Research released this week shows promise for a British drug called Iressa. That's a nice name, Iressa, isn't it? Yes. Much easier to bandy about with pharmacists than, say, gefitinib, the generic equivalent. Think that's an accident? I've been noticing lately how drug names are alternately unpronounceable and sleek, so I've done some digging, and the truth is about as unsettling as you probably suspect.
The drug makers want their brand names to be memorable and the generic counterparts to sprain your tongue. So they suggest awkward generic names and spend up to $2.25 million to come up with poetic branded alternatives. And they've got it down to a creepy science:
- People prefer drugs that begin with "plosives"�the strong-sounding letters P, T, D, K, Q and hard C. The most common first two letters in a drug name: PR.
- Marketers like to begin the brand names of lifestyle drugs with the soft sounds of C, X, and L.
- Z and X are popular because they sound "fast." They're so overused now that the FDA has imposed a moratorium. (15% of all medication errors arise through name confusion. )
Even when they're required to permit generic alternatives, they stack the deck by forcing ridiculously awkward, unmemorable names. First of all, the names can't start with H, J, K, or W, because those letters don't exist in some languages. But the first few letters must be unique (which makes for some weird combinations), and the last syllable must be an awkward "stem" keyed to the drug's mechanism of action.
Read a little further in the rules and you'll find they also want to avoid "conflict ... with established trademarks." Ah. Well, there are more than 33,000 trademarked brand names for drugs. That's a lot of tiptoeing. No wonder generics have names like rofecoxib and adalimumab. And gefitinib.
Final score: proprietary names average 10.4 letters and 3.53 syllables; generics average 14.4 letters and five syllables. Here are the five top-selling prescription drugs in 2001, ranked by dollar sales, along with their generic names:
- Lipitor (atorvastatin calcium)
- Prilosec (omeprazole)
- Zocor (simvastatin)
- Prevacid (lansoprazole)
- Celebrex (celecoxib)
The AMA's website says it favors "simplicity, brevity and ease of pronunciation" for generic drugs. What do you think?
|W|P|108324782495732391|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I just stumbled across this: Like MIT and Rice University, the Berklee College of Music is now offering its course materials for free, online, through a Creative Commons license. There are courses on production, songwriting, music education and a whole mess of instruments, including DJ and turntable.
"Please download these lessons and share them with your friends. Let us know what other types of free lessons you would like to see and what you think of Berklee Shares."
I thought MIT was a little nuts when they announced this in 2001, but now they've published syllabi, notes and calendars for 500 courses, and received 120 million hits from visitors in 210 countries. And they have no ulterior motive, except maybe letting people know about MIT's offerings. I complain a lot about how academia is divorced from reality, and I still think so, but maybe sometimes it's a good thing.
Berklee is the same way. The Berklee Shares material comes in audio, video and print-ready formats, and it's all free. The guitar stuff is okay, but not really systematic or comprehensive. I'll take a look at the keyboard files.
|W|P|108301122570273046|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat exactly would be wrong with a national health plan, again?
Today I took the morning off from work so I could drive my wife to a doctor in Durham. We had to use that doctor because he's the only one we could find who offers the tests she needs. Or so his reception staff had told us.
We didn't need diagnosis or treatment. We knew precisely what tests she needed; all we required was a licensed physician who could order them through a lab covered by our insurance.
Well, we didn't get it. Despite what the staff had told us, he didn't know of a covered lab that would do these tests, and he warned us six or seven times that he was going to invest very little time in trying to find one.
I understand his frustration�he probably spends hours every week negotiating a hall of mirrors to order covered tests for patients. But at the same time it shouldn't be our job to find out what tests we need and which labs cover them. It just shouldn't. He's not getting reimbursed for doing that research, but neither are we, and by pawning it off on us he gets two office visits for doing zero work�if I knew how to draw blood we could do all of this, literally 100 percent of it, ourselves.
We need a national system, with one set of rules for everyone. The current setup is an outrageous waste of time, money and stress for everyone involved, including the insurers and the providers. And it's only going to get worse as the boomers age.
|W|P|108318507837729358|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Bush and Cheney meet this week with the 9/11 commission. Did you know that Richard Cheney was secretary of defense during the first Gulf war? That's interesting, don't you think? Want to see something else interesting? Read this excerpt from his bio on the Pentagon's own website:
A congressional and public debate developed in the United States about whether to rely on economic sanctions against Iraq or to use military force. Bush in October 1990 settled on military action if Iraq's troops had not left Kuwait by the 15 January 1991 deadline. In November 1990 UN Resolution 678 authorized "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The debate ended on 12 January 1991, when both houses of Congress agreed to a joint resolution stating that the president was to satisfy Congress that he had exhausted all means to secure Iraq's compliance with UN resolutions on Kuwait before he initiated hostilities. Cheney signed an order, not publicly released at the time, stating that the president would make the determination required by the joint resolution and that offensive operations against Iraq would begin on 17 January. (emphasis mine)
So even in the first Iraqi conflict, Cheney was pressing for war even despite formal agreements with the U.N. and Congress saying it was our last option. And in both cases the administration kept secret its war plans, making a show of diplomacy. The common denominators are Cheney and Powell, and we know Powell opposed the current war. So why is Cheney so hell-bent on invading Iraq?
|W|P|108292419957894429|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAnother sad poem, this one by Stevie Smith:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,|W|P|108292400783295510|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he's always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
From recent questions received at the White House:
Q: Daphne, Fresh Meadows, New York: Did President George Bush, President George W. Bush's father, really hate broccoli so much he took it off the White House menu?|W|P|108291538786005420|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
A: George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States: I never asked that it be removed from White House menus. I just vowed that I would never eat it again, and I have courageously stuck to that promise.
From a New Yorker essay by E.B. White, published in February 1949, when American universities had begun dismissing professors who admitted membership in the Communist Party:
The pesky nature of democratic life is that it has no comfortable rigidity; it always hangs by a thread, never quite submits to consolidation or solidification, is always being challenged, always being defended. The seeming insubstantiality of this thread is a matter of concern and worry to persons who naturally would prefer a more robust support for the beloved structure. The thread is particularly worrisome, we think, to men of tidy habits and large affairs. ... They do not always perceive that the elasticity of democracy is its strength�like the web of a spider, which bends but holds. The desire to give the whole thing greater rigidity and a more conventional set of fastenings is almost overwhelming in these times when the strain is great, and it makes professed lovers of liberty propose measures that show little real faith in liberty.|W|P|108282360898153291|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
... And just installed an RSS feed. That's pretty good; I'll have to monkey with that later.
|W|P|108276412249727404|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWell, that was rather alarmingly easy. I just added a commenting feature via BlogBack. Just had to add a couple strings to the template and republish. If there are comments appended to this post then it's working. Huh.
|W|P|108267960313626186|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThat's odd. Rotten.com says that drummer Jeff Porcaro died from inhaling insecticide fumes. Apparently he was allergic; I guess I had never heard how he died. He was 38 in 1992, younger than I am now.
From Jim Keltner's eulogy:
I know he's laughing at me real good up there, because he'd love to see me squirm. He was more mature at 17 than most guys I was working with in the studio. He was cool and he was so BAD. He had so much chops, that I guess he got from his dad, and was worried he would overuse it in the studio. He told me all the time, 'I wanna be like you, Jimmy, I wanna just play simple and GROOVE.' That flattered me, I felt responsible to follow up. He would follow me on sessions; one night we were with Arlo Guthrie and we did 'City of New Orleans.' I said, 'Jeffrey, this is not gonna be a rockin' session, it's gonna be just brushes, so I'm probably gonna sound terrible.' I was floundering all night, but I could feel him watchin' me, so I was REALLY tryin', and finally I got the take and I look back and he was snorin'.|W|P|108259473106337181|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Jeffrey never stopped inspiring me since the moment I met him. He had the rare combination of all the qualities a drummer should have: articulateness, the deep, deep, wonderful pocket, the feeling, and most of all, time that was RIGHT outta heaven�I don't know any other way to describe it. When I would hear it I would stop, turn it up and listen, study and check and be so inspired. Now, of course, it's gonna be like that but I'm gonna be crying my eyes out all the time ... it's just gonna be so much more special.
The corpse will be taken to Tonga.
'E 'ave 'a e me'afaka'eiki ki Tonga.
Zompist.com collects unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks.
|W|P|108263184232129266|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEdna St. Vincent Millay via the Shizzolator:
Pity Me Not
Pity me not because da light of day
At close of day no longer walks da sky;
Pity me not fo' beauties passed away
From field 'n thicket as da year goes by;
Pity me not da waning of da moon,
Nor that da ebbing tide goes out sea,
Nor that a mutha�s desire is hushed so soon,
And yo' ass no longer look wit love on me, know what I'm sayin'?
This love I has known always: love is no mo'
Than da wide blossom which da wind assails,
Than da bomb diggity tide that treads da shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in da gales.
Pity me that da heart is slow to learn
What da swift mind beholds at every turn, know what I'm sayin'?
Specify up to five characteristics and The Washington Post's Veep-O-Matic will suggest a running mate for John Kerry.
Want a good fund-raiser with name recognition from a battleground state? Wesley Clark. A black southerner with congressional experience? Rep. John Lewis (Ga.).
It also includes brief bios of the most frequently cited possibilities, from Indiana senator Evan Bayh to Virginia governor Mark Warner. I didn't realize so many were in the running.
|W|P|108241274949709702|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA followup to that last post: In a brief AEI article, Murray suggests three candidates for most perversely destructive great idea:
- Logic. Greece was arguably heading toward an early Scientific Revolution when Aristotle devised a means of applying mathematical precision to everyday reasoning. Everybody decided you could find truth by just thinking real hard, and empirical science languished.
- Newton's Principia, brilliant in itself, led theorists to try inventing new social orders from scratch, according to "scientific" principles, with horrendous consequences.
- An arrogant Beethoven became the first prima donna, a model widely followed in subsequent years.
Those first two are rather dismayingly similar. Humans generalize too much.
|W|P|108232502755567699|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLately I've been reading Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment, an attempt to rank and compare great individuals according to their contributions to civilization. He divides the candidates into "inventories" within disciplines; the very top include Shakespeare, Galileo, Confucius, etc. These can't be compared with one another, and he doesn't try.
It's interesting so far, and I can't really see anything wrong with it, understanding that this kind of thing can't really be quantified. I mention it here because Murray got in trouble a few years back for The Bell Curve, which stated rather mildly that intelligence does not vary with perfect homogeneity through every conceivable constituency in the country.
Murray is a scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and we share no politics. But his work seems sound, or at least not ideologically driven. In Human Accomplishment he notes that all his top figures are male, and all but one of the scientists (Edison) are from Europe. That's not Murray's "fault," any more than that intelligence varies. He shouldn't get jumped on for saying it out loud.
|W|P|108232080720531320|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI could never get the hang of tremolo picking, the very fast right-hand picking technique that seems to come so easily to mandolin players and Carlos Santana. Here's one solution�apparently this is how Dick Dale did it ...
|W|P|108220316913391223|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPeggy Noonan repeats the tired Republican claim of a monolithic liberal media. I've been a professional magazine journalist for 15 years. A lot of the people I've worked with have been liberal, but the media is a business. If there were a hole in the market, someone would fill it and make a bajillion dollars. That's not happening. In fact, the one avowedly liberal recent national media launch, Air America, is already foundering after three weeks.
Another thing: Noonan thinks (rightly) that Bush doesn't come off well when speaking extemporaneously to the press. So she recommends he stop:
Should a president under crisis go into any venue that does not call on his greatest strengths? No. Get him out there doing speeches, meeting with citizens, taking a few shouted questions, again and again. That's how Mr. Bush best communicates his convictions, logic and plans, and that is the purpose of presidential communication.
That won't work. That'll just exaggerate the already disturbing Wizard-of-Oz quality he's giving, of a dim rich kid manipulated by shadowy advisers. A president should be able to speak intelligently about his administration's actions. If he can't, maybe he shouldn't be president.
|W|P|108211536444277680|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAs big a fan as I was of Edward Van Halen, I think "Cult of Personality" may have the best guitar solo in that completely over-the-top style. If Living Colour had been white they'd have been huge; as it was they were sort of a novelty act, which is a travesty considering rock's roots. I don't think they're a truly great band, mostly because Corey Glover improvised melodies in the verses, which gets annoying once you notice it. Great guitar and drums, though.
|W|P|108206643747210323|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMy favorite quote from Bush's press conference tonight:
People are sacrificing their lives in Iraq, from different countries. We ought to honor that, and we ought to welcome that.
Also:
REPORTER: I was asking why you're appearing together [with Dick Cheney before the 9/11 Commission], rather than separately, which was their request.|W|P|108190823543676651|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
THE PRESIDENT: Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 Commission is looking forward to asking us, and I'm looking forward to answering them.
Lately, despairing as usual for good music, I've been getting back into Zappa, particularly his later stuff. Jazz From Hell, composed on the then-novel Synclavier ("more fun than anything"), won a Grammy for best rock instrumental in 1987. It's definitely not rock, but it's well produced and terrifically dense.
Even better, maybe, is The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life, one of three products (with Broadway the Hard Way and Make a Jazz Noise Here) of the last tour in 1988.
Anyway, it gets its title for a reason. The band dissolved after only four months, but it may be the best band Zappa ever put together, and that's saying a lot:
- Bruce Fowler: trombone
- Bobby Martin: keyboards, saxophone, vocals
- Ed Mann: percussion, marimba, vibraphone, electronic percussion
- Chad Wackerman: drums, vocals, electronic percussion
- Ike Willis: synthesizer, guitar, rhythm guitar, vocals
- Paul Carman: saxophone, saxes
- Walt Fowler: synthesizer, trumpet, flugelhorn
- Mike Keneally: synthesizer, guitar, vocals
- Kurt McGettrick: saxes, E-flat clarinet
- Scott Thunes: synthesizer, bass, vocals, Mini-Moog
- Ray White: guitar
- Albert Wing: saxes
I've been through the second disc once and counted references to Strauss, the Troggs and the theme to The Dick Van Dyke Show in the horn arrangements. Plus the usual assortment of inside jokes and overlong guitar solos. Still, definitely worth repeated listening.
|W|P|108180926070333443|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) is calling for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq:
This Republic was founded in part because of the arrogance of a king who expected his subjects to do as they were told, without question, without hesitation. Our forefathers overthrew that tyrant and adopted a system of government where dissent is not only important, but it is also mandatory. Questioning flawed leadership is a requirement of this government. Failing to question, failing to speak out, is failing the legacy of the Founding Fathers.
He compares the plight of U.S. troops to Tennyson's Light Brigade:
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley�d and thunder�d;
Storm�d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
The comparison is unfortunately apt. Tennyson wrote the poem to honor the British Light Calvary in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War in the Ukraine. The suicidal charge, caused by a miscommunication between commanders, killed or wounded 247 of 637 men. The most telling (and famous) stanza:
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismay�d?
Not tho� the soldier knew
Some one had blunder�d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Bush is fishing this weekend.
|W|P|108172932293984747|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Draw Your Boss is, well, self-explanatory.
|W|P|108163944639975677|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYou know, the constant threat of a violent nonsensical doom can start to depress you after a while. You want to stay alert, but you also need to avoid the soul-deadening nihilism of existential despair.
So here is a terror alert banana:
It changes color to reflect the threat level cited by the Department of Homeland Security.
|W|P|108154277084322163|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOkay fine I'm back online. Might as well use this thing, since I built it. And blogging doesn't seem to be quite the fad it appeared. A post a day, then henceforward, and we'll just hope that no one notices the huge lacunae in the archives.
|W|P|108145626074763526|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com