Category: Hmmm

As reported in Nature, some British universituies are offering B.Sc. degrees in homeopathy and other alternative therapies. But…

Finding out exactly what is taught in the courses is not straightforward. Ben Goldacre, a London-based medical doctor, journalist and frequent critic of homeopathy, says that several universities have refused to let him see their course materials. “I can’t imagine what they’re teaching,” he says. “I can only imagine that they teach that it’s OK to cherry-pick evidence. That’s totally unacceptable.”
Pharmacologist David Colquhoun of University College London has had the same problem, and is now using freedom-of-information legislation to get access to course materials after having numerous requests refused. The University of Central Lancashire and the University of Salford both declined requests to talk to Nature or share details of their homeopathy degrees.

Now why would they do that? Surely homeopathy is going to be treated the same as other treatment regimes, with double-blind tests to avoid bias. Not exactly….

“Trying to do what I do in that context didn’t work very well,” says Clare Relton, a practising homeopath who is conducting research into homeopathy at the University of Sheffield and has taken part in a clinical trial designed to assess homeopathic treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. “I found it difficult to build a therapeutic relationship,” she says. Relton argues that homeopathy is scientific, but that the problem of trust means that double-blind trials aren’t the best way to measure its effectiveness. Instead, she and other homeopaths prefer to rely on more qualitative methods, such as case studies and non-blinded comparisons of treatment options.

In other words, it’s just a placebo. Placebos have their place, but let’s not pretend that there’s anything more going on. And for goodness sake, don’t pretend that this is a science.

I finally got around to reading Garrison Keillor’s snide little piece on gay marriage at Salon.com. Clearly he believes that it’s more important to hide the real complexity of life than to deal with it, embrace it. So what if “gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives”. My family loved Tom (my father’s partner, friend, and lover for over 20 years), and we’d have been happy to call him by a family name rather than the euphemistic “partner”.
Schmuck!

Another free wireless hotspot… this time it’s pie minster in the Covered Market in Oxford. I popped in for a “minty lamb pie” for lunch, and stayed for cappucino and wi-fi.
Yesterday evening I made the mistake of turning on the TV. (Lorna does have a small one, mostly to play back videotapes of documentaries she’s been involved in.) It was a surreal experience. On two channels, there were back-to-back programs about food and health, including segments about food addicts who weigh 30 to 60 stone (US: multiply by 14 to get pounds). And then over on BBC2 there seemed to be non-stop cookery programs. (BBC1 seemed to be doing a UK version of American Idol – equally inane.)
However there is no doubt whatsoever about what’s the best of the new (to me) TV shows. It is, of course Shaun the Sheep. Sheer brilliance from Aardman.

Seattle:
Today: Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 50s to mid 60s. Southeast wind 5 to 15 mph.
Boston:
This Afternoon: Sunny, with a high near 11. Wind chill values between -6 and -11. Blustery, with a northwest wind around 23 mph, with gusts as high as 34 mph.

I assumed that this event was a one-time occurrence: the product of a single faulty artefact. This evening I repeated the process, using an identical dish. I got an identical result. Clearly it’s a design problem. I wonder how they test them? Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going out to find some dinner. Perhaps I can stick IKEA with the tab.

Yesterday evening I finished assembling some shelves from IKEA, and then decided to fix supper, which involved reheating some lamb curry that I’d made the day before. I put the covered glass dish (also from IKEA, as it happens) into the microwave, programmed 5 minutes at 50% power, and left the kitchen. When I returned I found this:

The lid of the bowl had shattered into four or five large pieces; there were also plenty of tiny slivers of glass.
The interesting thing about this is that I did not immediately think, “Those !@^*$%#s at IKEA! What a piece of $#^*&!!” Instead I was struck by how completely unexpected this was. I’m pretty sure that 20 years ago I would have found such a product failure far less surprising. Things used to malfunction occasionally, and no-one was particularly taken aback when failures occurred. Today, I think, there’s a much greater expectation that stuff will just work, routinely, perfectly. Of course there are areas which seem to contradict this – some electronic appliances, for example – but in most of these cases we tend to overlook how dramatically we’re pushing the technology envelope. It’s hardly surprising that products depending on new technologies and (especially) production processes would have unexpected failure modes.
Anyway, I was able to find something else for supper….

This time last year, I had a sidebar feature on my blog that displayed the articles from a year before, so in addition to speculating about major snowstorms that weren’t I was able to look back to New Year 2005. Revisiting my blogging from December 2005 and January 2006, I see that much of it involves travel – to SeeBeyond in LA, to STK in Colorado, to various places in India and the Czech Republic.
Over the last few days, I re-read a lot of those pieces, and then spent a while wondering whether – and how! – to summarize 2006. So many changes, after so long (too long?!) in one groove. New role. New job. New company. New city. New lifestyle. New timezone. New friends. Flexing new muscles (metaphorically and physically).
And loss. Sure. But less than expected. One interesting thought: as we were clearing out 700+ books (in preparation for selling the house), I came across a volume of English landscape photography, given to me by my colleagues at CMC in Hemel Hempstead in 1981 when I left to relocate to the USA (“just for a few years!”). Inside there was a card with 40 or 50 names from the dim, distant past. I don’t think I stayed in contact with any of them after I moved. Compare that with today: I regularly exchange email with people all over the world that I’ve known for years. I’ve reconnected with people I knew 30 or 40 years ago. And so even though life is naturally episodic, the episodes are perhaps less disconnected than they were in years gone by. (Or maybe it’s just age, or indolence, or the pace of life: my mother’s generation seems relatively adept at maintaining webs of friendship spreading across space and time.)
Regrets? Any impulse to point fingers? Well, yes, but not strongly, because I’m so much happier in my new groove, and if it were not for the incompetence of a few Sun executives (now mostly ex-Sun) I’d probably still be there. So perhaps I should thank XXX for fscking things so royally, and YYY for not firing his sorry ass until it was too late. (I guess I feel about the StorageTek acquisition a bit like many people feel about the invasion of Iraq: I’d never have supported it if I’d known how badly the administration would screw it up.)
Anyway, I’m now working for a (potential) customer for the kinds of products that Sun offers. I have to say that it’s… breathtaking to realize the irrelevance of many of the things that seemed important when I was at Sun. Ah, well. It’s also good to recognize the many valuable lessons I learned there that I can apply my new role, and to thank the wise men and women from whom I learned them. (Some are still at Sun, but most have also moved on.)
Enough of this rambling: I have work to do. One challenge I face: what to do with all my CDs. It’s a curious practical and ethical dilemma. I have hundreds of CDs that I’ve ripped into iTunes, and I never need to touch the physical CDs again. But they’re bulky to store, with jewel cases, booklets, and various kinds of fancy packaging. What should I do? I can’t give them away or sell them; I’m a strong believer in not stealing from artists. Physically destroying them feels wrong in so many ways. I wish there were some really efficient way to store just the CDs themselves (perhaps on spindles, like the way they sell blank CD-Rs). And of course I don’t have time to deal with any of this; I’ll be heading back to Seattle tomorrow.
‘Tis a puzzlement….

The lack of recent blog entries is due to a small, unwelcome visitor: a pesky rhinovirus* which laid me low for several days, and still makes my sinuses feel as if they’re full of glue. So I’ve spent most of my time sleeping, blowing my nose, and watching TV (in that order). And as for TV… well, before la grippe struck, I visited some friends in Andover, and they introduced me to the Canadian series Slings and Arrows. I was hooked. We picked up the DVDs for Season 1 and Season 2 yesterday, and watched the first three episodes back-to-back. Absolutely brilliant.
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* When I started typing this entry, I assumed – incorrectly – that all examples of the common cold were caused by rhinoviruses. However according to Wikipedia: “The common cold is caused by numerous viruses (mainly rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and also certain echoviruses, paramyxoviruses, and coxsackieviruses) infecting the upper respiratory system.” So who knows what got into my nasopharynx this time?

Back in the north-east, a couple of inches of light snow would barely make the front page of the local section of the Globe. But here in Seattle….

Drivers inching their way through the evening commute cursed the snow that returned to the Puget Sound region this afternoon, shutting down at least one highway and essentially turning others into parking lots for several hours.

Police couldn’t keep up with cars careening across freeways, chain-reaction fender benders and motorists abandoning their vehicles on suburban roads. For the first time in at least a decade, Highway 9, a major thoroughfare in Snohomish County, was shut down much of the night because it became “a complete sheet of ice,” said Trooper Keith Leary.

Hmmm. Don’t they have sanding trucks around here?

UPDATE: Well, I was probably unfair to Seattlites. It looks as if things turned to freezing rain, which is no fun in any location. And with these steep hills…. Apparently some people who went to last night’s football game found themselves unable to get home. The office is really quiet this morning, and there’s been a steady stream of “WFH” (working from home) emails coming through.