My mate Declan (sorry about the Facebook link, it is the only Internet page I know of for the man) is in the habit of sending a joke to a select mailing list every Friday. Some of them are hit and miss. Certainly the ones that I send to him for distribution are more often miss than hit. But I really liked the one he gave us today. So much so I am repeating it here. Enjoy:

A woman didn’t come home one night.
The next morning she told her husband that she had slept over at a friend’s house. The man called his wife’s 10 best friends. None of them knew anything about it.
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A man didn’t come home one night.
The next morning he told his wife that he had slept over at a friend’s house. The woman called her husband’s 10 best friends. Eight confirmed that he had slept over. Two said he was still there…

NASA wants to name a module of the ISS and have asked for the public’s help. There are a few choices, one of which is Serenity. So you know you have to wander over to their site and vote for the correct choice.

If you read the Daily Mail life must be terrfying. Your trusted paper keeps telling you of all the things that are going to kill you. And the list is long. That link is just 20 of the things the DM has said will give you cancer.

I don’t know how their readers can be brave enough to get out of bed each morning.

I want to nominate John McAuley for the “Detached from reality” award today.

John was video taping the birth of his child when the Midwife asked him to stop for a moment. He objected to this and later sued the hospital for €38,000. Fortunately sense prevailed and Judge Joseph Mathews threw out the case with costs.

You can read about it in the Irish Times.

I read Cathal O’Loghlin’s (former assistant secretary of the Department of Finance and director of the International Monetary Fund) piece in the Irish Times today. He takes some time to look at the 10 point plan that the ICTU has proposed as an alternative to the government’s. The article is worth a read as he points out that

the Ictu plan simply does not add up to a strategy for resolving current economic and budget problems equitably

and

the plan is all about overturning the decision to charge public servants an extra €1.4 billion gross (about €900 million net of tax relief) towards the cost of fairly gilt-edged pensions

Take a look at it yourself.

One important thing he points out, which the ICTU keeps very quiet about for all its shouting about the people driving a wedge between private and public sector workers, is that public sector workers on balance did far better out of the Celtic Tiger than the private sector ones.

The Economic and Social Research Institute, reporting last December, found “a 23.5 per cent public-private sector wage gap in Ireland in 2006, with senior public service workers earning approximately 10 per cent more than their private sector counterparts, and those in lower-level grades earning between 24 and 32 per cent more”.

Yeah, some people on top of the private sector pile got very rich (and very bankrupt now things have turned sour) in the last 10 years. But for the vast majority of people, I would say the eye opener would be the huge public-private sector wage gap that has opened up (from 7.7% to 23.5% in just three years).

It wasn’t just the bankers that were creaming it from the Celtic Tiger. Remember that when you next hear a public sector union official on the radio talking about their members being hard done by.

I am in the market for a new PC. Something fancy that will do me as a gaming platform for a few years. My last 3 machines have been Dells, but my budget (somewhere around €1300) and my desire for fancy graphical capabilities means I am interested in seeing what some custom builders could do. Except I am struggling to find many in Ireland or that will ship here.

Can anyone suggest some good PC builders that might be able to help me out?

I have been waiting patiently for The Watchmen for a while now. The trailers said to expect it on 03.06.09 So I was counting about 3 months to the big day in June.

Except that was a US date format. So it is due for release on the 6th of March. Oh boy, oh boy oh boy. Must remain calm. Will see it soon.

It is one of those films that I “want” to be great. But I have been sensible enough in the past to still be objective about makingg a balanced decision on the day. I still think the Lord of the Rings is overrated for example.

Anyway, only 2 weeks or so left now.

I am going through one of my phases where I absolutely despair for the future of this country. Here we are, smack bang in the path of the greatest global financial crisis in a century and the whole country looks like it has collectively taken leave of its senses and stuck its head in the sand.

Practically no one seems to be accepting how absolutely dire the situation is. And believe me from all the numbers I have seen it is verging on catastrophic. We haven’t reached as bad a situation as we had in the 80′s but we may yet. And what is more we are falling from a much more prosperous height, so the pain will feel far worse. And how is all this being handled – with a national, “I didn’t do it, it’s not my problem, leave me alone”.

The reality is that we sat back and let the government pump up the massive bubble for 10 years. Now it has burst and left us in the shit. Yeah the international situation is contributing and was the trigger, but we have been living in la-la land for a long time. So we can’t blame the government, when we put them there and were happy to gorge ourselves on the fruits of the boom (across the board, public and private sector alike) in the good times.

With the vultures circling over the carcass of the Celtic tiger no one wants to take responsibility. Fine, but we are up to our necks in shit right now, and more is pouring into the pit. I look around and all I see is people scrambling to avoid taking any pain. Like the 100,000 who marched in town today to say the “workers did not cause the economic collapse but they are being forced to pay for it”. Well no fucking shit Sherlock! As one of my first managers used to say, “So what”. Who do you think is going to pay for it?

Of I forgot, a whole load of people are running around with some great slogans (but no real plan) that the bankers should pay. I am not sure what high grade hallucinogens they are taking but I am as likely to sprout wings and joining the avian pigs ice skating in hell as the effectively bankrupt banking sector is to get us out of this mess. These are institutions that are so utterly fucked they would have imploded without the unprecedented huge bailouts we have had to give them. And some people people actually think that the banks can/should be squeezed for the €2Bn that the government is looking for. Huh? Not that €2Bn will make much difference. Our deficit this year is going to be over €20BN! Yeah it sucks that we have to give hudge wodges of cash to the institutions that were part of the problem (but we are as big a part, happy to borrow and spend all the easy money). But if the banks go under we will have a recession that makes the one in the 1920′s look mild.

No one in the country seems to want to take any pain. “Make it happen to someone else” is the slogan of the day. So like I said I am despairing. Despairing with our government who first got us in to this mess, and now haven’t got the ability to get it through to people how thoroughly screwed we are. Despairing with union leaders who are either too cowardly (or stupid) to explain this to their members and convince them that some pain now will avoid much worse later, while they hide behind some red herring issue of nationalising the banks. Despairing with a greedy financial sector for reflecting too much the real Irish society. And finally desppairing with the great Irish public for being so immature when the long heralded crisis has struck, for displaying the true Irish character, for confirming what I feared – that despite all our back slapping, self satisfied, smug nonsense about being such great people, at heart we are a nation of grubby, petty, selfish, mé féiners. The national character is:

“Pull together? My arse! Every man for himself.”

I really am left wondering about my future here.

I hadn’t followed the whole Pirate Bay trial thing before now. I don’t use peer to peer download services, mainly because I don’t have to time to research how to reconfigure my PC to get around the port blockers ISP use. But with all the kerfuffle this week, and because I am in Stockholm I have started to pay a little attention.

You can get pretty good information on the case from The Local, a Swedish news site in English. All the usual techie sites have been following the story as well.

I was reading one article in Wired on yesterday’s proceedings.

Down at the bottom there was a quote from one of the prosecuting lawyers:

Wadsted claimed that the prevailing opinion among Swedish teenagers is that filesharing is wrong. “They have been very skilled in romanticizing the picture of themselves,” Wadsted claimed. “They have a small, dedicated group around them but apart from those there are very few who knows or even cares about who they are.”

Now, I am going to have to call horse shit on that one. It is true I don’t know many Swedish teenagers. But my bosses boss had five or six of us around to his home on Tuesday evening (his wife and kids are away skiing, so he has a free house). We had beer and takeaway which was nice. The Pirate Bay trial came up. And this man, who would be in his early 40′s unashamedly admitted to using their services to get music. If he is doing it I have little doubt that most Swedish teenagers are at it as well.

I was a bit late getting this post ready for Darwin day. Though if I was honest I would admit that I spotted it when I was looking at the various rants piling up in my “drafts” folder. This one has been here for a year. Ooops. I really should get better at finishing these things. Anyway here is my belated contribution to Darwin Day…
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A while back Pat the Plank had some people on discussing “Alternative Medicine” on his radio program. One was an author who has written a book (rightly) describing it as a scam. The other was a Doctor and practicing Homoeopath to make rebuttals from the opposite corner. I am sure he was required to be there because RTE is supposed to be objective. But he was embarrassingly bad. He hesitated and stumbled through a very lack lustre defense. He couldn’t have convinced me that water is wet, let alone that it can be imbued with semi-magical disease curing properties.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the last time I had a discussion with some people about what its supporters call “Complementary/Alternative Medicine” or CAM for short. It was a difficult discussion to have because there was one of me and three of them on the other side. Being out numbered didn’t bother me (that makes it more fun) it was the fact that you couldn’t have a structured argument when people were going off on odd tangents, or bringing in other ideas that were only vaguely related. A case in point is that they decided by attacking homoeopathy I was attacking any remedy that was “natural” in origin. That certainly isn’t true. A case in point is Asprin, “naturally” derived and one of the most effective medicines discovered in the last century and a half.

Fundamentally my arguments against CAM come down to three points. These are probably the cornerstones of my skeptical thinking when it comes to most things, and not just CAM. These aren’t original ideas either. You will find volumes written on them by far better thinkers than me. I just hope this little post might make one or two people pause and think a little about these things in the future.

1) There is no such thing as “alternative medicine”. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t. There is no alternative.
2) If you are going to claim the effectiveness something, it is not for me to prove you are wrong, it is for you to prove you are right.
3) Experience is not the same as proof.

I will try and explain each of these quickly.

1) There is no alternative. The first of my three things was said by John Diamond . He said this as he was dying of throat cancer. The point he was making was that if something is medically beneficial then it will be adopted by the mainstream medical world. Why at all would a doctor ignore a treatment that they know will help a patient of theirs? Any doctor who develops a new treatment curing disease, or successfully overturning medical orthodoxy, would be hailed as a genius. That is what they hand out nobel prizes for.

2) Prove your case. This is a big one. The last time I was discussing this stuff someone said to me “you can’t just make a sweeping statement that this stuff doesn’t work”. Well actually, I can. It is up to the people championing CAM to provide proper (i.e. independently verifiable, and repeatable) proof that their treatments work. Custom and practice has always been that if you turn up in a town with a bottle of green liquid claiming to be able to cure everything from warts, to back ache, to whatever you are having yourself, then you better have a way of proving it or you are snake oil salesman. And your proof better be good. As a man said – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The gold standard for proving something does work is the “Double Blind Test”. I will describe that more further down. To date none, of these CAM treatments has ever passed the test of delivering measurable benefits beyond placebo effects.

3) The plural of anecdote is not evidence. On Pat Kenny’s programme someone called or texted in to say “I am living proof” that whatever form of CAM he tried works. Actually mister, you aren’t. First we have to assume that you actually had the condition you said you had. A lot of people, quite sincerely, believe themselves to have a particular illness when in fact they don’t *cough* man flu *cough*. Assuming you did though, can you be sure that your illness didn’t just get better by itself (most illnesses do)? Can you be sure that the CAM was the thing that cured you? Can you be sure that this treatment would work for anyone else in the same situation? If you are honest the answer to those questions is “I don’t know”. The only way we can get an proper answer is to trial these things. And to be sure of the best answer you set up a double blind test.

The Double Blind Test
The DBT is the cornerstone of medical science measurement. But it isn’t really that sciencey. All it is is a common sense way of measuring whether something actually works or not. The principles behind it are fairly simple.

You would take a group of people (the bigger your group the more accurate the results) suffering from some condition. It can be anything from cancer, to back ache, to “electrosensitivity“, to having fertility problems. Half are given the special treatment, be it CAM, pharmaceutical, or even prayer, and half are given a placebo, the control. This is important. You are not testing the treatment against any other remedy. Instead, it first has be tested to see is it better than doing nothing. If it passes that test (repeatedly) then you can start looking to see is it better than “Brand X”.

The double blind trial gets it’s name from the two levels of protection you put in place to make sure the results are not biased or tainted. The first blind is that the people being tested don’t know what they have been given – the dummy or the test substance. The second is that the people giving it to them, and measuring the results, don’t know either. This double lock on the details of who has received what keeps bias from the study.

When you have done all of this you then check the results. If your new cure is significantly more effective than the control for a large enough group then you may have a case. The medicine can then be retested by another group, with different patients to make sure the results are repeatable and not a fluke.

What is very important here is that CAM consistently fails to pass double blind tests. It might show some marginal effectiveness on one test, but when you look at a large enough sample of tests, carried out in a rigorous manner, then each and every one of these “alternative” treatments is exposed to be ineffective. If doesn’t matter that people believe in them, or that science can’t explain how they might work. They just plan do not work any better than taking sugar pills.

These are not “Alternative Medicines” they are junk. If you are lucky they will do no harm, just maybe delaying you getting well with something that does work. And if you are unlucky then this stuff will kill you.

APPENDIX
Now a few related notes on all of this:

• Natural does not mean good. Plutonium is natural and so is arsenic. Both are found in nature and both are very toxic. Given a choice between a “natural” remedy and an manufactured one I choose – the one that works.
• People are often quick to claim there is a conspiracy on the part of pharmaceutical companies or the medical establishment to suppress research on CAM. As with point 2 above – Prove It! If you are going to make a claim, then you need to be able to verify it. Not that the conspiracy thing really holds water. The DBT tests on most CAM are relatively simple to do, and have been done time and time again by supporters and detractors. And time after time they flunk.

If you want more information the Skeptic’s Dictionary is a good resource. And for a book I would recommend Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site is an excellent resource for general medical science news as well.