Holy Moses that moose is HUGE!

None of my friends have a moose that big....

Right now, there's one ticket left, Jesse.

I think it will be a little far.... since I'll live in Boston then!!!

You know what I don't have time for this week? My job.

There's a link to the World Record size moose, which is even bigger, and accurately recorded. It helps to remember that moose are left over from the Ice Age, and were side-by-antler with mastodons and saber tooth cats.

You know what I don't have time for this week? My job.

WORD. That's the story of my October in a nutshell.

Another moose factoid - chocolate moose are awesome! [link]

They need nerd speed dating in Chicago. IJS.

Also, am tired today. It's perfect sleeping weather. Cool, rainy.

Today is Leif's first day in the gifted program at school, we'll see how he likes it. We got back the results of his WISC-IV testing they do for the gifted program and he scored a 150. On they sheet that listed the percentile as greater than 99.9. We didn't tell him this as his ego is already extremely large, he already thinks he's awesome at everything he does.

Newsweek trashes Suzanne Summers' cancer book: BREAKING: Health Author Suzanne Somers Mostly Wrong About Science, Medicine

...

But there is a big difference between staying open-minded and tossing aside treatments that have been proven effective after rigorous testing in favor of new “natural” therapies that have undergone much flimsier scrutiny. If you’re someone who needs answers now, and want to make health decisions based on solid scientific findings rather than wishful thinking, there’s not much in Somers’s latest book to help you. The basic problem with the book, says Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer, “is that it’s really inaccurate” when it describes the science behind current treatments and lacks a basic understanding of the scientific method. Not all research findings are equally authoritative. Just because something sounds good doesn’t mean it works. “Some people confuse what they believe with what they know," Brawley said.

...

Somers relies heavily on patient testimonials, but any scientist knows that talking only to those who benefited from a treatment can give less than objective results. A case in point: she lavishes praise on the research of Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, who uses a combination of enzymes, massive amounts of nutritional supplements (130 to 175 a day—yes, you read that right), a strict diet, and daily coffee enemas, which he says can cure pancreatic cancer. However, just about two months before Somers’s book was published, the Journal of Clinical Oncology published the results of a controlled observational trial of Gonzalez’s protocol vs. chemotherapy for patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer. The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute and enrolled 55 patients who met strict clinical criteria. A year into the study, 56 percent of those using chemotherapy were still alive, compared with only 16 percent of those who chose the enzyme therapy. In other words, those who picked chemo over the alternative treatment lived three times as long. Interestingly, the study was concluded in 2005, yet Somers doesn’t mention this in the book.

I wish the article trashed her more. This is the conclusion:

For her next book, we’d like to suggest a topic she knows very well: media manipulation. You have to love the fact that the only blurb on the back of the book (“Ms. Somers writes with the passion of the prophet”—Wall Street Journal) comes from a review trashing an earlier book. Somers’s real specialty is understanding that when a celebrity writes a controversial book, it doesn’t matter how much mainstream doctors and serious researchers attack it, or whether people’s health is put at risk. Attacks bring publicity, and publicity sells books. Here’s hoping that this time the public proves her wrong.

Oh, great glowing orb in the sky, why have you forsaken me?

Science Based Medicine has another excellent takedown of Somers' book and celebrity medical woo in general: [link]

(It's long, but worth a read if you're into that sort of thing.)