Rusty's Blog

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

Hilarious.

Because the risks associated with foregoing vaccines feel so hypothetical, and because the infinitesimally remote possibility that vaccines could hurt our children is so scary, and because there's nothing in our daily experience to indicate that a little fluid administered through a needle would protect us from a threat we can't even see, it's very hard for parents working by intuition alone to know what's best for their children in this situation.

This leaves us with two choices: We can either take it upon ourselves to do a systematic analysis of all the available information—which becomes ever less feasible as the world grows more complex—or we can trust experts and the media to be responsible about the information and advice they provide.

Andrew Wakefield, the grand-enabler of the vaccines-as-conspiracy movement, deserves to be imprisoned. He has indirectly caused the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of children whose parents would rather trust in crazy conspiracy theories than modern medicine. He advanced a fabricated, and ultimately deadly, theory linking childhood vaccines and autism in an environment more conducive to spreading bullshit than ever before.

Previously, quacks were confined in the damage they could do; today, knowledge, right or wrong, spreads faster than it ever has before. The above snippet of an excerpt of a much longer book is a fascinating peek into the world of the anti-vaccine cohort, people who have bought Wakefield's fraud hook, line and sinker.

The most straightforward method for a crimp to shanghai a sailor was to render him unconscious, forge his signature on the ship's articles, and pick up his "blood money." This approach was widely used, but there were more profitable methods.

Hangovers are bad enough as it is – hard to imagine waking up after a night cavorting in a saloon only to find yourself on a boat to China...

A few weeks later, Farhang was in the California desert, with a film crew. "There's a guy in a shopping cart with a rocket strapped to it, and there's pyrotechnics lining the base of a cliff, and there's a really hot model standing next to a machine gun," he recalls, and laughs. "It's hard not to be nervous. We've got this client that has a genuine desire to change its business, to change the way that people look at carrots forever." And it was planning to spend a huge sum of money for a produce company, in the neighborhood of $25 million. "This isn't Coca-Cola," he says. "We have one shot to get this right.

Until reading this article I didn't fully appreciate the fact that baby carrots were just big carrots cut into "baby" pieces. Shows what I know.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

The media has been preoccupied with breathless reporting on a nuclear accident that is, quite simply, not a big deal. I'm much more interested in reading about the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake from the human side. Tokyo will live with rolling blackouts for the near future. Global supply chains are disrupted, to the point where Japanese-export dependent companies like GM are only now getting part-starved factories back on their feet.

Of course, much of the media would rather feed on hyperbole than fact. An accident which will lead to isolated, easily mitigated nuclear contamination and negligible future health impact has received front page coverage for weeks running. A little perspective is in order; xkcd does it best.