tisiwoota

Another “Road”-themed poem while I cross the country… apropos since this most recent drive through Boulder did not, unlike last time, involve getting lost on mountain passes late at night or blowing out a tire in the middle of the Moab desert…

The Road to Wisdom

but less
and less
and less.

Song of the Open Road

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
(more…)

A new-to-me issue in bioethics, via the IP-health listerv: that patients involved in ongoing clinical trials may be using their experiences with a drug to guide their stockmarket decisions.

Evidence was anecdotal but sufficient for concern. Should patients in trials use their personal knowledge of a drug’s success or failure to guide their own stock choices? Do patients chatting in online cancer forums unintentionally release information that can affect stock prices?

One of the most disturbing possibilities is also the least likely—a patient falsifying trial results to drive up a company’s stock, Dr. Ratain says. Patients who purchase stock from the drug’s manufacturer may withhold information about side effects.

This one goes under the “one hopes this was somehow taken out of context” files– a quote from a review of a new book on Galileo in a recent issue of Science:

‘Interestingly, in a speech delivered at Parma, Italy, 15 March 1990, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) stated: “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.”’

Aiii….

From SciDev.net: An article on the Brazilian government’s failure to live up to its promise to unfreeze approximately US$1.3 billion in ‘contingency’ reserves from the National Fund for Science and Technology Development that had been cordoned off in 2002 in order to stabilize the economy:

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s administration can be accused of not being any different from past governments for a number of reasons. But one in particular should concern those who care about the future of the Latin American country: Lula is revealing himself as yet another president prepared to freeze Brazilian research funds to avoid jeopardising the country’s reputation on Wall Street.

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

From patenting entire plants, Monsanto has apparently moved on to patenting pigs?