Entries from January 2008 ↓

I went to a bookstore yesterday. It was one of the large firms that can be found all across the country. You’d recognize the name. I got caught up in the computer section reading a book on Ruby on Rails and, after a bit, felt the need to visit the bathroom.

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The Taoist Dragon

I saw this image recently and liked it quite a bit. I was reading about the development of dualistic thinking. In the western tradition the idea of dualisms is thought to have been first developed by Herclitus. He is our “…you can’t step in the same stream twice…” friend, who noted that variation is the common thread of existence.The two concepts are closely allied.Dualisms are pairs of opposites (and sometimes called that). For example, hot and cold.At what point does being hot stop and becoming cold begin? Does that idea even have meaning? Can there even be such a thing as hot if there is not such a thing as cold? In other words, can they even be considered as different things or are they not simply two sides of the same coin?If they are two sides of the same coin, then what differentiates hot and cold is variation.All things are different along this dimension (temperature), some hotter and colder. Thus, we can say with assurance that there will be variation among things with regard to their temperature. They cannot be all the same. Such is the ubiquity of variation.Up and down, happy and sad, light and dark, are more of these types of examples and, once you begin to think about it, you see that our world is filled with these  pairs of opposites. Can we have good days without bad days? It wouldn’t seem so. We would only have days; neither good nor bad. Even more fundamentally, if the days are indistinguishable, is there any meaning in the label of day?I used to tell my kids when they said that they were having a bad day that they should be grateful. It is those really bad days that make the good days so good. They would just roll their eyes.In the East this is dualist way of thinking is an accepted truth and symbolized frequently by the Yin and Yang symbol we see in the dragon.It is not that some things are Yin and some Yang, a misunderstanding sometimes made by westerners. It is that all things are always both, but in different combinations.

Here is more on the cholesterol mysteries from the NY Times.To pick up a thread from my last post, a troubling factor is the manipulation of research results by the pharmaceutical companies.Apparently, contrary to custom, the company involved released the research results via press release and considerable time had gone by between when the study was finished and when the results were released.I don’t know if any wrongdoing was involved, but the news that drug companies are fooling around with research results is becoming steady fare in the media. Vioxx, the recent controversy over the diabetes drug and on it goes. Since the companies are in the business of making money and not social welfare, the question is to what extent should the country be dependent on them to guide health policy.Since cutting in research and development in healthcare has been the steady tendency in healthcare. Nature magazine, perhaps one of the most prestigious popular periodicals about science lambasted the current administration as did other news sources.

Anyone who knows me has heard my rant about the lack of evidence that Cholesterol at moderate levels has any relationship with heart disease. Now it seems that some vindication may be in the wind. The New York Times’s Alex Berenson reported that two widely read studies of cholesterol lowering drugs were not able to establish that the drugs provided any medical benefits to patients. Of particular note was the questioning, mentioned at the end of the article, of the assumption that cholesterol levels are related to heart disease in the first place. In a quote from the article we can see that it is a questionable foundation on which this assumption rests.

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I have finally gotten around to reading some of the documentation on blogging and how to set up a Word Press blog. It’s surprsingly easy to operate at a simple level and yet has many layers that can become quite complex. For example, I am using one of the many free themese available (This one is called WP-Andreas01, named for the person who developed it). It is a three column format with two sidebars and the post in the middle. To this I have figured out how to add a calendar, an RSS syndication link up, some page links, a description of the photo in the header (I replaced the default photo). I also have figured out some simple formatting and how to stick a photo in a post, like this one.

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