so I went thru most of the Zenz paper

August 7, 2007

It doesn't say much at all about what happened when the mice were

given cipro. They didn't get arthritis (without cipro 100% of them

did), and the onset of skin lesions was " significantly delayed " or

something like that. That's it! No real data.

The paper was interesting. Their JunB-/- cJun-/- double " knockout "

(sort of) model apparently has certain histologic and molecular

hallmarks of psoriasis. The molecular hallmarks sounded mostly pretty

nonspecific to me (mostly inflammatory molecules)... I wish I knew

enough histology to be able to better judge the impressiveness of the

histologic analogy.

Commence rant:

The way many journals are written these days is going to be the end of

Western civilization - mark my words. You try to read data figures and

everything's so cross-referenced and confused, it's a freaking

nightmare. You can barely tell the hatched diamond data points from

the filled diamond data points from the other 5 data point symbols on

some crappy looking line graph, then you look down into an IMMENSE

tangle of a caption (covering 6 different figures) to decode the data

point symbol... and come up with a completely arcane abbreviation ,

which you then scan the text to find the meaning of. Repeat 6-8 times.

It's (# & % & (* crap!

20 years ago they would have written the damn WORD explaining WHAT IT

IS at one end of each data line on the line graph. It's SO SIMPLE!

And the writing is so condensed (to save 2 pages) that it's

unreadable. Talk about a false economy.

Also, these days half the paper is online as " supplementary " files,

which are usually complete crap. This Zenz paper has the damn captions

of the data in a different file from the damn data! I've had it!

Old papers are 50% longer, but they take HALF as long to READ, or

less. You can read them casually while doing the dishes. You could

probably read them while flying an F-16 or defusing a bomb.

I once read a paper where the cryptic abbreviation " M " was used in a

data graph. After scanning through a huge confusing caption, I found

that " M " was an abbreviation for " MS. " I'm not lying.

Recommended Posts