JayB

The anti-Vaccination fever seems to have caught with the nut-cases on both sides. Plenty of homeopathovegorgano folks on the anti-vaccine train these days as well. There's a fine line out there that I don't want to cross when it comes to the power of the state to enforce compulsory medical treatments of any kind - but I do think its entirely reasonable for school districts, health insurance companies, employers to decline admission to people who have "opted out" of vaccination against diseases. If someone wants to live in a "state of nature," I'm more than happy for them to indulge that fetish on their own so long as they're prepared to deal with the consequences. When it comes to children, I think the question gets tougher - since any parent who knowingly let their child die of diabetes for ideological reasons should be tried for murder just as surely as if they'd beaten or starved them to death - but exposure to potential harm at some point in the future is something more nebulous than direct harm, and I don't think that this warrants state compulsion or prosecution. But back to the matter at hand - if you had told people in the early 20th century that by the end of the century we'd have developed treatments that would make everyone immune to the diseases that had been ravaging humanity for all of eternity, and then told them that parents were denying their children these vaccines, and explained their rationale for doing so - I can only imagine what their response would be...

Amazing stuff. Quite depressing. Heartland of Darkness...

There's a bunch of agencies out there that specialize in placing physicians, etc that you can use if you don't get any bites on the boards.

Close enough.

Curling?

I don't support the idea, but when you consider that there are candidates basing their entire economic policy on reviving protectionism - it gets a fairly low score on the Campaign '08 RetardoMeter.

Yes you are. Glad to hear that someone else on the board has discovered how to enjoy the flip side of the hydrological cycle. Maine is no WA, but it was definitely delivering up the goods on that front this weekend. So many beautiful places....

There was this little bit of info in the article... "Last month's median house price was $448,500, the Northwest Multiple Listing Service reports. That's almost $19,000 above February and about $10,000 higher than March. But it still falls 3.6 percent short of the previous April's $465,000" But anyhow...C'mon, amigo. You know that $50 of the bet was on Case-Shiller-Weiss, and the other $50 was on a home that you were supposed to select as of Nov 1 '08. No one uses the NWMLS stats as a reliable guide to what's going on with the value of the average home, at least not anyone that's lending money (I hope). When the CSW numbers for April come out in June, I'm pretty confident that they'll reveal that the NWMLS median numbers got a bump as a result of the sales mix changing, with more high-end homes changing hands relative to less expensive places. Time will tell.

Yeah fun stuff, but I decided it would be a good activity when I am old my body can't take the climbing, freeriding and snowboarding. Yeah - I've been thinking that flatwater and/or sea-kayaking would be a cool thing to do with kids once they enter the picture. In the meantime - Man! - the rivers in your former home-base delivered up the goods this weekend. I heart Maine.

Given the percentage of the electorate that falls into this category, it's little wonder that the candidates are competing for their votes....

I can attest to the fact that the direct communication that people who don't live in the NE love to applaud from a distance is considerably less charming in person. I'd kind of enjoy watching people who sing the praises of these virtues via a hidden camera while they drive through Boston. "Hey - the guy who ran the red light and almost T-boned me while narrowly missing two pedestrians while tossing his trash out the window and flipping the old lady with the cane off when she yelled at him to slow down...aaaah, how delightfully self-assertive, how bracingly direct and iconoclastic, such a wonderfully change from that stultifying civility and restraint in the PNW...." Not likely to happen, I'd say. I'll take people who are generally civil, keep their hostility to themselves, and at least pretend to care about extending the same courtesy to others that they'd like to have extended to themselves most of the time anyday. There'll be at least two vacancies here in a couple of months. Any of you folks pining for the attributes that are so sorely lacking in the PNW are welcome to my spot. All yours.

Seems like you can pretty much exempt most non-chossy, non R/X cragging routes that don't have a line at the base on a busy day from the statistical definition of moderate. Seems like 5.11 sport, 5.10 trad, and WI4+ gets you there most of the time. I doubt that's changed all that much over the course of the past twenty years, since for most of us, leading at that level will require getting out consistently and keeping the climbing fitness at a fairly high level (for us). For me at least, the time commitment associated with pushing my top-end clean lead grades higher than where they've topped out in the past - mid 11 sport, mid ten trad, WI4, V4 - would involve committing more time and energy to climbing than I have the time or inclination to put forth, since that would mean taking too much time away from other pursuits that I enjoy just as much. Climbing is great, but there's a lot of other great stuff out there.

Waiting for someone on cc.com to start channeling the ghost of Samuel Johnson and exclaim "Tosh!" instead of "bullshit." My money's on Ivan...

Such...cough..turkeybaster...cough...innocence. Must not have stayed in the lesbian rampart *that* long....

Just make sure that no one strips out the appliances and the copper pipes in the meantime...

The standard route on Whitehorse Ledge is pretty sweet. 5.5-5.7. Most of the gullies on Mt. Washington's Huntington Ravine. Frostbite Ridge on Glacier Peak. Standard Route on Frankenstein (WI3) Keiner's Route, Long's Peak. Center Route, Cynical Pinnacle. (South Platte. 5.8, 5.9, 5.8 with a bit of aidable 5.12 to the top if I recall correctly). Standard Route on Exfoliation Dome. For me, "moderate" usually ends at anything more than a single-pitch of 5.9 crack/trade, ice harder than WI3, most routes with more than 5-10 pitches (depending on the grade), anything that's far enough out there that getting stuck on the route could result in suffering and/or a calamity in the wrong conditions, and anything that leaves me feeling wiped the day afterwards. Just to take one consensus moderate as an example, the climbing between the notch and the gendarme on the UNR of Stuart was amazing, but I was still very focused, keeping an eye on the time and the weather, and just generally felt like I was a long way from home. After leading the gendarme pitches, I felt less so - but the overall experience was far from "moderate" for me, and I wasn't truly relaxed, soaking up the scenery, and generally savoring the alpine ambience until I was laying on a sunny rock on the summit. No rain, no lightning, no crazy wind, no health issues, no running out of water, no falls on the (*$#ing off-width that'd been preoccupying my imagination for days - "Phew - yes....moderate..."

"Michael Moore, hard at work gathering new material for his next hard hitting expose'- Sacko..."

Seen at Tuckerman's Ravine, 4/19/08:

People stop growing food crops when they can make more money growing crops for fuel. Brewers are apparently having a hard time finding hops now that the folks who used to sell it to them have switched to growing corn.

I'm personally relieved as hell to learn that the price of diesel is a top-of-mind concern in Rwanda these days...

I wasn't nearly as impressed with the site, which I found vaguely reminiscent of the tone and content one finds at vaccine-autism sites, but to each his own, I suppose. Unfortunately for me, the case has been conclusively settled in the court of public opinion at this point, so it looks like I'll have to start hoarding polycarbonate food containers. On second thought, I guess that I shouldn't be so fatalistic, since we've witnessed the resurrection of the silicone breast implant...

If you are interested, a great statistic is the following: ( iread this on Wikipedia a month ago) Of 131 studies of the health effects of bispehenol A, 110 studies funded and conducted by government and academia found some level of or potential adverse effect 21 studies funded and conducted by the plastics industry found no adverse effects JayB and Kk, you guys want to argue that the industry knows what they're doing and the special interest groups in government and academia are pumping our dangerous, biased data? I generally think that when it comes to arguments concerning contentious biological phenomena that have caught the public eye, it's generally safe to argue against whatever position that you personally take. Other than that, I'm basing my conclusions on what I know about the biology of nuclear receptors like the estogen receptor, retinoid receptors, etc, dose responses, toxic thresholds, the way animal studies are conducted...etc...on the fact that it's been used in a gazillion applications for decades without incident, and that the mode of action is to mimic a natural hormone. I also think it's highly amusing that this has become even a blip on the health-radar in a nation full of sedentary fatasses who are far more likely to consume themselves to death in some fashion or another than they are to sustain the slightest perturbation in their health on account of traces of estrogen mimetics - whether they're synthetic or natural. I think it's important to note biases, and eliminate them where possible in such studies. If there's a big disparity between the results obtained in one set of circumstances versus another, that's usually a problem. I also think that it's important to determine whether the experimental systems, etc that are being compared in meta-analyses are close enough to result in an apples to apples comparison. If the conflict persists, the best way to sort things out is to have independent facilities conduct the same experiments and see if the results are consistently reproducible. If there's data out there that conclusively prove that BPA exposure resulting from food and beverage containers constitutes a real threat to human health, I'll gladly revise my stance.

Maybe. None of the data I've seen suggests that there's any risk from the levels of BPA that anyone using polycarbonate containers for food or water is likely to encounter in any realistic scenario. ": Toxicol Appl Pharmacol. 2007 Feb 1;218(3):280-8. Epub 2006 Dec 5.Click here to read Links Analysis of the interaction of phytoestrogens and synthetic chemicals: an in vitro/in vivo comparison. Charles GD, Gennings C, Tornesi B, Kan HL, Zacharewski TR, Bhaskar Gollapudi B, Carney EW. Toxicology and Environmental Research and Consulting, The Dow Chemical Company, Midland, MI 48674, USA. charles_grantley@allergan.com In the evaluation of chemical mixture toxicity, it is desirable to develop an evaluation paradigm which incorporates some critical attributes of real world exposures, particularly low dose levels, larger numbers of chemicals, and chemicals from synthetic and natural sources. This study evaluated the impact of low level exposure to a mixture of six synthetic chemicals (SC) under conditions of co-exposure to various levels of plant-derived phytoestrogen (PE) compounds. Estrogenic activity was evaluated using an in vitro human estrogen receptor (ER) transcriptional activation assay and an in vivo immature rat uterotrophic assay. Initially, dose-response curves were characterized for each of the six SCs (methoxyclor, o,p-DDT, octylphenol, bisphenol A, beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, 2,3-bis(4-hydroxyphenyl)-propionitrile) in each of the assays. The six SCs were then combined at equipotent ratios and tested at 5-6 dose levels spanning from very low, sub-threshold levels, to a dose in which every chemical in the mixture was at its individual estrogenic response threshold. The SC mixtures also were tested in the absence or presence of 5-6 different levels of PEs, for a total of 36 (in vitro) or 25 (in vivo) treatment groups. Both in vitro and in vivo, low concentrations of the SC mixture failed to increase estrogenic responses relative to those induced by PEs alone. However, significant increases in response occurred when each chemical in the SC mixture was near or above its individual response threshold. In vitro, interactions between high-doses of SCs and PEs were greater than additive, whereas mixtures of SCs in the absence of PEs interacted in a less than additive fashion. In vivo, the SC and PE mixture responses were consistent with additivity. These data illustrate a novel approach for incorporating key attributes of real world exposures in chemical mixture toxicity assessments, and suggest that chemical mixture toxicity is likely to be of concern only when the mixture components are near or above their individual response thresholds. However, these data suggest that extrapolation from in vitro assays to in vivo mixture effects should be approached with caution." Toxicol Lett. 2007 Apr 25;170(2):165-76. Epub 2007 Mar 12.Click here to read Links Estrogenic effects of mixtures of phyto- and synthetic chemicals on uterine growth of prepubertal rats. van Meeuwen JA, van den Berg M, Sanderson JT, Verhoef A, Piersma AH. Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. J.A.vanMeeuwen@iras.uu.nl Through the diet humans are exposed to many weak estrogenic phytochemicals (PCs) and synthetic chemicals (SCs), but most experimental studies used individual compounds rather than mixtures. Estrogenic effects were determined in the rat juvenile uterotrophic assay using a predefined phytochemical mixture (PCmix) containing coumestrol, genistein, naringenin, (+,-)catechin, (-,-)epicatechin and quercetin, and a predefined synthetic chemical mixture (SCmix) containing nonyl-, and octylphenol, beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, methoxychlor, bisphenol A and dibutylphthalate. The mixture composition was based on human dietary uptake and actual ratios in serum. 17beta-Estradiol and genistein were also tested individually. It was found that combinations of phytoestrogens and exogenous 17beta-estradiol act additive. In contrast SCmix, inactive by itself even at high dose levels relative to human exposure, caused no synergistic or antagonistic uterotrophic effect with E(2) and/or the PCmix. Based on ED(05) and ED(01) values of the PCmix the margin of exposure in regular human diet for a uterotrophic effect is estimated many orders of magnitude. However, food supplements with phytochemicals might bring individual exposure around ED(05) and ED(01) values of the PCmix. Based on the results of our study the contribution of SCs to total estrogenicity in human diet can probably be neglected." I'm not an expert in the field by any means, the biology of estrogen receptors is complex, the affinity of estrogen mimetics for estrogen receptors and their effect on the genes that ER's upregulate or downregulate is even more so, etc, etc, etc...but at the end of the day we're talking about a mode of action consistent with that of a natural hormone here. I think you may live in Canada, where perhaps there's a requirement that the scientific validity of a particular claim may have to be established before anyone can be held liable, but that's certainly not the case here in the US. Consequently, I can pretty much guarantee that it's the fear of liability - irrespective of scientific merit - that's driving the behavior of manufacturers and retailers in this case.

Another reason why I find this episode at least somewhat amusing is that for me, the funk growing inside the Nalgene that's been siting in the back of my truck for two months in the summer has always been the paramount health concern of mine - even after cleaning it out....