Visiopoetics

Today Yankee Pot Roast features my latest in poetry & lyric, “Ode to My Nanny Career.”  (The music file downloads best from Internet Explorer.)  Enjoy previous YPR light verse here.

As I report for Demockeracy this week, population trends mean trouble for AIG.

On Saturday, the LA Times reported about a new study that concludes hot tea causes a greatly increased risk of esophageal cancer.  They reported it as if the link was new, but studies linking too-hot tea consumption with an increase in this type of cancer risk have been around for over ten years.  In fact, the first results from the very study the article mentions were published in 2004.

The earliest such studies were conducted in Japan regarding green tea consumption, and the “new” one was in Iran with tea that we don’t actually know anything about from the recent studies.  It could have been green, oolong, brick, or black; it could have been from anywhere (Iran, Turkey, India); it could have come to Iran in a bundle smuggling opium from Afghanistan, and the increased temperature could unlock the sweet taste of a particular pesticide it was subsequently contaminated with.  Or maybe it was grown locally, and absorbed nuclear waste in addition to fluoride in the rich northern Iranian soil.  Isn’t heat a type of radiation anyway?

We know nothing about what type of tea this was, what levels of carcinogenic heavy metals in particular it was contaminated with, or where it came from, and we aren’t really sure why tea is the focus anyway.  All studies conducted in this vein thus far appear to share the strange feature of distinguishing hot tea drinkers from hot coffee drinkers and even hot food eaters when tracking and reporting increased esophageal cancer risk — while asserting that the increased risk has everything to do with the temperature and nothing to do with the tea. Presumably this is because Golestans are big on tea, and maybe hot food isn’t customary.  (I have a hard time believing the latter.)

That’s all good and well, but this is what Americans need to know:  does the conclusion of the tea studies hold for Starbucks?  And if so, how long before the first lawsuit for a cancer-causing latte?

An MC Escher print inspired NYU’s Nadrian Seeman to use DNA origami in nanotechnology.  I think this makes it very clear why I should be permitted to play with expensive nanoSTAR equipment.  (Who better to fold a swan out of swan?)

THREE

+ CHEERS

————

SPRING

As I report for Demockeracy this week, the current dynamics of supply and demand in American healthcare work just fine.

Today’s New York Times features my letter to the editor on evidence-based medicine.

My love affair with the powerhouse diagnostic tool Isabel has been previously immortalized in alphametic form.  I’m still waiting for Archimedes (about whom I published this poem last year) to simulate the missing basic research comparing Prednisone with placebo in randomized lupus patients.  And to compare innovative bioavailable B-vitamin and iron supplementation (including vitamin C, inulin, and alcohol) with iron dextran infusion for severe anemias.  And to compare ginger and aspirin in a re-simulation of CARDS.  (You know what I’m talkin about.)

THEMA (Vol. 21, No. 1 Spring 2009) is here!  The Box under the Bed (the current issue theme/prompt and cover art title) is mixed media on a flatbed scanner.  (That’s my brother and me when we were little kids inside the heart-shaped locket.)

Of course I’m plugging it because it’s got my cover art, right?  Wrong.  All special interests aside, I strongly believe you should run outside right now without even stopping to make sure you’re wearing pants, make your way to the nearest library or exclusive tea-house, and find yourself a copy.  My favorite piece changes every time I turn the page, such that having just read the issue front to back in my hot little hands, my current favorite is Deborah Kolodji’s “Sorting” (last poem in the issue, page 99-100).  Now I must read it backwards to find out if that holds or reverses.

Future issue premises:  The Dean’s cat (July 1, 2009), Math & Music (November 1, 2009), The trip not taken (March 1, 2010).  Got plot?

GREEN

+ BEER

———–

QUEASY

Today The Science Creative Quarterly features my timeless sonnet, “Personal Biogenetic Analysis: Prospectus.”  (It may not technically be a sonnet.  But it’s not about time, so I’m pretty sure it qualifies as timeless.)