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January 30, 2006

Links for a lousy day: Insiders' weather forecast; Flu mystery; librarian makes FBI follow law...

Under the weather today, just a few links here. (Not much interests me today but going back to bed. Only the weather link was written today.).

Area Forecast Discussion: The latest National Weather Service forecast, a log entry supported by raw data and a sifting of other pros' opinions. Why does this terse insider bulletin feels more authentic than just "rain today, windy tonight."

(In the forecast below, pcpn is precipitation, qpf is how much -- Quantitative Precipitation Forecast; wna guidance is wave forecasting.)

1032 AM EST Tue Jan 31 2006

Short term (rest of today): Nam12 seems to have a good handle on current trends. Shallow cold air conitnues across interior valleys where freezing pcpn is a concern. will continue with winter wx advisory for freezing rain/drizzle through 4 PM but drop CT zones and NW Rhode Island as temps have come up to above freezing. Model cross sections indicating a change to snow (albeit it light snow/flurries) across the advisory area this afternoon, but best snow growth well above best rh. Seems more indicative of a change to sleet so will be mentioning this pcpn type to the eventual changeover.

Bulk of qpf focused SE of bos-Pvd line with just light amounts NW of this line. So snowfall totals expected to be under 2 inches, more like a trace to at most one inch. But given terrain, the 2 inch highter amount seems possible.

Based on latest guidance will be expanding wind advisory to include south coastal Rhode Island, Bristol and Plymouth counties Mass, Martha/s Vineyard, and Blue Hill. Will keep the same time frame with best winds between 23-01z (6-8PM).

Marine, seas are building quick and wna guidance below the mark. increased seas for today and overnight. Also including bos Harbor and narr Bay in the gale warning for today and tonight.

Coastal flood warning continues and will assess this afternoon whether another one needs to be hoisted for high tide cycle tonight around midnight.

This one's out of Taunton, Mass., for Southern New England, including Boston and Providence and inevitably touching on eastern Connecticut and points due north at times. Where you are, "AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION" is the phrase to search, adding your city.

13 things that do not make sense in NewScientist.com. From last March, but they don't make more sense this year. Possible news to use:

4. Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Why this matters: The government is sending the U.S. secretary of health and human services around to say you're on your own if bird flu arrives ("Every community will have to rely on its own resources... Every family needs a plan." Michael O. Leavitt told an overflow crowd of hundreds of Rhode Islanders at the Crowne Plaza hotel." (ProJo, Jan. 14. '06, reg. req. )

So this bit of history about the 1918 flu pandemic in a forum at Flu Wiki and elsewhere is worth looking at again:

I did not lose a single case of influenza; my death rate in the pneumonias was 2.1%. The salycilates, including aspirin and quinine, were almost the sole standbys of the old school and it was a common thing to hear them speaking of losing 60% of their pneumonias.-Dudley A. Williams, MD, Providence, Rhode Island.

It's from a book by American homeopath who married in New Zealander in the '90s and stayed there, Julian Winston; he died last June.

I've got a copy of Dr. Williams' obit on my desk downtown. Gotta start someplace. We're on our own.

FBI Agents Back Down When Librarian Refuses to Let Them Seize 30 Computers Without a Warrant. At The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Over at Improprieties, Tom Matrullo riffs on Sunday's story about Waitstill and Martha Sharp:

"The mystery of some people's rightness of intuition, the rarity of not just seeing into the actuality of what's going on, but then of doing the necessary thing at astonishing personal risk."

Doc Searls and Jeneane Sessum also point to the Sharps' item, perhaps increasing the number of people who get infected by their substance.

Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang: From longtime news researcher Liz Donovan's Infomaniaclinks dump. She also blogs in full sentences at the Miami Herald, both online and in print.

A mild-mannered link at Infomaniac simply reads "photo blog", but behind it lies her real life: Southern Highlands Cam is a local blog about Cherokee County, N.C. and beyond. Liz retired to the mountains and "phones in" her Herald blog. Sweet.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:54 AM | Permalink