Snow became very well known in his own time for administering anesthesia during childbirth to Queen Victoria, and as you might expect, starting a fashion. He's much better known today as one of the founders of the discipline of epidemiology, as result of his amazing research on the cholera outbreaks in London.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html

which seems gratuitously hostile to me - "we hope, do more than just pay lip service to the pandemic". As a health researcher myself, I assure you that the majority of us are in this field to do more than pay lip service to public health problems, especially in the US, where "public health" is often defined and limited to clinical services to poor people.

we develop the worst faults of classed societies. I spent a number of years, to some degree still am, living within a strongly Confucian society. One of the prime tenets of such a society is reciprocal responsibility and respect between people of differing levels. In my view, open acknowledgement of class differences accompanied by the expectation of respect works better than our pretence of equality.

I dunno, Andrew - here in southern California, there's plenty of talk of the drop in housing, especially in San Diego - but the research outfit Dataquick took a look at that market a little while back, and concluded the main component of the drop was flippers stopping their nefarious activities. When I see articles about the national housing market, the referral point most often mentioned is San Diego, but without anything in the way of nuance, so one gets the impression, doubtless because the writer has that impression as well, that it's ordinary houses and people who are affected by the drop. According to Dataquick (they have a good website), that is not the case.

.................dan

it was enacted by republicans to prevent great evils like democratic presidents doing 4 terms. I remember at the time hearing things like "Washington and Lincoln had only two terms, and we should respect that." Baloney! It was completely an anti-FDR proposition, because of the man's popularity. So since it was enacted against democrats, it shouldn't apply to republicans, eh?

is the US mostly west coast carrier, Southwest. I fly them on short hops all the time; don't even need a tilt-back to feel comfortable.

And all of you who go on about $1 cups of coffee being sold for $4 at Starbucks might want to go check the menu and prices at Starbucks sometime.

as a loaded term, meant to connect us to the (often misrepresented) appeasement of Hitler. I suppose most of the repubs using the term are old enough that the term carries a stigma for them, but I wonder if it does for most voters.

In any event, the meaning of 'appease' with regards to Hitler was something along the line of "we'll let him take over a couple of countries, and maybe he'll leave the rest of us alone." I don't see how that applies to Saddam or to anyone else in the area, although there are certainly a number of groups who would like to see Israel gone. But I can't think of anyone there with broad territorial ambitions; most of those countries have enough to do holding together states that are often a confederation of tribal groups with some serious historical conflicts.

I don't know, Garrison - certainly there are successful ongoing campaigns to emphasize our differences and animosities. Just look at the voting maps for recent years and compare them with the confederacy, or with the religious splits dating from the late 1800s, or with the settlement patterns described by David Hackett Fischer in "Albion's Seed". I think what you're trying to say is that we all hold to certain fundemental tenets of decency, and I hope you're right. But I'm leery of the bland assertion that runs something like "everyone's pretty much the same the world over". I lived in a mid-sized mid-western city a coupla hundred miles or so to the southwest of you for a decade, and that attitude was pervasive. It led to things like happy, bland acceptance of the Defense of Marriage Act, and failure to realize that racism is alive and well. Further, speaking as a former Peace Corps volunteer married to a former Peace Corps language teacher, I can assure you emphatically that people do have very different ways of thinking about the world. My wife still surprises me - you'd think I'd learn.

So, this article and many of the letters in response are spun out of a series of anecdotes, a blurb from an advice-to-the-lovelorn writer, a survey of attitudes (how many repondents, where, who, etc?) and a study of 34 men and women. Not a lot of solid data upon which to hang everything we've been spinning out here (sorry for repeating the spinning metaphor; it's golden orb weaver season here). Apparently the story speaks to some of us, but it's a huge country, and it's equally apparent that there numbers of people for whom this conversation, and the sterotyping therein, is silly and sophomoric.

Perhaps I'm remembering wrong, but isn't the 6-fold risk of an sutistic child born to a father over age 40 considerably higher than the risk of a Down's child for women of similar age?

my department is expanding and we're interviewing research scientists, hoping for some mid-to-senior level people but of course getting a lot of juniors. And while the rest of the cost of living here is pretty reasonable, everyone visiting from almost anywhere else is blown away by the housing costs. Especially if they have to think about schools, because of the close correlation of house prices with perceived school quality. We just interviewed a guy who's in a hard-to-get specialty, from the east coast, fresh grad, and he ended up taking an offer in the midwest. Even though we were offering a fair chunk more of salary.