Rat pharmacology update:

• Ever see a rat yawning? Chemical and Engineering News (March 27, 200, p. 23) reports that nicotine in combination with haloperidol (an antipsychotic drug marketed as Haldol) provides an effective treatment for the symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome. In addition, Haldol makes rats sleepy.
   

This would never happen in a French market:

• On a Tuesday evening, I asked the staff guy behind the seafood counter at "the friendliest store in town" when their sorry looking (pale, dehydrated) "fresh" salmon fillets, on sale at a reduced price, had arrived.


"We got them in Friday," he replied.
"So you're selling fish that's at least five days old as fresh?!?"
"Yeah, it's fresh-- it doesn't smell!" was his snappy rejoinder.

A more experienced person at the store told me a few months ago that they were permitted to sell ten-day-old seafood as fresh. This is like saying that a loaf of bread is fresh up to the point at which it is covered with mold.
 

Don't try this at home.

• "In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards celebrate evolution in action by commemorating the remains of individuals who most contributed to the improvement of our gene pool. Winners minimized their own genetic contribution by suffering idiotic and fatal misadventures, thereby dousing our gene pool with chlorine."

Don't fear the deli:

• In Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison (a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins) reports that suicidal individuals have even injected themselves with peanut butter or mayonnaise to bring about their deaths.

Strange culture:

• A few years ago Pat Boone released an album titled In a Metal Mood, featuring covers of Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple), No More Mr. Nice Guy (Alice Cooper), and other songs. Pat Boone is known for his white shoes and squeaky-clean Christian outlook. In preparation for a Y2K meltdown, he liquidated a large portion of his assets in 1999.

Dumb things that have been said by smart people:

From my intellectual brothers and sisters in physics

• "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been uncovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."-- said by Albert Abraham Michelson in an address at the dedication of Ryerson Physical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, in 1894. (Apparently this was included in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 14th edition,but omitted from the 15th and 16th editions.) Discovered after Michelson's address were special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, the Standard Model,.... Our (still changing) notions of space, time, matter, and fundamental interactions are quite different from those of Michelson's time. The quote was discussed in a letter published in the July 28, 1996 edition of the New York Times.
• "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."--attributed to Ernest Rutherford, printed on souvenirs distributed by agents from Harper Collins publishers while pushing their textbooks. This seems to ignore the fact that solving the Dirac equation for a biological system is not the best way to explain, for example, the human immune system.