I'm trying to think of when I had more than one USB device at a time plugged into my laptop, and I'm coming up short. Likewise, I can think of only a couple of times I've ever used the DVD drive while traveling, and that cured me of ever doing it again--it utterly kills battery life.
So what predictions does the theory of evolution make than can be or have been verified by an experiment or observation in todays physical world?
That would be a long, long list. Evolution is the fundamental theory of biology, after all, so it shows up virtually everywhere.
A sampling:
Presence of particular fossils in strata of particular age. Patterns of sequence similarity in DNA of different species corresponding to predictions of common descent via natural selection Evolution of novel enzymatic activities in microorganisms (e.g. nylonase) Evolution of resistance to antibiotics and antivirals Ability of genetic algorithms based on natural selection to solve problems in mathematics and engineering design Genetic evidence of gene duplication and repurposing Presence of endogenous retrovirus DNA remnants in multiple species
Sorry, that should have said 'you can observe the effects of gravity
Yes, just as you can observe the effects of evolution: fossils that reveal species change over time, similarities in DNA sequence that fit proposed patterns of descent, evolution of new capabilities in microorganisms, etc, etc.
Science will not ever be able to convert Big-E evolution into a fact, since there is no method of proving how something DID happen, only ways to show how it COULD HAVE happened.
Science will never convert evolution (whether you use a big e or a little e) into a fact, because in science all explanations and generalizations are theories. Facts are observations, like "All known differences between the DNA of different vertebrate species are of the type created by mutation." Any interpretation, e.g. "These facts argue that all known species arose by common descent" is theory.
"I dropped a book and it fell to the ground" is a fact. "All masses are subject to a gravitational attractive force" is a theory.
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is a theory of gravity. It replaced Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. The theory is backed up by sufficient observation (the precession of Mercury, gravitational lensing) to have replaced the law.
But we still talk about Newton's "Law" of gravity, and Newton's "Laws" of motion, even thought they are known to be incorrect. This is because, despite popular misconception, in science "Law" does not mean "fact" or "proved theory" -- in actual usage, it means something more along the lines of "rule of thumb": something that may or may not be strictly correct, but that is simple and reliable enough for most purposes.
All you've done is explain short term genetic mutations. Hair color and pattern can be altered due to selective breeding. Even genetic defects (as well as advantages) can be passed on and enhanced. But how does a fish with gills suddenly grow a lung? Genes and DNA don't just spontaneously say "I think I'll try to make a lung in the next generation."
No, but you could have a mutation that caused a fish to gulp air, and if that fish lived in an area where the ponds dried up or became eutrophic, the absorption of oxygen across the mucous membrane could allow that fish to survive long enough to reach another pool. Then mutations that caused an outpouching of the stomach or esophagus, providing giving more area for gas exchange, would be favored in this line of fish. Then mutations that caused folding of this pocket to further increase surface area would be favored, etc., etc.
So rather than a lung in the next generation, we have fish that gradually get better a gulping air from generation to generation, with a pouch that gradually elaborates, mutation by mutation, over thousands of generations, into a lung.
And note that if you compare the DNA of an air-breathing animal to that of a fish, you don't find new "lung" genes with no counterpart in the fish--what you find is the same fundamental complement of genes, differing only by sequence changes of the sort that are produced by mutation.
Sure you can observe gravity and model it based on observation, but no one know what actually causes gravity or why it exists. There is no proven theory as to what gravity actually is.
You can observe gravity? What does it look like?
Normal people are unable to observe gravity. All the rest of us can see is various objects moving around in various ways. We theorize that commonalities in this motion can be explained by an unobservable force that we call "gravity." Of course, we haven't observed every single moving object in the universe, only a small sampling of moving objects in our own region, so we can never be sure that our theory is correct. What is worse, there is good reason to believe that our mathematical description of this invisible force is not entirely correct, because the equations don't seem to work right under certain conditions--conditions where it is hard to make any kind of observations.
I am a scientist, and I know that in science, "theory" means any generalization or explanation that is well supported by experimental or observational evidence.
A "tautology," of course, is a statement that logically must be true, so any valid mathematical equatioin or logical proof is a tautology. Since a scientific theory must be logical, it necessarily contains embedded within it one or more tautologies, but it goes beyond that in that its conclusions constitute predictions about the physical world that can be tested to evaluate whether or not the premises are correct.
Without scientific proof (Please, show me how fish can grow lungs to breath only air, without compromising their current breathing system
Basically, it is all gas exchange across membranes. So a gill will absorb oxygen from air to some extent, and a lung will absorb oxygen from water to some extent. It is actually easier to get oxygen from air than water, because the concentration of oxygen is higher (you can breathe highly oxygenated liquids for a short time, although it is very tiring, and it is hard to get rid of the liquid so that you can breathe air again). While a land-dwelling animal has little need to maintain the ability to extract low levels of oxygen from water, it is easy to see how the ability to extract oxygen from air can be advantageous to some fish, such as those that might be caught in drying pools or in eutrophic waters where the oxygen has all been consumed.
Not if they want to keep their jobs they won't. With school boards and school administrators unsympathetic to the teaching of evolution, while the teaching of evolution is not banned, parent complaints will give them a reason to find some other convenient excuse to fire the teacher.
However, there is nothing preventing them from teaching accurately what a theory means in science, and dispelling the falsehood that there is some level of evidence at which a "theory" gets promoted to a "fact" or a "law."
Given the fact that there is no established mechanism whereby nonionizing radiation can damage DNA, not to mention the potential for bias (differential recall bias--people with tumors who are seeking a cause may be more motivated to remember cell phone use than healthy people--is mentioned but dismissed by the authors) as well as the problem of multiple comparisions, I'd have to see a p value considerably lower than 0.03 to take this seriously.
You're missing the point. iPhone over EDGE is a premature product, because the phone is meant to serve as both mobile phone and internet browser. You won't get that benefit before you reach 3G speeds.
My iPhone seems to be about as fast in browsing the internet as the average laptop of maybe 5 years ago, when we were all rather pleased with our 802.11b wireless access, even if it took complicated web pages a while to load.
I find that my iPhone is perfectly adequate for most of the web browsing that I do on the go. I certainly wouldn't mind a speed bump, and I'll likely upgrade once it's available, but I'm glad that I didn't wait--I'm getting a lot of use out of my iPhone as it is.
I wonder what percentage of those un-activated iPhones were bought by people who didn't realize they had to mess with a PC just to turn the phone on.
Rounded off to two significant figures, I'd guess 0.0%. You spend $400 on a product and then keep it when you find out you can't use it; you take it back to the store and get your money back. Even people who don't have a personal computer probably know somebody who has one to activate the phone.
Actually the keynote announcement included the top two features on my wishlist: GPS (OK, not real GPS, but it does the job) and lyrics on the screen while listening to music.
Of course, there will probably be a flood of new features soon, now that Apple is opening the phone up to 3rd party applications.
I don't really care much about carrier exclusivity. I pick my carrier based on the phone more than the other way around. The difference between carriers seems minor to me compared to the features of the phone. AT&T might not be my first choice of carrier, but offering iPhone makes them my first choice.
From a business standpoint, exclusive access to the iPhone has value, and enables Apple to get better terms. AT&T's customer base and profits increased significantly based on the iPhone. It wouldn't surprise me if the money Apple is making based on their exclusive relationship with AT&T exceeds what they would have made by offering the iPhone to all carriers. They might sell a few more phones (although I suspect that most buyers are like me, more interested in the phone than the carrier) but they'll be making less money per phone, because a carrier can't be expected to agree to as favorable terms if they aren't going to have an exclusive deal.
They calculated the linear velocity that a tiger would need for a take-off angle of 55 degrees. But that is relevant only if the zoo has thoughtfully provided a 55 degree launch ramp for the tiger. Building up speed in one direction is one thing, it is easy to imagine that a tiger with a running start can accelerate to the required horizontal velocity of a little over 15 miles per hour. But to achieve the required total velocity of about 27 mph, the tiger also needs to be able to accelerate vertically to 21.9 mph, and it doesn't get a run-up to accelerate to that speed--it needs to do that in one step (well, leap).
So does anybody know how how high a tiger can jump from a standing start? (I doubt if running helps much for altitude) Basically, it needs to be able to jump as high as the wall. Although to be fair, they did a center of mass calculation--a real tiger wouldn't have to get its COM over the wall, just get high enough for its forepaws to reach the top, and it might have enough momentum and friction to run up the wall a step or so.
My personal favorite from that era was a game called Star Blazer by Tony Suzuki. The game itself was not particularly original--a side scrolling shooter where you were mainly attacking ground targets. But the physics was very good--when you dropped a bomb, the bomb took on the velocity of your plane, meaning that you could do all sorts of tricks like "lofting" bombs. And it had the best progression of difficulty that I've seen in any game. On each level, there was an "optional technique" that you could discover, which was not necessary to pass the level, but greatly enhanced your score. And then on the next level, that same technique would turn out to be crucial, so each level sort of functioned as training for the one to come.
It isn't a pissing contest. Yes, Apple still exists today. And yes, Atari had better games and hardware back in the day.
Eventually. The Apple II was the first home system with the capacity do games that rivaled the arcades, and it remained a strong game system throughout the 8-bit era, although graphically it was eventually surpassed by computers from Commodore and Atari that offered built-in videogame hardware features such as hardware sprites and sound synthesizers. The Apple II simply provided a screen buffer to write data to. Everything had to be done in software--shifting sprites on the screen, synthesizing music (the speaker supported only a simple on/off click, but clever programmers learned how to modulate this to produce (somewhat harsh) tones. Even writing to the disk was under direct cpu control at the bit level, leading to some truly bizarre protection schemes.
As it happens, I remember surveying the competition before buying the Apple II+. At the time, the choices were. TRS80-black and white extremely low resolution block graphics Commodore PET-black and white character based graphics; no ability to put an arbitrary dot anywhere on the screen Exidy sorcerer-black and white character based graphics; no ability to put an arbitrary block anywhere on the screen
I initially wanted to avoid the Apple, and was leaning toward the Exidy sorcerer, which was compatible with the Z80/S100 based systems that were the "standard" in those days. But I soon found that the Apple II was the only one that offered "color" graphics with the ability to address an individual pixel on the screen. The color was very limited based on a clever Wozniak hack that took advantage of an artifact of how a dot was displayed on a color screen. It offered a palette of two colors, and was position based. You could have violet or green (alternate pixels being one color or the other). Or you could have orange or blue (with the ability to switch palettes at the byte level). To get white, you had to illuminate neighboring pixels. Later on, people figured out how to dither these colors to get a larger palette.
But it was still color and pixel-level graphics addressing, at a time when other computers with color or pixel level graphics capability cost at least three times as much. It was the only computer even close to its price range that supported vector graphics other than with crude, character size blocks. It also offered two analog inputs. Initially, the system came with two game paddles, but before long there were analog joysticks available. Another major feature that was important in early games was the support of dual graphics buffers, enabling games to draw to one buffer then rapidly switch buffers.
The first game that really blew people away was Space Invaders, because it looked identical to the arcade version. A bit later Asteroids came out, not quite as perfect, because the arcade original used a genuine vector display that the Apple II emulated with pixel graphics, but very close.
There was no dedicated sprite hardware. Early developers had to write their own sprite engines. Although you could control every single pixel on the screen, the software could only write a byte at a time, at fixed boundaries, so early sprite engines used tables of pre-shifted shapes to avoid the overhead of shifting a bitmap relative to byte boundaries.
Let me just make sure I understand: Your friend owes you something because he offered you a cup of coffee in a container that displeased you? All you had to do was decline his offer, and yet you think you're doing him a favor by not suing him. Now I understand why you feel McDonald's is liable.
So if you negligently hurt your friend, you don't think that you owe him anything, not even an apology, much less help with the medical bills for the injury caused by your carelessness?
I think the disagreement between those who feel the case is frivolous and those who feel it is not stems from whether you believe there should be different standards for companies and individuals.
For example, suppose that you and I are friends, and you ask me to make you a cup of coffee for the road. I brew some coffee at 200F and serve it to you in a cheap styrofoam cup at 190F. "Be careful, this coffee is hot," I say. "No shit, Sherlock," you reply. As you're sitting in the car, you hold the cup firmly between your knees and remove the top, so you can add sugar and cream. But then you accidentally spill some coffee on yourself. "God dammit, that was 20% my fault," you say through clenched teeth. I certainly think that there should be different standards for friends. A friend is somebody with whom I have an ongoing relationship that includes a certain amount of mutual debt, for favors done in the past and for harms forgiven. So if a friend of mine does something so idiotic (I don't know if I have any friends that stupid, but never mind) as to hand me 190F coffee in a flimsy styrofoam cup, without even putting the cream and sugar in so I won't have to risk opening the cup in the car, I won't sue him; it just becomes part of the tab, and he'll make it up to me in some form in the future. Of course, a friend, if not impoverished, would surely offer to pay my medical costs without even being asked. (It is worth noted that the lawsuit occurred when Macdonald's refused to pay the woman's actual medical expenses).
The wide publicity given to this report is probably unfortunate, given how many people are desperate for a cure. Key points: This is a case study of one patient. Treatment was not double blinded. Patient's family and doctor knew about the treatment. From the paper, the degree of improvement sounds a bit short of complete reversal of symptoms
Upon returning to the clinic one week following perispinal etanercept administration for his weekly dose the patient's wife and son confirmed that he had remained markedly clinically improved throughout the week, a fact which was remarked upon by the family [see Additional file 1]. He was noticed to be less reluctant to join in conversation. On re-examination by author ET prior to repeat dosing one week after the initial dose, the patient correctly identified the year, month, season, day of week and state. He appeared to answer with less frustration, and the examiner's impression was that there was reduced latency of response, and his affect seemed improved. On the FAS test for verbal fluency when asked to list all of the words that start with the letter F in 60 seconds he listed 8 words, and named 5 animals in 60 seconds. The study author has a patent on this treatment strategy.
Severity of Alzheimer's dementia can vary dramatically from day to day, and many patients show periods of near-complete lucidity.
I can't help wondering how much etanercept (it is a large protein) is getting into the brain when administered in this way.
It is widely suspected that Alzheimer's Disease has an inflammatory component, so the approach is not unreasonable, but I worry about large number of patients' families demanding etanercept based on this very preliminary work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to think of when I had more than one USB device at a time plugged into my laptop, and I'm coming up short. Likewise, I can think of only a couple of times I've ever used the DVD drive while traveling, and that cured me of ever doing it again--it utterly kills battery life.
That would be a long, long list. Evolution is the fundamental theory of biology, after all, so it shows up virtually everywhere.
A sampling:
Presence of particular fossils in strata of particular age.
Patterns of sequence similarity in DNA of different species corresponding to predictions of common descent via natural selection
Evolution of novel enzymatic activities in microorganisms (e.g. nylonase)
Evolution of resistance to antibiotics and antivirals
Ability of genetic algorithms based on natural selection to solve problems in mathematics and engineering design
Genetic evidence of gene duplication and repurposing
Presence of endogenous retrovirus DNA remnants in multiple species
etc., etc.
Yes, just as you can observe the effects of evolution: fossils that reveal species change over time, similarities in DNA sequence that fit proposed patterns of descent, evolution of new capabilities in microorganisms, etc, etc.
Science will never convert evolution (whether you use a big e or a little e) into a fact, because in science all explanations and generalizations are theories. Facts are observations, like "All known differences between the DNA of different vertebrate species are of the type created by mutation." Any interpretation, e.g. "These facts argue that all known species arose by common descent" is theory.
"I dropped a book and it fell to the ground" is a fact.
"All masses are subject to a gravitational attractive force" is a theory.
But we still talk about Newton's "Law" of gravity, and Newton's "Laws" of motion, even thought they are known to be incorrect. This is because, despite popular misconception, in science "Law" does not mean "fact" or "proved theory" -- in actual usage, it means something more along the lines of "rule of thumb": something that may or may not be strictly correct, but that is simple and reliable enough for most purposes.
No, but you could have a mutation that caused a fish to gulp air, and if that fish lived in an area where the ponds dried up or became eutrophic, the absorption of oxygen across the mucous membrane could allow that fish to survive long enough to reach another pool. Then mutations that caused an outpouching of the stomach or esophagus, providing giving more area for gas exchange, would be favored in this line of fish. Then mutations that caused folding of this pocket to further increase surface area would be favored, etc., etc.
So rather than a lung in the next generation, we have fish that gradually get better a gulping air from generation to generation, with a pouch that gradually elaborates, mutation by mutation, over thousands of generations, into a lung.
And note that if you compare the DNA of an air-breathing animal to that of a fish, you don't find new "lung" genes with no counterpart in the fish--what you find is the same fundamental complement of genes, differing only by sequence changes of the sort that are produced by mutation.
Right. So "y = x^2" is not a tautology, but "IF x, y are rational numbers AND x = sqrt(y) THEN y = x^2" is a tautology.
You can observe gravity? What does it look like?
Normal people are unable to observe gravity. All the rest of us can see is various objects moving around in various ways. We theorize that commonalities in this motion can be explained by an unobservable force that we call "gravity." Of course, we haven't observed every single moving object in the universe, only a small sampling of moving objects in our own region, so we can never be sure that our theory is correct. What is worse, there is good reason to believe that our mathematical description of this invisible force is not entirely correct, because the equations don't seem to work right under certain conditions--conditions where it is hard to make any kind of observations.
I am a scientist, and I know that in science, "theory" means any generalization or explanation that is well supported by experimental or observational evidence.
A "tautology," of course, is a statement that logically must be true, so any valid mathematical equatioin or logical proof is a tautology. Since a scientific theory must be logical, it necessarily contains embedded within it one or more tautologies, but it goes beyond that in that its conclusions constitute predictions about the physical world that can be tested to evaluate whether or not the premises are correct.
Basically, it is all gas exchange across membranes. So a gill will absorb oxygen from air to some extent, and a lung will absorb oxygen from water to some extent. It is actually easier to get oxygen from air than water, because the concentration of oxygen is higher (you can breathe highly oxygenated liquids for a short time, although it is very tiring, and it is hard to get rid of the liquid so that you can breathe air again). While a land-dwelling animal has little need to maintain the ability to extract low levels of oxygen from water, it is easy to see how the ability to extract oxygen from air can be advantageous to some fish, such as those that might be caught in drying pools or in eutrophic waters where the oxygen has all been consumed.
However, there is nothing preventing them from teaching accurately what a theory means in science, and dispelling the falsehood that there is some level of evidence at which a "theory" gets promoted to a "fact" or a "law."
Given the fact that there is no established mechanism whereby nonionizing radiation can damage DNA, not to mention the potential for bias (differential recall bias--people with tumors who are seeking a cause may be more motivated to remember cell phone use than healthy people--is mentioned but dismissed by the authors) as well as the problem of multiple comparisions, I'd have to see a p value considerably lower than 0.03 to take this seriously.
My iPhone seems to be about as fast in browsing the internet as the average laptop of maybe 5 years ago, when we were all rather pleased with our 802.11b wireless access, even if it took complicated web pages a while to load.
I find that my iPhone is perfectly adequate for most of the web browsing that I do on the go. I certainly wouldn't mind a speed bump, and I'll likely upgrade once it's available, but I'm glad that I didn't wait--I'm getting a lot of use out of my iPhone as it is.
Rounded off to two significant figures, I'd guess 0.0%. You spend $400 on a product and then keep it when you find out you can't use it; you take it back to the store and get your money back. Even people who don't have a personal computer probably know somebody who has one to activate the phone.
Actually the keynote announcement included the top two features on my wishlist: GPS (OK, not real GPS, but it does the job) and lyrics on the screen while listening to music.
Of course, there will probably be a flood of new features soon, now that Apple is opening the phone up to 3rd party applications.
I don't really care much about carrier exclusivity. I pick my carrier based on the phone more than the other way around. The difference between carriers seems minor to me compared to the features of the phone. AT&T might not be my first choice of carrier, but offering iPhone makes them my first choice.
From a business standpoint, exclusive access to the iPhone has value, and enables Apple to get better terms. AT&T's customer base and profits increased significantly based on the iPhone. It wouldn't surprise me if the money Apple is making based on their exclusive relationship with AT&T exceeds what they would have made by offering the iPhone to all carriers. They might sell a few more phones (although I suspect that most buyers are like me, more interested in the phone than the carrier) but they'll be making less money per phone, because a carrier can't be expected to agree to as favorable terms if they aren't going to have an exclusive deal.
They calculated the linear velocity that a tiger would need for a take-off angle of 55 degrees. But that is relevant only if the zoo has thoughtfully provided a 55 degree launch ramp for the tiger. Building up speed in one direction is one thing, it is easy to imagine that a tiger with a running start can accelerate to the required horizontal velocity of a little over 15 miles per hour. But to achieve the required total velocity of about 27 mph, the tiger also needs to be able to accelerate vertically to 21.9 mph, and it doesn't get a run-up to accelerate to that speed--it needs to do that in one step (well, leap).
So does anybody know how how high a tiger can jump from a standing start? (I doubt if running helps much for altitude) Basically, it needs to be able to jump as high as the wall. Although to be fair, they did a center of mass calculation--a real tiger wouldn't have to get its COM over the wall, just get high enough for its forepaws to reach the top, and it might have enough momentum and friction to run up the wall a step or so.
My personal favorite from that era was a game called Star Blazer by Tony Suzuki. The game itself was not particularly original--a side scrolling shooter where you were mainly attacking ground targets. But the physics was very good--when you dropped a bomb, the bomb took on the velocity of your plane, meaning that you could do all sorts of tricks like "lofting" bombs. And it had the best progression of difficulty that I've seen in any game. On each level, there was an "optional technique" that you could discover, which was not necessary to pass the level, but greatly enhanced your score. And then on the next level, that same technique would turn out to be crucial, so each level sort of functioned as training for the one to come.
Eventually. The Apple II was the first home system with the capacity do games that rivaled the arcades, and it remained a strong game system throughout the 8-bit era, although graphically it was eventually surpassed by computers from Commodore and Atari that offered built-in videogame hardware features such as hardware sprites and sound synthesizers. The Apple II simply provided a screen buffer to write data to. Everything had to be done in software--shifting sprites on the screen, synthesizing music (the speaker supported only a simple on/off click, but clever programmers learned how to modulate this to produce (somewhat harsh) tones. Even writing to the disk was under direct cpu control at the bit level, leading to some truly bizarre protection schemes.
As it happens, I remember surveying the competition before buying the Apple II+. At the time, the choices were.
TRS80-black and white extremely low resolution block graphics
Commodore PET-black and white character based graphics; no ability to put an arbitrary dot anywhere on the screen
Exidy sorcerer-black and white character based graphics; no ability to put an arbitrary block anywhere on the screen
I initially wanted to avoid the Apple, and was leaning toward the Exidy sorcerer, which was compatible with the Z80/S100 based systems that were the "standard" in those days.
But I soon found that the Apple II was the only one that offered "color" graphics with the ability to address an individual pixel on the screen.
The color was very limited based on a clever Wozniak hack that took advantage of an artifact of how a dot was displayed on a color screen. It offered a palette of two colors, and was position based. You could have violet or green (alternate pixels being one color or the other). Or you could have orange or blue (with the ability to switch palettes at the byte level). To get white, you had to illuminate neighboring pixels. Later on, people figured out how to dither these colors to get a larger palette.
But it was still color and pixel-level graphics addressing, at a time when other computers with color or pixel level graphics capability cost at least three times as much. It was the only computer even close to its price range that supported vector graphics other than with crude, character size blocks. It also offered two analog inputs. Initially, the system came with two game paddles, but before long there were analog joysticks available. Another major feature that was important in early games was the support of dual graphics buffers, enabling games to draw to one buffer then rapidly switch buffers.
The first game that really blew people away was Space Invaders, because it looked identical to the arcade version. A bit later Asteroids came out, not quite as perfect, because the arcade original used a genuine vector display that the Apple II emulated with pixel graphics, but very close.
There was no dedicated sprite hardware. Early developers had to write their own sprite engines. Although you could control every single pixel on the screen, the software could only write a byte at a time, at fixed boundaries, so early sprite engines used tables of pre-shifted shapes to avoid the overhead of shifting a bitmap relative to byte boundaries.
Sublogic Flight Simulator
Wizardry I
Aklabeth
Temple of Apshai
Doctor: Can you name 8 words beginning with the letter "F"
Patient: Uh..flower, fantastic, forward, front,..um...force,..uh... fun,...uh... flimsy...uh...uh...uh...FUCK!
Doctor: Very good.
So if you negligently hurt your friend, you don't think that you owe him anything, not even an apology, much less help with the medical bills for the injury caused by your carelessness?
Do you have any friends?
For example, suppose that you and I are friends, and you ask me to make you a cup of coffee for the road. I brew some coffee at 200F and serve it to you in a cheap styrofoam cup at 190F. "Be careful, this coffee is hot," I say. "No shit, Sherlock," you reply. As you're sitting in the car, you hold the cup firmly between your knees and remove the top, so you can add sugar and cream. But then you accidentally spill some coffee on yourself. "God dammit, that was 20% my fault," you say through clenched teeth. I certainly think that there should be different standards for friends. A friend is somebody with whom I have an ongoing relationship that includes a certain amount of mutual debt, for favors done in the past and for harms forgiven. So if a friend of mine does something so idiotic (I don't know if I have any friends that stupid, but never mind) as to hand me 190F coffee in a flimsy styrofoam cup, without even putting the cream and sugar in so I won't have to risk opening the cup in the car, I won't sue him; it just becomes part of the tab, and he'll make it up to me in some form in the future. Of course, a friend, if not impoverished, would surely offer to pay my medical costs without even being asked. (It is worth noted that the lawsuit occurred when Macdonald's refused to pay the woman's actual medical expenses).
Key points:
This is a case study of one patient.
Treatment was not double blinded. Patient's family and doctor knew about the treatment.
From the paper, the degree of improvement sounds a bit short of complete reversal of symptoms Upon returning to the clinic one week following perispinal etanercept administration for his weekly dose the patient's wife and son confirmed that he had remained markedly clinically improved throughout the week, a fact which was remarked upon by the family [see Additional file 1]. He was noticed to be less reluctant to join in conversation. On re-examination by author ET prior to repeat dosing one week after the initial dose, the patient correctly identified the year, month, season, day of week and state. He appeared to answer with less frustration, and the examiner's impression was that there was reduced latency of response, and his affect seemed improved. On the FAS test for verbal fluency when asked to list all of the words that start with the letter F in 60 seconds he listed 8 words, and named 5 animals in 60 seconds. The study author has a patent on this treatment strategy.
Severity of Alzheimer's dementia can vary dramatically from day to day, and many patients show periods of near-complete lucidity.
I can't help wondering how much etanercept (it is a large protein) is getting into the brain when administered in this way.
It is widely suspected that Alzheimer's Disease has an inflammatory component, so the approach is not unreasonable, but I worry about large number of patients' families demanding etanercept based on this very preliminary work.