To the Nature Network site admin. I DEMAND an autosave feature on this damned system.

I just lost another bloody blog post and the only thing keeping this clean is the in house rules we’ve all been reminded ot death of recently.

I am seriously hacked off. VERY seriously hacked off.

To my loyal reader:
yes it was clever, yes it was scientific, yes it had embedded video and images and shit in it too. And no I can be arsed to re-type the damned thing.,

I’m off to blogger

Yeah. Working on it. Hence no posts recently.

Sorry.

The Frozen Wasteland that was formally known as Great Britain, yesterday

-11C in Memphis today too. This is it. The big chill. It’s all over. Glacial advance, woolly mammoths, roving packs of…things.

With all due credit to the EXCELLENT and full of WIN Scary Duck (go visit and buy his book or something. That should get me off the hook for retweeting this post (or reblogging, or something).

Warning contains FACT, SCIENCE and a naughty word.

Regular readers of these pages will know by now that I’m a big fan of SCIENCE and FACTS, and an even bigger fan of fake SCIENCE masquerading as FACTS in the pursuit of a quick fortune.

The above statement may or may not have anything to do with my latest SCIENCE and FACT based money-making venture – a trip into the world of complementary medicine and homeopathy.

Homeopathy, as you may know, is the practice of diluting a substance in water to such an extent that absolutely NONE of the original exists.

This process allows the quack to pass off a bottle of water as magic medicine that contains the “memory” of the original, and is hence a cure-all medicine that many people swear by.

I’d swear by it as well. They’re fucking idiots.

However, they’re easily-impressed idiots with lots and lots of money, to such an extent that even major High Street retailers have the front to sell bottles of magic water at an extraordinary mark-up.

And I want a slice of the action.

Just as your Take a Break astrologers rake it in with dial-up Astro-Tarot-Flip-a-Coin-Feng-Shui horoscopes, I’ll be mixing up the best alternative medicines to provide a unique, scientifically unsound, highly profitable service.

And it is this: Combine the best natural therapies with reflexology and homeopathy to create a therapy that has guaranteed* results.

Applying homeopathic logic into the sphere of natural medicine: I theorise that if a plant such as mistletoe holds healing properties (with natural therapists claiming it can be used for lowering blood pressure and combating fatigue, whilst others say it is also useful for poisoning people TO DEATH), other parts of the tree on which this mistletoe grows must have the MEMORY of these properties even if they are not directly connected.

Therefore, other parts of the tree – or any tree growing nearby – can be used in healing, and may be used in my patent-pending herbalist-complementary-homeopathic-reflexology therapies for fee-paying customers.

For fifty quid a throw, I’m going to thrash stupid people’s feet with a stick.

It’s the very least they deserve.

• results not guaranteed

Originally a reply to Austin Elliot’s comment on my earlier post. It became so surreal that upon proof reading I decided it needed a post of its own

Hi Austin, thanks for stopping by. It’s been nice getting props from some of the more vocal (and talented blogging) community about this post. I’m always loathe to do posts like this because I’m an old skool rant blogger at heart, and that’s not always appropriate in these cases.

The claims of the homeopath/chiropractic/snake oil crowd always remind me of arguing with Traditional Martial Artists (Kung Fu etc., and especially bloody Ninjers) when they complain about Mixed Martial Arts, or more “active” or “alive” martial arts such as Muay Thai, Kyokushin Karate and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (WTF are you rambling about now Brooks? Ed.)

Passive Holding someone’s hand doesn’t make them fly through the air. I tried.

Those of us that practice “alive” martial arts mock and ridicule most Ninjer types, and Kung Fu types because they don’t test and hone their skills through constant sparring. It’s all compliant drills on unresisting or even actively participating partners. In other words it’s a load of bollocks fake and will likely get you badly hurt if you try it in real life.

Alive Can you spot the difference?

Just like homeopathic medicine if you are actually seriously ill.

The TMA guys claim they don’t need to spar because they train in deadly (aka d34dl3y) martial forms that are too dangerous to be proven through anything but true Mortal Kombat™. Which is of course utter nonsense. Your deadly plam strike isn’t worth a damn if you can’t land it properly because I’ve just punched you in the throat and knocked you down. And trust me, the minute you start pulling some ludicrous crane stance, or squatting hippo or WTF ever, I’m going to punch you in the throat and knock you down. Because that’s how fights work. You will try and hit me: I will move/block your punch and hit you back. I train hard and spar hard. You don’t. Your puny punch lands on me, I move on. My puny punch lands on you, surpise is enough and you freeze/cry/call your mom.

Now, likewise, they (TMA folks, do keep up!) also claim unbelievable heritage, having trained with such and such a master who was a Shaolin monk etc., who also taught them lethal moves like Dim Mak…The Death Touch. And, again, these can’t be tested or proven because of their Teh D34dleyness.

However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And thus, when we (the “alive MA” crowd) mock the TMA crowd there is much angry waving of fists (chain air punching?), and cries of how unfair the system is, and “we’ll show you pesky kids”.

Just like with homeopaths et al. bleating that everyone out to get them, and woe is me, and why does the system hate meh so!

Note added in proof: This, kids, is what happens when you try and work The Internets after spending 10hrs writing dodgy code and not interacting with humans.

As promised:

1. Making tables. This is tedious, and time consuming and fiddly. Repetitious code monkeying that that does nothing but prove that the human mind cannot possible keep track of every tr and td etc., and thus takes a lot of troubleshooting.

2. That my html editor (Dreamweaver which I do enjoy using, I must admit) only recognises American spelling. I have spent 11 years resisting the pull of dropped "U"s, and zedified "S"s. And preprogramming every computer I’ve worked on so that MS Word auto-correct makes the changes for me has been a delightful act of rebellion. However, no matter how much you scream, td bgcolour=“AABBAA” does not work. (c.f. point the first, above)

To be a continuing list of “Things I Love About Webwork”, with the acknowledgment that there will doubtless be another list appearing at some point soon, “Things I Hate About Webwork”.

1. Being able to drop the formal structures and rigourous traditionalism of technical science writing. I get to write, without a sense of irony, sentences like this

But there can be no doubt that that these data represent a rich and virtually untapped seam of knowledge and information that stands to do wonders for the long term health benefits of Americans, and people around the world.

Thanks to serial twitterer @Blue Wode I came across this hilarious article defending Homeopathy, called Why skeptic love to hate homeopathy over at Online Health News. As far as I can tell it’s a reprint from the aptly, yet ironically titled Impossible Cure written by Amy L. Lansky, PhD (PhD computer Science, not biology or medicine).

Anyway, the article is equally bloodcurdling and unintentionally hilarious. Because of my associations with autism and ASD charities I come across a lot of people who are blinded by their own innate beliefs, and the unshakable convictions that those beliefs inspire. These are the hardest and most frustrating people to reach out to because logical argument is impossible. Anything that backs up their claims is accepted unconditionally, and anything that attacks or undermines is automatically “out to get them” or corrupted by special interest groups (usually “Big Pharma” in these cases; which ignores the salient point that CAM is Big Pharma, worth $60 Billion year in the US alone).

I won’t suggest you go and read this woo, because it will only add to their hit count, and as bloggers know, we only do it for the hit-stats. However, I will share with you my favourite giggle:

[anti-homeopathic types]…insist on citing a single negative meta-analysis study that has already been shown to be methodologically flawed, while ignoring many positive studies in respected publications, including two other meta-analyses that showed positive results.

they continue and explain the woo behind the woo:

The reason why homeopaths run into trouble with the skeptics, though, revolves around how homeopathic remedies are prepared….a method…called potentization, in which a substance is serially diluted and succussed over and over.

Successed means you shake it after diluting it. Dunno why it needs a special word, but there you go.

…these ultradilutions — so dilute that they cannot possibly contain a single molecule of the original substance — were still potent therapeutically. In fact, they were even more potent than low levels of dilution. Of course, this was and still is too much for the skeptics to bear. It turns much of accepted science on its head!

Emphasis added. This passive aggressive nonsense is indeed what skeptics take issue with. If there is not even one single molecule of a substance left in pure water, then all you have, by definition, and by every law of chemistry and physics, is…pure water.

But Dr. Lansky helps her credulous readers understand this unbelievable, nay, miraculous fact by selectively quoting from literature that in her terms is rigorous and professionally conducted. Unfortunately, the rest of us know this is a load of crap, performed by magicians, employing sleight of hand that cannot withstand any kind of scrutiny.

What the skeptics keep ignoring, however, are an increasing number of scientific studies that indicate that some kind of signature of the original substance is embedded in a potentized ultradilution.

Dr. Lansky: it’s not science. Science was employed to debunk these un-peer reviewed, self-published, self-aggrandising claims. Some kind of signature? Phlogiston is embedded in a liquid composed solely of molecules of water…just hydrogen and oxygen in a 2:1 ratio? Really?

In a 2007 paper by Professor Rustom Roy…demonstrated that lab instruments could pick up energetic signatures in ultradilutions that were not only specific to individual homeopathic remedies, but to specific potencies of these remedies…In 1988 Jacques Benveniste…found that a certain antibody could be serially diluted and succussed beyond the point where a single molecule could remain, but still cause the same effects.

Any half trained skeptic is aware of these frauds, along with the notorious recent scandal of Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier claiming he had picked up an “energy” signature in potentized water. Any physics grad student could point out that his equipment was picking up background noise and that he should have put a Faraday cage around the experimental set-up.

My absolute favourite, and the part where these guys go completely off the rails into science fiction is:

…he (Benveniste) continued his work and further demonstrated that the electromagnetic signature of an ultradilution could be recorded electronically, transmitted via Email, replayed into water, and still achieve the same substance-specific effects in the laboratory

As the kids say nowadays, LMFAO. Are you taking the piss having a laugh? You seriously expect any credulous adult to believe that serially diluting something out of solution, sorry, I mean potentizing an ultradilution, and then recording the background noise in the room, and transmitting that noise via email (down noisy cables) to another lab will allow another glass of pure water to cure my headache/insomnia/maleria or whatever?

Seriously?

Honestly?

Well, yes. You do expect that. You are unable to face the elephant in the room, and face up to the simple reality behind this nonsense. You are being lied to. You are being lied to by a CAM brigade (your word) that stands to make billions of dollars profit selling you bullshit and fairy tales. Is life so hard that you must resort to naturalist fairy stories to find succour?

I think we, The Skeptics, need to not only continue our “war” on this egregious nonsense, but branch out and fight the battle on multiple fronts. Many of these folks are also part of the anti-vaccination movement, and are thus deliberately, and with malice aforethought allowing innocent children to die through their callous and misguided inaction. While we’re fighting them we could also use some help from the psychotherapists amongst us to find out what the hell is going on in these peoples’ heads.

I am not to be described as a technophile. This is due to several circumstances, generally conjoined, though disparate in nature.

Firstly, I tend to Meander through life, hence the title of my blog. Although I can be very driven, and when I have a goal in mind, or deadline set I can be incredibly focused, this is more an externalization of the repression of my inner demons (dreamy, daft and unfocused they may be), built through years of practice, cajoling, haranguing and frequent beatings about the neck and head with a blunt instrument by my exasperated parents.

Secondly, I am doer, but not always a leader. I’ll usually watch someone else take the first bite, the first step, or the first leap in the great unknown because under this buff bluff and extroverted posterior exterior, I am painfully shy and mortally terrified of making a fool out of myself.

Fourthly, I am just not good at handy-things as my dad calls them. He’s a proud self-made man, an ex-Navy Officer who fought his way up as a 16 year old Rating to the Officers Mess, serving his King/Queen and country for 35 solid years. He builds, hammers, saws, hangs, mows, slices, dices yadda yadda yadda.

Me…I can barely thread a needle without sewing my fingers together, let alone do something complicated and handy. technical building of stuff eludes me; my girlfriend had to wire in the DVD player for crying out loud. I think that’s one of the reasons I took to drumming, instead of playing guitar: I couldn’t figure out all those leads and pedals.

So I wasn’t the first to embrace Twitter, I still don’t understand Friendfeed and I deleted my MySpace account. But I have been rather excited about a novel new technology that’s gradually making its way in the world.

Google Wave

It’s still beta, with disclaimers everywhere saying “pardon our dust” and “Let us know how you like it!”; these are littered shyly around the pages of the API like flirting teenagers at the bus stop after school. What a load of bollocks nonsense. Everything is released as beta nowadays; Microsoft taught us that, although they didn’t mean to and it cost them. Release early, and update often. Let the users to the grunt work.

Because we expect everything on the internest to be free, most users are happy with this arrangement. It suits the Generation X and Millennial mindset, although for different reasons (one eager to please, the other not wanting rules).

Now, I don’t want to wander off on a joyful ramble about Google Wave, if you don’t know what it is, the best description I ca think of comes from the developers themselves (I’m paraphrasing)

we tried to imagine what email would be like now if we developed email for the first time…knowing everything we know now about email and e-communication.

Google Wave was released to the “public” earlier this year, firstly to a select few, and then via invitation to more through conferences and user groups etc. I’m sure local ubertechnophile “Cameron Neylon” has written about it somewhere. So, imagine my excitement when RPG emailed me over the weekend and offered me an invite!

*YAY*

said I.

Today I went to the site and signed in and wandered round, and laughed at the pseudo-sincere “Hey, hope you like it” tags everywhere; and I played with various extensions (careful… this is a family site; Ed.), and generally had fun. And I noticed that you can Wave only with other Wave users, which would make sense. But I only know one other Wave user. And he’s 6 Time Zones from me.

Which is why I don’t do technology.

Is anybody else “Waving”? Wanna Wave with me?

I was reminded this weekend of why leaving The Bench was good for both me and science as an enterprise.

All I did was buy a bookcase and, feeling horny handy in the current Spring like weather, decide to assemble them. It. They. Whatever the personal pronoun is for a bookcase.

I grabbed my drill (shut up Grant, get your mind out of the gutter), and hammer and “unstructions” firmly in hand I set to work.

Now this bookcase a simple pre-fab: bolt the top, middle and base panels to the sidewalls, turn it over and nail/pin the the back board on and Bob Ohara is your Father’s Brother, you have a book case. Easy!

Once the frame is thus constructed one uses little pin-type thingamajigs that fit into holes on the inside of the walls of the book case. One pokes them into a pre-drilled hole (Grant. For crying out loud, calm down!) and mounts the shelves upon those.

Unless you’ve built the damned thing with the walls/side the wrong way round. I actually built the bloody thing inside-out.