Testing Out My Ipod

I'm typing this on my
new toy, an Ipod Touch. I've had it about a day now and am loving it. I was a bit worried that because I was looking forward to it so much I might be dussapointed. It is however even better than I expected. It is so fast on the Internet and easy to use that it is a pleasure. Add to that the entertainment capabilities and pound for pound it is more fun than any small thing I've held in my hand for a long while (excuse the innuendo).
I'll write something more purposeful when I have something more to say. This was just to test out the blogging app.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Addendum to the Last Blog

The office of Shifa Herbs is now vacant. The misleading medical imagery removed from the boards, and the flashy sports car no longer parked outside. It would be too much to hope that the Dr of Naturopathy has seen the light of reason and laid down his bottles of water and assorted tools of mumbo jumbo for a more honest occupation. I do hope however that it does at least indicate that the tides of gullibility and desperation in the area were not high enough to make sustaining the office a feasible affair.

Local Quackery

You would have had to have your head buried deep in the sand to be unaware of the current economic situation around the country. A general feeling of doom and gloom that pervades the financial news,

reflected on the high street by the loss of some old friends. My own local shopping area has said goodbye to Woolworths, Adams Clothes, Salisburys and others. What might spring up to fill these commercial voids? Something that reflects the needs of the community of Bearwood perhaps. Well, lets have a quick peek at the new shoots of revival in the area.

We have an ever expanding number of fast food outlets. Don't get me wrong, I am as partial to a kebab, burger or dodgy saveloy as the next drunken carnivore on my way home from the pub. Such a plethora of choice could be seen as a bonus I suppose, bit I can't help thinking that ten such places within a short high street might be a bit of overkill. Still onwards and upwards with our expanding waistlines and diminished nutrition.

Once out of the pub though there may be no need to stop drinking. I noticed an application for a 24 hour off licence on the High Street yesterday. Just the ticket when you've finished your last pack of Tennents Super and you need something to see you home after buying your Not Exactly Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But never fear! The alcohol imbibing, junk food eating residents of Bearwood are being offered a chance to buy their way back to health. We now have a Holland and Barratt providing at remarkabley reasonable rates all sorts of potions, pills and quackery for the less discerning consumer. Just what you need when you have a vague feeling of not quite rightness that modern medicine can't seem to help you with.

There is one other recent opening that I have been intending to blog about, and will possibly be the subject of future blogs. A naturopath has opened up virtually on my doorstep. For anybody unfamiliar with naturopathy it is a collection of unproven, worthless pseudo-medical mumbo jumbo. It incorporates everything from iridology, mad diets, homeopathy and herbal preparations. Your first consultation will cost you £60 for the hour and should it be deemed necessary subsequent half hourly visits will be £30 a go. Of course any herbs, homeopathic remedies or other placebos will cost extra.


I'm sure that the treatment will be good and fully medical as there is a picture of a stethoscope on the sign. Also the personalised registration plate on the very smart sports car parked out side has been styled to read "The Dr". Perhaps he' a science fiction fan? Have a look at what is on offer at:

http://www.shifaherbs.com/

When placebo is not enough

I sometimes find myself thinking about my current interest in alternative medicines and therapies and wonder if I am getting a bit carried away. I have a number of friends who subscribe to various, what I would consider, sham remedies all of whom believe in the healing properties of needle pricks, positive thought and expensive tiny bottles of water. All these people are doing okay and it doesn't seem to be causing them any problems.

Then you read articles like this http://allbleedingstops.blogspot.com/2009/09/human-cost-of-woo.html. This is not a one-off case either. There are multiple accounts from bloggers, physicians and others of the preventable death, illness and suffering caused by and to those who prefer magic and hope over clinically tested remedies. A good source of such stories is http://whatstheharm.net/

Many people feel that they should never have aches and pains, that they should always be on top form and that general weariness is symptomatic of a health problem. Often this is a mistake for what is in reality the effects of lifestyle, aging and just being human. For those people, on the whole, exposure to crystals, aromas and the like is not going to do them harm. When you read about homeopaths exporting their practice to Aids stricken Africa and herbalists treating cancer you have to question any thought that this is essentially a harmless hobby.

Real illness needs real treatment. Science based medicine is by no means perfect but it is constantly reviewed and when something proves to be ineffective there are systems in place to check, improve or remove failing remedies. There is little or no evidence that this is the case in any of the alternative treatments proffered by the woo mongers.

When people are really ill they want hope and they want it fixed. They are scared and they are vulnerable. They don't need people to tell them that it will be alright if they believe hard enough, take sugar pills and avoid the use of anything that might make them feel better.

Even Less Random Than I Thought

I've started keeping a little notepad with me to jot down ideas that I have through the day. They are few and far between but even so they disappear into the ephemera, consumed by the essential mundanity of getting through life. Some people I am sure have memories that would allow them to capture the thought for later reference, not me though. I therefore come to my blog site, when finally I have a bit of time, armed with little more than the frustration of knowing I had a good idea but I can't quite reach what it was. That is why I now pin those thoughts onto paper.

I figured that I would try my hand at a skeptical or scientific type blog. My confidence in this area is just emerging and finding a subject to do a bit of research and analysis on would possibly help to coalesce some ideas in this area. I wondered about a topic and came up with one. The Top Ten Things to Lose Sleep Over. I hadn't actually got ten but I thought that this wouldn't be a problem as the purpose was to make me do research. I had a few in mind. In no particular order:

1. Asteroid Strike
2. Super Volcano

3. Sun Going Nova

4. Time Dimension becoming a Spatial Dimension

5. Reversal of the Magnetic Poles

You can see the type of thing that I was going for, catastrophic but not necessarily likely to happen in the very near future.

As soon as I started the research though I came across this book by Phil Plait. It does what I was going to do but much better and in more detail. All my main astronomical ones are there and a few more. Ah, a coincidence maybe. In a huge random world coincidences have to happen at some point and this is just one of those times in the continuum when one has occurred. I would agree with that except that I am a fan of Phil Plait and dip into his life and thoughts reasonably often. I listen to him on podcasts, read his blogs and follow him on Twitter. I'm not stalking him but I must have heard him talking about this book and about the ideas in it. Somehow though I buried this in my memory and then resurrected it as a blog idea.

Ironically its provided excellent skeptical material for a blog because one of the main points about approaching life in a skeptical fashion is to be aware of the fallibility of memory. We are all capable of being fooled by others and by ourselves because we often erroneously believe that we have total recall when we don't. I'm currently reading an excellent book called "How We Know What Isn't So" by Thomas Gilovich. It explores many of the hardwired mechanisms and fallacious tendencies of human reason that cause us to believe things that just aren't true, for example, and topically, that celebrities die in threes and that I always leave the toilet seat up! It's a good cautionary tale against personal smugness and I am happy to admit that I am capable of being wrong.

To Kill a Mocking Bird

I've reproduced a blog here from my bookgroup blogsite. I wouldn't normally do that but I felt that this time I wanted to. There was a discussion at the end that troubled me and this blog is in some respects my response. I'm not going to say anymore because this is a public blog and I haven't been overly direct in what I have said. But for those that were there it's pretty plain...


It was a good book group meet excellently hosted by my Jan and Elsa. Most of the regulars were present and most everybody had finished the book which is always good for discussion. Several of us had read the book in our teens and it was interesting how different the impact, looking at it with a few more years tucked under our belts.

Lee uses the unclouded eyes of a child to pull apart the prejudice that swamps the characters of the story. Lee herself would have been that age at that time in the thirties and we can imagine that she was writing from experience. When very young, innocence can shield you from the truth as you don't know how to recognise the injustices that surround you. Once you lose that innocence though your choices are either to challenge or accept and ignore. One group of people lose their freedoms while the other set lose their humanity.

The book was written some twenty odd years after the time it was depicting, but the issues were just as current in the early 60's. Reading it now, in the next century it is still current. There may be laws set out to protect rights but society isn't balanced and possibly it never will be.

I had totally forgotten the part where Scout puzzles over how the teacher that deplores the actions of Hitler towards the Jews could dehumanise people just for being black. Scout never used the word dehumanise, though I am sure she could. She never uses the word racist either but then, as the saying goes, fish probably have no word for water.

The people of the book are just people and they are still with us. We are them in our own times. The Atticuses, Scouts, Miss Stephanies and even the Ewells. For me I think that is the point of the book. There will always be those who find what they consider to be reasonable justification for their prejudices. The question is do we challenge them or accept and ignore?

Vespula Vulgaris RIP

Today I felt guilty and sad. I was personally responsible for the killing of thousands of individuals. I didn't take the decision lightly but after weighing up the arguments I put the well-being of my own kind before that of another species. Beneath our feet, buried beneath the floorboards of our house are the decomposing remains of a queen and all her offspring. Rotting in and around the papier mache tomb of their own construction.



A few days ago I noticed wasps entering an airbrick that leads to the space beneath our dining room. Then I noticed some coming out, then in, then out and so on... you get the picture. I concluded that there was a nest and so headed straight to Google to see what I should do about it.

Opinion was, of course, divided. If the nest could be left and the wasps were causing no trouble then all we had to do was wait. In the autumn the queen lays the eggs for more queens and males. After insemination the newly fertilised queens fly off whilst all the poor labourers, males and old queen die. The nest is then left empty and never used again. Whilst not being the ideal model of a modern socialist society it at least offered some hope.



Unfortunately the location of the nest entrance couldn't have been worse. Right beneath the doors that are left open on sunny days where the children dash barefooted in and out of the garden. There would be inevitable wasps in the house and potential stingings. Furthermore, this is still quite early in the season and the frequent ingress and egress of these small wasps would only become more frequent and the wasps larger.



What's the problem then? On a philosophical level the bioegalitarians would argue that the wasps have as much right to flourish as do I and that they should be left. If I thought that it would have been safe I would have done. I love insects and find them fascinating, espicially social insects. Ants, bees, termites and wasps are wonderful. As individuals they are incredibly well adapted to their roles, but as a collective they are an intricate society of builders, hunters, feeders, nurses and more. For a little while beneath our feet was a growing colony of life. An expanding ball of complexity that unfortunately contained a potential for pain.



At about 9.30 the van pulled up outside of my house. Unable to do the deed myself I had called in Sandwell's finest. In came the council exterminater bereft of any protective clothing or scary looking materials. He was a rather droll man and I think his job must have given him a sardonic look on life. Whilst being no palace I think our house and situation was a little better than some of the rat, flea, cockroach, bed bug infested places that he usually has to attend.



He looked at the nest entrance and said that by August we would be having real trouble if we didn't sort it. He then put some magic powder into a device that looked like it had been stolen from Heath Robinson and squirted it into the hole. That was it, deed done. In a matter of minutes their sentence had been agreed and executed for the sum of £44.50. Entomological genocide at bargain prices.

Wasps returning to the nest would no longer enter as they could smell the poison. A few totally white powder covered wasps flew out. Although not yet dead they were like vespal ghosts banging against the window. He said that the wasps inside the hole would soon carry the powder into the nest. They would then take their contamination to the queen committing inadvertant regicide. The wasps left outside would then have a problem as their home would be gone. They could not start their own nest and if they enter another they would be killed as invaders. They would instead wander off with no purpose and die.



Wasps are sometimes mistakenly cited as evidence that there is no God. I don't mean mistaken in the sense that there is a God, but that the basis of the argument is wrong. Nature in itself is not anthropocentric and just because a bee produces honey that we can use makes it no more likey to be the product of a deity than an earwig underneath a rock. Wasps are a fine example of evolution but in this particular inter-species battle for survival, they didn't stand much of a chance.