The iTunes/iPhone/Starbucks business model seems to work

Here’s a nice example of a successful bit of business synergy. (Pardon the “stream of consciousness” style; this is exactly how it went.) I was sitting in Starbucks this morning, sipping my quad espresso macchiato, and listening to a podcast ((It was one of the excellent “Semi-Coherent Computing” pieces from The Register. Highly recommended – the conversation with Dave Patterson was incredibly good.)) with on my iPhone. During a moment of quiet, I heard the music that was playing in the store: “Needle and the Damage Done” by Neil Young. I pause the podcast, listen to the song. Hmm… which version is it – the original studio recording, that “Live at Massey Hall” disc I picked up a few months ago, or something else? I select iTunes on my iPhone, up comes the Starbucks icon, I touch it, and I can see from the “What’s Playing” box that it’s the Massey Hall recording that I already own.
OK, while I’m logged in to iTunes, what’s in the “Featured” category today? Oh yes, the new Led Zeppelin collection, “Mothership”. I browse the tracks, and see that I have all of them (from the “Led Zeppelin Remasters” box set) except for one: “When The Levee Breaks”. I’ve always liked that track, and post-Katrina it acquired a special significance, but for some reason I never got it on CD. Never mind: I touch the title, confirm “Buy”, re-enter my Apple password ((I had changed it recently.)), and download it. A few seconds and 99¢ later, I’m listening to Robert Plant’s plaintive harmonica over that menacing beat and Jimmy Page’s shimmering guitar. And half an hour later when I get home, I drop the iPhone into the cradle and the track is sync’d back into my regular iTunes library.
Apple has successfully redefined the process of buying music. Now we’re going to try to do the same for books. Should be fun.

Meanwhile, back in England the paranoid obsessive-compulsives seem to be running the asylum

I know, I’m being unfair to real sufferers from paranoia and OCD. But how else to describe these pusillanimous nincompoops? Honestly: I don’t recognize the country I was born in. I know this story is from the Daily Mail ((And they get it wrong by describing this as a “PC” issue, which it isn’t.)), but even so…

A leading children’s author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book – because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.
It is just one of the politically correct (sic) cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.
As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

At least these idiots are only screwing around with books. Here in the U.S.A., the paranoid idiots are playing games with people’s lives.
UPDATE: This ridiculous dumbing-down of material for children is in full swing on this side of the Atlantic, too. Today’s NYT reports that DVDs of the original Sesame Street are not suitable for children:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
[…]
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Aldous Huxley nailed this ghastly kind of insipid ((As he put it, “All of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”)) mind-control in Brave New World:

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”

Desmond Tutu sticks it to the Anglican leadership

From the BBC:

Archbishop Tutu referred to the debate about whether Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, could serve as the bishop of New Hampshire.
He said the Anglican Church had seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time.
Asked if he still felt ashamed, he said: “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes.
“If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

Seems kind of obvious to this atheist, but then what do I know about such matters? Shouldn’t textually obsessive Christians be stoning the adulterers and divorcees rather than the gays?

Pride of place in my collection…

Regular readers will know that I have a longstanding interest in transportation, particularly buses and airliners, and that I built up sizeable collections of models of each kind. Most of these are now packed away (( I’d actually like to figure out how to sell them, but eBay feels so laborious.)) but occasionally I pick up a new item. And so this week I added a new airliner model to my collection, and I have to say that it’s the best small-scale replica I’ve ever seen.
Gemini 200 British Airways Airbus A320
(Click to enlarge.)
It’s a 1/200 scale model of a British Airways A320 by Gemini Jets. It’s one of their new “Gemini 200” range, and the level of detail that they’ve achieved is amazing. All of the antennas and warning lights are there; the engines have detailed metal fan blades; the undercarriage uses rubber tyres and the nosegear steers. And somehow ((Yes, I know, cheap Chinese labour.)) they’ve kept the price under $60. The closest I’ve seen to this in quality is the Herpa Premium line, where a 1/200 Boeing 737-300 costs around $300.
So I suspect I may be adding a couple more Gemini 200 aircraft to my collection. There’s a Monarch A321, and an American 737-800…..

The dishonesty of homeopaths

Must-read article in Bad Science on “The end of homeopathy?” Among other things the author addresses the way in which homeopaths distort the evidence. (The emphasis is mine.)

Why else might there be plenty of positive trials around, spuriously? Because of something called “publication bias“. In all fields of science, positive results are more likely to get published, because they are more newsworthy, there’s more mileage in publishing them for your career, and they’re more fun to write up. This is a problem for all of science. Medicine has addressed this problem, making people register their trial before they start, on a “clinical trials database“, so that you cannot hide disappointing data and pretend it never happened.
How big is the problem of publication bias in alternative medicine? Well now, in 1995, only 1% of all articles published in alternative medicine journals gave a negative result. The most recent figure is 5% negative. This is very, very low.
There is only one conclusion you can draw from this observation. Essentially, when a trial gives a negative result, alternative therapists, homeopaths or the homeopathic companies simply do not publish it….
Now, you could just pick out the positive trials, as homeopaths do, and quote only those. This is called “cherry picking” the literature – it is not a new trick, and it is dishonest, because it misrepresents the totality of the literature. There is a special mathematical tool called a “meta-analysis“, where you take all the results from all the studies on one subject, and put the figures into one giant spreadsheet, to get the most representative overall answer. When you do this, time and time again, and you exclude the unfair tests, and you account for publication bias, you find, in all homeopathy trials overall, that homeopathy does no better than placebos.

If all that homeopaths did was to push harmless placebos in situations where a placebo was the best choice, that might not matter. But having fraudulently established their credentials as healers, they abuse this power in horribly dangerous ways:

It’s routine marketing practice for homeopaths to denigrate mainstream medicine. There’s a simple commercial reason for this: survey data show that a disappointing experience with mainstream medicine is almost the only factor that regularly correlates with choosing alternative therapies. That’s an explanation, but not an excuse. And this is not just talking medicine down. One study found that more than half of all the homeopaths approached advised patients against the MMR vaccine for their children, acting irresponsibly on what will quite probably come to be known as the media’s MMR hoax.
How did the alternative therapy world deal with this concerning finding, that so many among them were quietly undermining the vaccination schedule? Prince Charles’s office tried to have the lead researcher sacked.
A BBC Newsnight investigation found that almost all the homeopaths approached recommended ineffective homeopathic pills to protect against malaria, and advised against medical malaria prophylactics, while not even giving basic advice on bite prevention. Very holistic. Very “complementary”. Any action against the homeopaths concerned? None.
And in the extreme, when they’re not undermining public-health campaigns and leaving their patients exposed to fatal diseases, homeopaths who are not medically qualified can miss fatal diagnoses, or actively disregard them, telling their patients grandly to stop their inhalers, and throw away their heart pills. The Society of Homeopaths is holding a symposium on the treatment of Aids, featuring the work of Peter Chappell, a man who claims to have found a homeopathic solution to the epidemic. We reinforce all of this by collectively humouring homeopaths’ healer fantasies.