stimulating. It is good summary of data-crunching software with particular emphasis on how big league programs have developed modules aimed at students. It raises a number of issues and it also brings back some memories to this feeble old mind.

Firstly, it got me to thinking about education, particularly scientific education, and how it has changed over the years, and then its extension into scientific research. Secondly, it got me thinking, once again, about kinetic data and computing. I’ll simply reminiscence about the first topic, but the second is nearer and dearer to my heart since it reflects back on our discussion of information transfer.

Reminiscences:
When I was in high school, Sputnik had just gone up. If you had the least aptitude for science or math, you were lavishly encouraged. I will admit, that we all thought this was the way the world was heading and found it inconceivable that we would ever live in a country whose President was scared of science and thought his intuition was better. Worse yet, a President who states that he talks to God. (if that doesn’t make an atheist out of you, nothing will.) Science was pretty near the most exciting thing out there. In the mid 50’s we got a chance to see a computer, first hand, and to try our hand at programming. It was the IBM 650 which was the first real workhorse for business.

IBM introduced a smaller, more affordable computer in 1954 that proved very popular. The IBM 650 weighed over 900 kg, the attached power supply weighed around 1350 kg and both were held in separate cabinets of roughly 1.5 meters by 0.9 meters by 1.8 meters. It cost $500,000 or could be leased for $3,500 a month. Its drum memory was originally only 2000 ten-digit words, and required arcane programming for efficient computing.

This “memory” consisted, as it says, of 2000 addresses on a fast rotating drum. Data was read into it by punch cards (punch cards continued as the preferred mode of input up into the 70’s) and its output was on a teletype like printer. To program this computer, one had to place instructions on the disk in such a way that you took advantage of its rotation. That is, by the time the computer read the first instruction and executed it, the drum had rotated by, I think, three positions. The only thing the computer could do was add, subtract, multiply, and do logical tests like AND, EITHER, OR. Our final task in the introductory course was to program the 650 to do a square root. No hand held calculators here, just a $3 million dollar (2007 dollars) machine! I think we used Newton’s Method.

Moving onward to undergraduate school. The university where I went had a lot of pre-med students (I wasn’t one then). They all had to take Analytical Chemistry with us Chem majors. While there were some electronic instruments available, this was mostly a course of titrating one chemical with another. The data was read off a burette and analyzed using logarithms out of the Chemical Rubber Company handbook. Thus, all computations were done by hand without benefit even of an adding machine. (Slide rules, which we all carried in belt holsters, were, of course, not precise enough for this work.) You were graded on accuracy. What you gained from this exercise, which should have been appreciated by the pre-meds (it wasn’t), was precision. Also, in the context of the Growlery’s article, one really, really, really got close to the data in a way that is impossible today. In this course we had to personally collect each little tidbit of information by reading the meniscus on a burette. Compare that to what surely must be the current situation. Now students are inundated with thousands of pieces of data collected by a machine. There is inflicted remoteness from the primary data source. I think you can argue that this trivializes data in a way, but I’m open to other views.

Further onward to graduate school. Computers were just in the offing. We had a big IBM 360 main frame, but it was hard to get time on it.


Graduate chemistry was an experience with an effusion of data. However, it still was collected in a very primal way. The most common was analogue data (peaks on a chromatogram, infrared spectroscopy, NMR, etc.) which we digitized by hand. That is, we measured distances and, believe it or not, cut out paper peaks and weighed them on a triple beam balance . At this time, during the late sixties, crystallographers went from determining their structures by reading diffraction film and measuring distances by hand, doing the calculations on a big adding machine, to automated machines that collected data on a Geiger counter that generated punch cards. The cards still had to be carried to the “big” computer (e.g. the 360) where the data was processed. But, in the end, we even got a drawn structure with the CalComp plotter. This was graphics in its infancy.

Was the exponential increase in quantity of data worth the removal of the researcher from the first hand collection of data worth it? I am sure that it was. None of the current technical advances would have been able without it (e.g. sequencing the human genome). However, there was something earthy in all those notebooks of numbers put down by hand that must be missing in this age of printouts and automatically generated spread sheets. The question becomes, has this had an effect on the possibility of a researcher making an insight? Can such data overwhelm and drown the investigation? This might be true particularly in the field of neurobiology where one is dealing with 100 Billion neurons.

Kinetics:
Much later, I encountered a problem with data that baffled me. It wasn’t a very profound problem, but it occupied me for years while my main job was doing medicine. One of the principal anticancer drugs used in oncology over the past 30 years has been cisplatinum. The story of how an inorganic complex got to be where it is in the treatment of cancer is fascinating, but I’ll leave it for a future thread. In any case, I had been puzzled by the fact that everyone believed that cisplatinum achieved its anticancer action by reacting with DNA. This just didn’t make chemical sense to me (it still doesn’t) since platinum complexes are much more reactive with sulfur compounds than the predominately nitrogen containing nucleotides of DNA. In any case, we did some experiments with cisplatinum and glutathione (one of principal sulfhydral containing biomolecules). To make a long story short, the reaction is a two stage reaction with the complex reacting with glutathione and then that product reacting further. We never identified the products, we were mainly interested in the rate of reaction. Sounds trivial, I know. Mathematically this two stage reaction is represented by simultaneous differential equations. Being a good Scout, I tried to solve them. It turns out that the kinetics of competing reactions is difficult to do in an exact manner.

We finally solved the problem by modeling it in Excel (actually Lotus 1-2-3, it was that long ago). We (re)discovered that any complex kinetic problem can be divided into smaller and smaller time segments (Newton strikes again). If the time segments are small enough, then one can have each reaction run sequentially, and use the product of the reactions as the starting point of the next, tiny, time segment. To determine the rate constants you had to manually compare the reaction curves. I think this is similar to what is called Euler’s method but, remember, I am not a mathematician. Eventually, I discovered that this technique had already been computerized for me in a nice graphical manner by the people at ScientificSoftware with their program Stella. I didn't see it in the list of programs discussed by the Growlery probably because it is a different field.

One of the first things that ScientificSoftware points out when introducing students to Stella is that the human brain has a very hard time predicting something in the future when there is more than one input (i.e. competing reactions). The example they use is wolves and deer in the forest above the Grand Canyon (the Kaibab Plateau). Predicting how the population of deer changes depending on the number of wolves and the birth rate of wolves and deer is hard enough. Throw in a rough winter, human hunters, etc. and it becomes impossible. Stella, on the other hand, solves the problem nicely. It is an excellent kinetic “what if” program. I guess this is the field of system dynamics. (I am also pretty sure that this is the way that computer games are programmed, so my tiny effort has been lost in an ever expanding super nova of Tomb Raiders and The Sims.)

Kinetic modelling definitely impacts on discussions we have had before. One of the defining characteristics of the human brain, as opposed to much smaller mammalian brains, is its ability to construct future scenarios. While we have just mentioned the limitations of theoretical projections, e.g. more than one kinetic input, in practice, in the every day world, humans make predictions on a minute by minute basis. Driving a car in busy traffic requires an awful lot of intuitive computing of trajectories.

However, as we have previously described, in the end run, all mental processes are reducible to basic electrochemical reactions. Millions of them, to be sure, but still there. This set of reactors (computers if you will) is presented with millions of pieces of sequential data from, for instance, the eye. The processing of this data must involve kinetics. For instance, I have just been reading about the period gene, which is a highly conserved gene in a group responsible for the internal clock of everything from the fruit fly to the human. This clock probably operates by having an oscillating concentration of a biomolecule, actually a protein, with high levels shutting down its production and low levels stimulating its production (by transcription of the per gene and/or generation of RNA)

Finally, it occurred to me when reading this paper that many of the examples were of static data. That it is very hard to perform statistics on moving data. Many of us are familiar with Kaplan-Meier plots of survival data in oncology. These are used to compare survival data for patients using various treatment regimens, +/- surgery and +/- radiation therapy. While diverging survival curves are frequently pounced upon as showing the superiority of a treatment regimen, such plots must be taken with a grain of salt because of the increasing statistical uncertainty of the data as it matures. One of the advantages of static data (I assume that most of the data referred to in the Growlery’s paper is static data) is that very sophisticated statistics can be done on this data.

However, for moving data, i.e. kinetic data, all sorts of new problems arise. Taking all the data at a single point one can apply well known statistical analysis. However, if that data moves on to a new time point, one cannot treat the data at that point as independent, since it is constrained in some way by where the data started from at the previous point in time. I have never understood how statistical analysis took care of this other than connecting dots one to another. Maybe these new programs can do this.

Friday Crab Blogging

I asked this young Hispanic boy what his picture was about. His answer took me aback. He said "New York." I said, "What do you mean, New York?" He said, "You know, the World Trade Center...."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Children have an amazing ability to see the unseeable.




This is one of my favorite crabs. It distills the essence of crab, the soul of crab, whatever...

Friday Crab Blogging

Dr. C in his exam room next to an exam table (with paper).

In memory of all the children of Irak.

Coming Attractions

I hope to blog on the following issues in the near future:

1. The Growlery's excellent article in Scientific computing: Making child's play of power tools (I first encountered Mathematica in 1988)

2. The interesting exchange between Mr. Putnam and The Growlery over racism.

3. Some thoughts on Pediatric Oncology in Irak (gleaned from an interview with Maryam, an Iraki blogger on Gorilla's Guides, at FireDogLake) vs. the current treatment of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) in the U.S.

4. The ramifications of a world without Free Will. Why we never even think about this.

What's $30 Billion among "friends"

Billions for defense Israel but not one penny for tribute Children. You see that:

Senate OKs Wider Kids' Health Program

but that:

President Bush Renews Veto Threat Of SCHIP Expansion Legislation

Go ahead, call me anti-semetic.

Christmas 1914

This is a Christmas card from Germany, 1914. Although only 4 months old, World War I was turning into a bloody mess. On this, the Western Front, the trenches were full of men, water and, most of all, mud. It was indescribably awful.

Just think of the mind set that would create a Christmas card with the theme of "Peace" over the horror of the trenches. Then think of the same mind set that claims we are making "progress" in Irak in the 120 degree heat.

Still, on Christmas Day, 1914, soldiers in both armies laid down their arms and walked out into no man's land! The next day they got back to the business of slaughter.

I was brought to think about this strange episode in Man's warfare by this post of Mr. Putnam's which references in full another post on Spiritual activism, political revolution & New Age fuzzy thinking. Here is a quote:

In Bush's War on Terror, threatening to kill anyone who threatens us and torturing the people we capture have become standard operating procedures. The neocon solution to terrorism appears to boil down to one simplicity: Kill all the bad guys.

And:

To believe that Iraqis and other Muslims are a different breed of human, that they they don't hate and fear and love like we do, is simply crazy. But that seems to be the neocon/Bush belief.

Could it be that we don't know the first thing about human behavior? That humans, including Americans, operate on a much more fundamental level than we have been led to believe?

To say we learn nothing from History is a triviality. But we don't. At the risk of being iconoclastic, and given the conclusions drawn from the information thread, I am not optimistic. I really do not think that humans, particularly Americans, can control their (another over used term) destiny.

I guess it makes us feel warm and fuzzy that we can.

Friday Crab Blogging

(Had to reach back in the archives for this one)

As usual, in memory of all the children of Irak.

(I realize that you might think this smiling crab not in keeping with such a sentiment, but I think those children would understand.)

The Bush Legacy

The sadness:

Suicide truck bomb kills 28 in Iraq
By HAMID AHMED, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD -

A suicide bomber slammed his truck into a densely populated residential area in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar on Monday, killing at least 28 people, including 19 children, local authorities said. (emphasis added)

Friday Crab Blogging

In memory of all the children who have died in Irak.