To atomicswerve: My question was specifically about smallpox because that is the case I am most familiar with.... unless I am missing something, the graphs you referred me to, even if I accept them at face value, had one chart that had smallpox data - for a part of the twentieth century in the US only. Now are going to use data that is no more than a blip in smallpox history as opposed to the undeniable effects of smallpox vaccination across Asia and Africa, and then complain about my ideology?

To peeps and others concerned about an autism epidemic - May I refer you to "Unstrange Minds" by Dr. Roy Richard Grinker where he discusses the reasons why an epidemiological study on autism is impossible at this point of time? Dr. Grinker is a professor of anthropology and the father of an autistic girl - hardly an "usual suspect". Regardless of what you choose to believe abot autism, I think this is one book that all parents with autistic children should read.

To folks who have consider it fit to launch an ad hominem tirade against Dr. Parikh and all doctors who have a view that differs from your own: I have heard many autistic advocates accuse parents involved in vaccine litigation of being interested in making a quick buck by suing whomever they can.... at that point, this becomes a pointless discussion, right? So why not stay on the issues?

Oh and about David Kirby - there are many autistic advocates on the net who have taken apart his "evidence" - most of these people are either autistic themselves or parents of autistic children - but I guess they are not important because they don't get to write columns on Huffington's rag.

The edge of a biscuit tin works fine too - that's what I use with the ragged edges on my rotis.

Not sure if the Natya Shastra really decrees bhavas as combinations of one or more rasas...

But in any case, it would take a computer science student to explain a combination of n items in terms of an n-bit string. I mean, come on...if you have 9 items and you want a combination of one or more of them, then each item can have one of two states in your combination - it is either present or absent. So if each item can have 2 states, and you have 9 items, then the number of possible combinations is 2 raised the power of 9, or 512. However, one of those combinations is where none of the items would be present, which is not an acceptable combination. Therefore 511, not 512.

The math is pretty simple, Natya Shastra is a whole different ballgame.

xkcd is neat.

did a comparison on a bunch of CFLs last year, and they all performed favorably compared to incandescents, even in terms of light quality.

And yes, you can now buy reflector CFLs for dimmable recessed lighting. And I just googled "CFL ceiling fan" and there are quite a few out there.

As usual, this report (and the newspaper article it references) provides very little information about the study. How many women did it study? What methodologies were used?

Now assuming that this is a valid study in that it didn't study 25 white women in a New Zealand hospital and attempted to draw a conclusion about the rest of us....the important thing to remember, as one poster already mentioned, is that correlation != causation. After all, women with high testosterone may prefer a certain kind of partner and that partner may have a certain kind of sperm.... and so on. Unless someone can explain the process by which a woman with high testosterone would end up selecting a sperm with a Y chromosome instead of an X, this study is far from over.

However, having said that I do not understand the basis for your anger. Is it wrong to try to correlate testosterone levels to certain qualities in people? Why? Because, some day, there might be data to prove that "nature" triumphs "nurture"? I suspect it's never going to happen, but if it did, it wouldn't make sense to get mad at the researchers, right? Relax! They would still have to explain Maggie Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.

And by the way, equating "nurturing" and "caring" with being a wimp also reveals a certain bias, no?

If there is anything that can be legislated in India, rest assured it has been done already. Dowry is illegal. So is sex determination during pregnancy.

The problem is that there is very little enforcement and you can always find a clinic that you can bribe to tell you the sex of the child. And a "no dowry" rule is something that can never be enforced.

I agree with the other poster that the issue is not abortion. The issue is the conditon of women. Hopefully things will change with education. Though I do personally know many educated employed women whose marriages involved dowry.

And now that the Ug99 rust fungus threatens wheat farming in all of South Asia things could get much worse.

But what's the big deal about giving out the password to my computer to some random folks doing a survey? Not the same as giving out the password to my bank account, right?

And yes, I would lie.