haha, nice. I'm glad my advice is so poignant.

Anyhow, on an entirely separate topic, here's a game I helped to make:

http://www.xgenstudios.com/play/pillage

I made all the character graphics, the intro animation (including the voices), and a few of the sounds.

Oh, I also made all the spells, most of the icons, and the entire how-to-play movie.

And also the huts, the windmills, the bowling-balls, and the aztec heads.

The other dude did the GUI, the rendered fonts, the cloud tutorials, the game background, the firepits and the trees.

(y'know, just so you can tell what is and isn't my handiwork)

If you don't want to read that, watch this: The Office Summer Vacation:

What you were suggesting, Tay, falls into line pretty nicely with my thoughts about the issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal that arrived today. It focuses on cervical cancer and the human papillomavirus, as well as the recent vaccine products developed by Merck and GSK to prevent HPV infections and, ideally, cervical cancer.

With a little bit of indulgence to my novice interpretation of this issue, some of tidbits from the CMAJ:

There were five articles (as well as a public health fact sheet) devoted to the topic. The bookends were a public health article heralding the "new era in cervical cancer prevention" and a commentary including "questions and cautions." The remaining articles presented more concrete data on NNT (number-needed-to-treat) values and a systematic review of studies on the vaccines' efficacies. As the 'data' articles are technical and can be interpreted as inconclusive, I'll stick to the bookends for the most part.

I will briefly mention, however, that the time frame of the development of the vaccine means that preventing cervical cancer was not a measured endpoint in efficacy numbers. While trials have looked at the rates of the development of precancerous lesions, and while it's feasible to look at cancer prevention rates in the future, there is no data one way or the other on what impact the vaccines will have on cervical cancer prevention. Any information about that particular datapoint is purely speculative, though it's probable, based on our current understanding, that the vaccines could prevent cervical cancer.

The "new era" article, written by doctors with expertise in public health, infection control and vaccine evaluation, discusses the epidemiology of HPV and incidence of cervical cancer worldwide. It then describes the development of the vaccines and the clinical trials demonstrating their efficacy in creating an immune response against HPV and reducing the incidence of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia, the precancerous lesion that can become cervical cancer.

The article concludes by "strongly recommend[ing] a universal publicly funded vaccination program aimed at immunizing adolescent females before they are at risk of HPV infection." It goes on to say at that the lack of long-term data is not unprecedented (one would expect as much at the infancy of any such program) and that the program must be evaluated carefully on an ongoing basis.

The "questions and cautions" commentary is penned by, among others, an epidemiologist and a bioethicist, and all the authors are members of the Canadian Women's Health Network. They list a series of questions and cautions about a national HPV vaccination program, including some identified at the Canadian Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Research Priorities Workshop.

Items on the list that struck me as particularly important to address:

• "Relatively few girls (about 1200 aged 9-15 years) were enrolled in the clinical trials of Gardasil. . . . Clearly, this is a thin information base on which to construct a policy of mass vaccination for all girls aged 9-13."


• "Gardasil is the most expensive childhood vaccine proposed for mass use . . . yet, the cost-effectiveness analyses of proposed vaccination programs needed to evaluate this expense are missing." It remains to be studied whether this is the most efficient use of public health dollars.

The overall recommendation, then, is that a number of questions need to be answered, not the least of which is defining clear, explicit goals, before a national vaccination program should begin.

Bombay Taxi

Whoah - but does it come in blue?



Those glowing figure eights in the blast stream are called Mach disks, after the guy who lent his name to the speed of sound. They're shock waves, created as the expanding fuel hits the higher atmospheric pressure outside the nozzle. If part of this blast weren't obscured, you could take the number of Mach disks (we count seven) and multiply by the speed of sound — about 758 mph at the 1,300-foot altitude of this test — to estimate the speed of fuel exiting the engine. Just don't get too close.

Kind of reminds me of telling people how to properly set casing. You can set it wrong and the casing will sink into the ground therefore collapsing your drilling hole. Our advice... setcasing properly.

I also just thought of an excellent policy for sugeons:

"measure twice, cut once".

Shit, I should do conferences.

Paras, whatever you do MAKE SURE YOU CHECK FOR ASPIRATION CAUSED BY THE FEED TUBE.

I think a good policy for any physician to go by is "BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY".