Sunday, August 28, 2005

23 'Av 5765/28 August 2005

Greetings.

Gripe of the day: Barry has pointed out the article “Autistic Boy's Death Raises Questions”, which is a warning to those who act upon hypotheses which are unsupported by actual data. What the article does not say is that there is zero credible data that any vaccination is associated with autism. Children happen to get vaccinated with a vaccine called MMR (stands for “measles, mumps, rubella”) about the same time that autism is usually diagnosed. This led one man to assume there was a link between MMR and autism, and he announced it to the press without bothering to do the actual research needed. When other people did the research, it turned out that vaccinated and unvaccinated children were equally likely to develop autism. As such, chelation therapy is a waste of time at best, and in the case discussed in the article homicide due to stupidity.

I have solved the riddle of why Google AdSense ads were not showing up: PithHelmet, the ad-blocking software I use, was filtering them out. I set PithHelmet not to block anything from this blog except (universally agreed to be evil) pop-up ads, and now they show up fine. They haven't earned me any money yet, but at least I know they can. Though I doubt anyone is going to lay out money to buy alleged ghost footage...

Today’s weird thing is a convenient rationalization from Emily’s collection, included below. Enjoy.

Aaron



Can't eat beef... mad cow.
Can't eat chicken or eggs... bird flu.
Can't eat pork... fears that bird flu will infect piggies.
Can't eat fish... poisoned by heavy metals in the water.
Can't eat fruit or veggies... insecticides and herbicides.
Hmmmmmm... I believe that leaves chocolate.

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