Geek Flame

I'm not very active on the Pyramid boards--I don't check them often enough to participate in the give and take. But when someone was being pedantically wrong about the orbital mechanics of a space elevator I had to post a correction. And then I could not resist letting him have it for this assertion:

> And there is no such thing as centrifugal
> force, it's a illusion based on inertia.

Bah. Centrifugal force is real. Inertial reference frames are an illusion. Nobody in human history has ever been in a non-rotating reference frame. They're a purely theoretical construct. Save it for the physicists. Anybody doing practical work uses centrifugal force when it's the most sensible way to describe the system.

Childhood Vaccinations

Reason had an article on childhood vaccinations. Here's my comment on it:

We've contemplated the delayed/reduced schedule for our kids, but haven't been able to find a doctor willing to administer it. Now we can't get them seen by a pediatrician at all. Apparently letting a kid leave the office w/o vaccinations looks bad in malpractice suits, so they just refuse to keep non-vaccinated kids as regular patients. Fortunately GPs don't have that problem.

My take after many years of raising an autistic kid and researching the issue:

1. Nobody has a clue what does or does not cause autism.
2. Medical researchers get published with data sets so small relative to the frequency of occurrence that other fields would laugh them out of peer review.
3. 24 vaccinations in 18 months is way past the point of diminishing returns for infants who haven't finished developing their immune systems.
4. The official doctrine in favor of 100% vaccination has prevented research on how many shots are too many (either total or in a single session) or on warning signs that indicate a predisposition to bad reactions (such as a family history of autoimmune disorders).
5. Most of the improvement in childhood health came from clean water and good sewers, not vaccinations.

Right now we're conducting a huge experiment in how many vaccinations kids can get before we overwhelm their immune systems. Mine are in the control group.