Like I said, I wouldn't take tamiflu for H1N1 regardless. Any halfway decent doc would pull you off if you're showing significant side effects. No clinical trial can ever claim to predict what a particular treatment will do to you as an individual, that's not how statistics work. Over a broad population, the trial data show a decrease in the severity of symptoms with tolerable side effects. If it doesn't work for you, no biggie. Just don't take it. But if you start saying, "based on one data point (me), my conclusion is this drug doesn't work and has intolerable side effects", be prepared for that opinion to be called out as unscientific. Because it is. Rule #1 of statistics-- the plural of anecdote is not data.

As I said, "if a lethal pandemic flu that's sensitive to tamiflu comes around....". It's well known old news that H5N1 (the asian "bird flu") isn't sensitive to tamiflu.

The side effects are significant in a small portion of the population. Most people can take it with minimal side effects. All effective drugs have side effects, and most have drug-drug interactions. If I take erythromycin, I get seriously ill. That doesn't mean erythromycin should be taken off the market. It doesn't mean that nobody should take it. That just means I shouldn't take it.

If the clinical trial you were part of was a real properly designed trial, half of you were being given pills without vitamin C in it. The person who gave you the pills didn't know the difference, and the person who was monitoring you didn't know the difference. This is called a double-blind controlled study, and is universally recognized as the only way to actually tell whether or not a treatment is effective. Many treatments (especially those that supply "common wisdom" treatments like vitamins) produce a dramatic placebo effect-- people who think they're taking Vitamin C but who are taking just lactose pills will show reduced rates of infection and will report milder symptoms. You said yourself and the rest of your company either didn't get the flu or had reduced symptoms. If this was a decently designed, placebo controlled experiment, than your observation would indicate that the results were the same for both those who actually got the vitamin pill, and for those who got the placebo. If you had noticed that half of the company didn't get sick, but the other half did, then you might have something.

I certainly wouldn't suggest that the grandparent poster should take tamiflu-- they clearly do have side effects, and anyway the current version of swine flu running around isn't doing much damage. What I took (and take) exception to the the GP credulously taking one (or for that matter, many) doctor's anecdotal experience as being conclusive, and then credulously accepting an unproven folk remedy as a treatment.

Ignoring a pile of clinical evidence showing oseltamivir efficacy because one doctor renders a contrary opinion, and then loading up on vitamin C (which as far as I can find has no peer-reviewed evidence to support reducing the severity or duration of influenza infection) to try to impact the course of infection?

If you ever had a science card, please hand it in.

(any effective medication has side effects. I personally wouldn't take tamiflu for H1N1 or regular seasonal flu. If a lethal pandemic flu that's sensitive to tamiflu starts around, please send your dose to me, I'll put it to good use)

Albert Einstein captured the essence of which I speak in a single sentence: "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

If you read up on the history of higher education, you'd understand that the systems referred to by Einstein in that quote (late 19th/early 20th century) essentially no longer exist. Today's system, at least in decent schools, lets you get out of it what you want. I'd say 70% of the student population in the school I went to was there to finish a BS in four-five years, while putting in as little effort and as much beer as possible. They'd plagiarize, cheat, or do anything else to get by. What they got back was a half-assed education, filled with exactly the sort of problems you descibe.

For a few of us it was a little bit different. By my junior year I was working 20+ hours a week as a paid assistant in a biochemistry lab, working closely with grad students, post-docs, & the profs (as well as a half-dozen other undergrad RAs). I rolled out of there with a fantastic science education, a strong network of professional connections that I continue to use today, 16 hours of transferrable gradute school coursework, and a level of comfort of how to work in a lab that made grad school actually fun.

The point is, the higher education system in which students can receive an individualized education delivering a high level of training in a technically challenging field does exist; actually it co-exists with the beer-swilling do-the-least-possible-work system. You just have to 1) be a little bit talented, 2) be willing to work your ass off, and 3) show some initiative.

As an old geezer, Phobos & Deimos hold less than romanticmemories.

Ah, memories. Skulls & Chainsaws & BFGs. But maybe that was your point.

I hear Apple is now making a special version of the shuffle for people who want controls on the player rather than through the headphones.

This version will have the traditional Apple click wheel controller, and will even include a small screen to see what's playing:

See here

This is why one makes a product line. See, some folks want the smallest possible player. Other folks will want controls on the device. Whining that they're not making the exact device that you want suggests a simple course of action-- go into business & make it yourself. Or use one of the knock-offs. Or buy a used last-gen shuffle on Ebay. But for god's sake, please stop the whining.

Visual Basic sucks. BASIC rules. Long live GOTO!

Why would Mac people hate somebody for that? I ssh into my macs all the time. I pretty much always have terminal windows open. A lot of the molecular biology software I use (the open EMBOSS set of programs ROCK) are command line only, take files as input & write files as output. It's a BSD box with pretty paint. Sure, it's nice to have the pretty screens & be able to run things like iphoto & etc, but at the end of the day the most useful stuff still runs from the > prompt.

Obviously only Barak Obama can hold them together.

And then only Ted Nugent could blow them apart again.

8-10k (yes, that's thousand) minutes per month.

Jesus tapdancing christ, there's only 44,000 minutes in a 31 day month-- you actually spend almost 1/4 of your life on your phone? Wow.

Also, great for making popcorn.

You can kill large-scale evolution much more easily than that. Simply falsify some of the major underpinnings & the whole thing falls down. Radioisotope dating, stratigraphic dating, spontaneous mutation rates, Mendelian inheritance, etc. Proving that any of these work significantly differently than we currently think they do would obligate a full-scale re-evalution of evolutionary theory.