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31 Jul 2010
Excellent article on the government's baffling announcement about NHS provision of homeopathy:
So we can't regulate these products as medicines because they'd end up being banned, but we'll let them be called medicines anyway? It gives me a headache just trying to think down to the level of the person who wrote this stuff.
Bravo for Oxford
HOMEOPATHS in Oxford have hit out at county health bosses after they ruled out treating patients with alternative and complementary medicines. ...
[Homeopath Steven Cartwright said] "There is as yet no explanation as to how homeopathy works"...
No, Steven, what is lacking is evidence that homeopathy works; not explanations of how. Disgruntled homeopath Steven Cartwright, by the way, has previously written about the merits of using astrology in medicine. Maybe he's been teaching David Tredinnick.
25 Jul 2010
When an e-mail announcing a desperately ill-conceived plan by homeopaths to test their inert sugar pills against malaria in a part of Kenya where the disease is rife comes into your possession asking you "PLEASE DO NOT post it on the web" there's only one decent thing to do, and that's to post it on the web.

Apart from the wasted money which could have been used to do some actual good with mosquito nets or real medicines, and the desire at secrecy to stop people finding out about their sordid little experiment, I'm struck by this from the project's director:
Even though we’ve been using in our clinics and mobiles our homeopathic malaria complex (MalariX) for these last 10 years to not only treat, but also prevent, malaria, we never have been able to track the results simply because it takes money. In the beginning of 2009, however, we were given a generous donation and I was able [to] initiate the steps to pull together a proper study on the product.
For 10 years they've been giving people this stuff to treat and prevent a fatal disease while knowing full well that it's never been properly studied. So why are you dispensing it to people?
25 Jul 2010
'Daily Mail' Scoop Of The Year: "grass turns green and grows when watered". This is epoch-defining journalism.
29 Jun 2010
Following England's recent exit from the World Cup of football, the BBC asks the question nobody else did: was "sludgy blood" caused by altitude training responsible for England exit?
Well, probably no. Wherever did anyone get "sludgy blood" from? It's a cracking excuse but does make me wonder whether a time portal was involved.
<Scene: The England dressing room, after unambiguous defeat by Germany.>
COACH: That was a-terrible game! Why you no a-scoring the goals?!
ROONEY: I couldn't help it, my feet wouldn't move quickly.
COACH: Why ees this? I ask the doctor. Doctor! Doctor!
<Enter the TEAM DOCTOR from 17th Century, wearing frock coat and powdered wig.>
COACH: Doctor, why Rooney's feet move so slowly like he-a-saying?
DOCTOR: Alas a clear case of Sludginess Of The Blood, sir.
COACH: Sludginess of the blood?
DOCTOR: Yes, sir. A not uncommon affliction induced by breathing the Rareified Airs of mountainous regions. This imbalances the Essential Humours and causes the liver to make a Very Great Excess of blood, which perturbs the Whole Organism and can cause Clogging Of The Pipes just as Mr Rooney describes. In extreme cases sufferers have been known to burst.
26 May 2010
The reliably reality-challenged MMR scaremonger-in-chief Melanie Phillips isn't reacting well to Andrew Wakefield being struck off because he performed unethical experiments on children and lied about it. Writing at the Spectator she describes the GMC decision as...
...risible kangaroo court ... a tragedy and a travesty... monstrous injustice ... sinister travesty ...
Utterly unhinged.
24 May 2010
Cricket was being played in the park yesterday and I'd just bought my new zoom lens, so I took some pictures of the cricket.
Cricket in the park Cricket in the park
24 May 2010
As the doctor who helped to spark a resurgence in infectious disease is finally struck off for performing unneeded and unapproved experiments on children then lying about it in his published writeup, I wonder whether any of the journalists whose fearmongering allowed measles to make a comeback will be struck off the Journalistic Register? Of course not, and I fully expect to see articles denouncing "the establishment's withhunt against a brave maverick" coming soon in popular newspapers.
15 Apr 2010
The British Chiropractic Association, who happily promoted bogus treatments for conditions like childhood asthma for which there isn't a jot of evidence, have finally dropped their libel case against Simon Singh for pointing out that were doing so. They dropped the case after an appeal court hearing in which the Lord Chief Justice declared himself "baffled" that they'd issued a writ instead of writing a rebuttal to the critical article, and along with 2 other senior judges issued a ruling that:
By proceeding against Dr Singh, and not the Guardian, and by rejecting the offer made by the Guardian to publish an appropriate article refuting Dr Singh's contentions, or putting them in a proper prospective, the unhappy impression has been created that this is an endeavour by the BCA to silence one of its critics...
..which I think is Senior Judge language for "We've got the measure of you".

So we may allow ourselves a brief moment of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toil and effort that lie ahead in reforming the antique and preposterous libel laws in this country, which you can help with by signing the libel reform petition if you haven't already done so.
27 Mar 2010
Fascinatingly strange prediction of the year 2000, in the Februrary 1950 edition of 'Popular Mechanics'. The man of the house flies to work in his personal helicopter while the woman will stay at home hosing down the furniture:
Woman hoses down the furniture Man dissolves away his beard
Slightly alarmingly on the nutrition front:
Discarded paper table “linen” and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.
Mmmm, recycled underwear sweets!
23 Mar 2010
What a fine hat retrothing.com discovered in an old magazine:
Radio pith helmet
A pith helmet with an inbuilt, and well concealed, radio. Who wouldn't want one?
13 Mar 2010
The MOD has been served with a Freedom of Information Act request relating to what it knows about "worringly big sea monsters":
Dear Ministry of Defence,

Are there any abnormally large, or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea that haven't been revealed to the public?

Being a marine biologist, it would be in the best interest of the public as our lives could be at risk.
And the MOD hasn't responded as promptly as it should have done... what are they hiding?		 Sea Monster
12 Mar 2010
71 year old woodworker Del shows off his pointless but wonderful beautiful new wooden machine:
He has made several other wooden machines, but calls this latest one his crowning achievement.
And rightly so.
09 Mar 2010
I had to wait for a haircut today so was pretty much forced to browse a copy of the Daily Mail in the barber's, and the big story in the Health section was the mind-bogglingly silly "Infra-red magnetic pants and homeopathy keep me healthy".

A few days ago, perhaps deciding that not even they could run scaremongering vaccines-give-children-autism stories anymore, they ran with... "Vaccines made my spaniel autistic".

The world must be a very scary and confusing place to Daily Mail readers.
17 Feb 2010
A herbalist pleads guilty over the poisoning of a customer with pills which contained a poison banned over ten years ago. Oddly, the judge decided to let her off for the actual poisoning because she had no idea what was in the pills she was dispensing:
But an Old Bailey judge ruled that, as the sale of traditional Chinese medicines was totally unregulated, there was no evidence that she knew of the potential harm. A charge of "administering a noxious substance so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm" was therefore thrown out.
"Everybody accepts that you didn't know you were breaking the law," he told Ms Wu.
That seems a strange ruling. Selling bottles of poisonous "medicine" is okay as long as you don't bother to find out what it is?
The Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, which represents more than 450 practitioners, said the case highlighted "the urgent need for the statutory regulation of herbal medicine in the UK".
Well... sort of. What is not needed is some new and different way of regulating herbal medicines and herbalists. What is needed is for people who want to diagnose diseases and prescribe drugs, or people who want to dispense those drugs, to train as doctors or pharmacists; professions which already have statutory regulation. And what is also needed is to treat herbal medicines for what they are; they are drugs, so should be subject to the same standards of testing for efficacy and safety as anything a modern pharmaceutical company might produce. Drugs are drugs, whether they're traditional, Chinese, herbal, or modern or western. They have effects and benefits, and they have side effects and dangers, so regulate them all as medicine. The current set-up is absurd. I saw St John's Wort, an antidepressant drug with complex side-effects and interactions with other medications, being sold as a "food supplement" in a health food shop the other weekend. That's like stocking bottles of Prozac on the shelf and labelling it as a "condiment".
09 Feb 2010
In a feat of unintentional jingoistic comedy, the Daily Mail runs an article headlined "White Cliffs of Dover to be sold to the French to help reduce Government's debt" full of lamentation that this symbol of Englishness is falling into foreign hands, illustrated with a photograph of "A Spitfire over the White Cliffs of Dover". It's enough to makes you come over all tearful. Except that the spitfire isn't over Dover, it's over Beachy Head - dozens of miles away. And the spitfire is in Polish markings, so would have been flown during the war by that creature the Mail loves to hate... an aylum seeker.
A Polish spitfire, over Beachy Head
You can almost imagine Daily Mail readers during the war grumbing about the influx of skilled central European workers... "Those bleedin' Poles, coming over here looking for asylum, fighting on our side and flying our fighter planes... makes you sick".

And of course neither the cliffs nor the town are up for sale; parts of the port might be but that's far from certain and the port have said they've not agreed anything with any frenchmen. But apart from that the report is solid.

(Via Tabloid Watch.)
08 Feb 2010
Gallery of American space suits past and future:
spacesuitspacesuitspacesuit
03 Feb 2010
Ah good, Prince Charles has announced that nobody needs to take anything he ever says seriously ever again. Speaking at an architecture conference he said he's proud to be an enemyof the Enlightenment:
I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud. I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it.
The Enlightenment: the idea that the universe can be methodically studied, its laws and processes understood, and that the world isn't made of magic. This has been a hugely productive approach which has advanced health and knowledge and happiness enormously. Notice how you're not having to scrape a living out the mud as a subsistence farmer before dying of smallpox? You can thank the Enlightenment for that, with all its sciencey goodness. But Prince Charles thinks it's somehow outdated. And this man gets to meet with members of the government. Hint to members of the government; just smile and nod politely until the old duffer goes away.
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