Joshua Burton (if memory serves) asks:

By the way, has anyone seriously looked into how the thoughtless overuse of placebos in double-blind research studies dilutes their genuine value in therapeutic contexts?

And shouldn’t the plural of placebo be placebimus?

In an advertisement for a new drug, I was mildly surprised to hear something to the effect that “Black people are more likely to have an adverse reaction.” Is this new?

I’ve long noticed that PSAs about hypertension tend to have a Black cast, though they don’t come out and say that Blacks have higher risk.

Assuming full eye transplant (or artificial replacement) becomes possible: What happens when a colorblind man receives a normal eye? Has science-fiction addressed this question?

Today I started a course in medical terminology (aiming to make myself more marketable). I have to restrain myself from speaking up too often, as I know more Greek and Latin (and which is which) than the teacher does. Evidently it is thought undesirable to burden the students with such notions as a distinction between nouns, adjectives and verbs.

HIV comes to Sesame Street, and Tim Blair wonders how:

How will the character’s contraction of the disease be explained? Sharing a needle with Oscar in his squalid street dwelling? Sex can be ruled out — Muppets don’t have genitals.

A blood transfusion doesn’t make sense; where would any donated Muppet blood come from? Each Muppet is the only living example of its species. The fluid oozing through Big Bird’s avian veins is unlikely to sustain whatever the hell Elmo is.

The recent report that a high-carbohydrate diet is Bad for us naked apes, it suddenly occurs to me, takes some oomph out of the altruistic argument for vegetarianism.

At age 18 or so I wrote a scene (opening an otherwise unconceived story) set in the distant future, in which one of the characters was a tiger-striped human. Now . . . Look halfway down this page: Human genetics: Dual identities (Nature, 29 Apr 2002).

2008: The article has vanished. Oh well. It was about mosaicism, and included a picture of a human, apparently the product of two fused embryos, with striped skin.