Archive for August, 2005
Northern Scotland is a strange place…
…where dogs drive cars.
Please excuse the dust
I decided to try and fix the blog design, which wasn’t working properly in Internet Explorer. As ever I’ve probably made a right arse of things so if anyone passing is running IE, could you let me know if the page displays properly? Ta.
Update, Saturday morning
I think I’ve fixed all the major problems. Fingers crossed.
It’s good to talk (to yourself)
We’re getting some major work done to our house at the moment, which means there’s been a steady stream of builders, plumbers, electricians, plasterers and decorators working on the place. One of the things that I’ve noticed: if a tradesman is working alone, within a few minutes of starting he’ll begin talking to himself.
I don’t just mean the odd epithet, either. I’ve heard explosions of delight (”YESSSS! TAKE THAT, YA BASTARD! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!”) and of confusion (”What are we going to do with this bit, eh? It’s a nightmare! A nightmare, man!”); of anger (”For fuck’s sake! Who did this bit? Eh? Eh?) and of resignation (”It’ll have to do. It’ll be all right.”) Sometimes it’s funny, although it’s often a bit worrying when you’re in the middle of a train of thought and there’s an explosion of Tourette’s from somewhere above your head.
Yesterday, I had to do some work on the house myself. Guess what? Within five minutes, I was merrily chatting away to myself, swearing at walls and casting aspersions on previous workers’ parentage.
What puzzles me about this is that I don’t talk to myself when I’m working, other than the odd explosion of rage when the Mac locks up and eats the piece I’ve been working on. Is there something about physical work that brings out a mild form of multiple personality disorder?
Which is worse: the spam, or the anti-spam?
Thank god I’m back on broadband: at about 20 past eleven last night, I received 464 spam emails - or rather, emails from anti-spam systems telling me “my” message had not been delivered. These things are worse than the bloody spammers.
Working in a work in progress
Squander Two didn’t believe me that it was sunny in Scotland. So nerrrrr.
Cameraphones will eat your children
It’s the not-entirely-plausible story that will not die: cameraphone credit card cloning. As Mike from Techdirt rightly notes,:
Once again… there’s no actual proof that this happens, but the article makes it out to be a big problem. In fact, the article claims it’s “commonplace.” Commonplace? Despite [no] actual proof that it’s happened?
Did the net bring you together?
I know it’s a long shot, but do any of you know a couple or couples who met online? I’m not looking for people who met via online dating, but people whose eyes met over a crowded deathmatch, or during a vicious flame war, or while they blethered on in chat rooms. It’s for a feature I’m doing - I need a few case studies. Cheery ones, rather than “I flew to America and he had his mum’s body in the basement” ones, heh…
When scare tactics are too scary
I’m reading Chuck Palahnuik’s Non-Fiction at the moment, and he tells a wee story about health scare tactics. College students were shown pictures of diseased gums and bad teeth to encourage better dental hygiene. As he recalls:
One group was shown mouths only a little rotten. The second group was shown moderately rotten gums. The third group was shown horrible blackened mouths, the gums peeled down, soft and bleeding, the teeth turned brown or missing.
The first study group, they took care of their teeth the same as they always had. The second group, they brushed and flossed a little more. The third group, they just gave up. They stopped brushing and flossing and just waited for their teeth to turn black.
This effect is called “Narcotization” [sic].
When the problem looks too big, when we’re shown too much reality, we tend to shut down. We become resigned. We fail to take any action because disaster seems so inevitable. We’re trapped. This is narcotization.
Naturally, I can see parallels in anti-smoking campaigns. Pictures of black lungs on fag packets will have the same effect on me as the current, terrifying health warnings: none whatsoever. What does help, I think, is what I call the “pain in the arse factor”. Instead of trying to scare people into a particular form of behaviour, it’s better to make their bad behaviour a pain in the arse. The smoking ban, despite the appalling and arrogant way the Scottish Executive introduced it, will add the pain in the arse factor to smoking. Not smoking inside your house or flat - well, that’s a pain in the arse. Having to stop the car because you’ve promised your wife you won’t smoke in the car - pain in the arse. The pain in the arse factor isn’t as dramatic as putting pictures of autopsied lungs on a packet of smokes, but it’s more effective.
There is a downside to the pain in the arse factor, though. I don’t smoke in the house, but today it’s a beautiful sunny day. Going out for a cig isn’t a pain in the arse at all; it’s a chance to experience a rare blast of Scottish sunshine. So I’m off for a smoke. Seeya…
Banning clerics who preach hatred
I was in Northern Ireland at the weekend, and as ever I skimmed through the local papers to see the news that doesn’t get reported over here. A man was shot in the chest as part of a feud between protestant paramilitaries. A fairly hefty bomb was defused in Belfast. A couple of riots, not many injured. And so on.
I doubt it made the mainland editions, but in one of the Irish editions of the sunday newspapers a columnist made a good point: not all the clerics who preach hatred are based in London, or have brown skin.
More responsible health journalism from the women’s glossies
This month it’s the turn of Red Magazine, which runs an excitable story about a woman who lost an amazing 5lbs in ten weeks, leading to an incredible 2-inch reduction in her waist size. And the weight has stayed off!
The miracle cure? A 10-week course of vitamin injections, costing a mere £2,750. Mind you, the article also mentions in passing that the so-called expert also recommended “some dietary changes”. Now I’m no health professional, but I reckon that the successful weight loss (and 5lbs in two months isn’t a lot; you only need to make very small dietary changes to lose that amount) is more likely to be the product of a better diet than three grand’s worth of Haliborange injected into your arse.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, this is something that really bugs me. The crap in the glossies is probably the most visible version of it, but it’s the tip of the alternative health iceberg (pedantic note: surely the alternative to health is illness, or death?). What we have here is a massively profitable industry that’s taking the piss out of people and in many cases, selling snake oil. As the Guardian’s Ben Goldacre - who’s rapidly becoming my favourite journalist - writes, this is an industry based on:
the dismal outpourings of flaky humanities graduates in the media and the bogus pseudoscience of people with products to sell.
And then there’s what Goldacre calls “science by press release”. In this week’s column, he writes:
In February 2004, the Daily Mail was saying that cod liver oil is “nature’s superdrug”. The Independent wrote: “They’re not yet saying it can enable you to stop a bullet or leap tall buildings, but it’s not far short of that.” These glowing stories were based on a press release from Cardiff University, describing a study looking at the effect of cod liver oil on some enzymes - no idea which - that have something to do with cartilage - no idea what. I had no way of knowing whether the study was significant, valid or reliable. Nobody did, because it wasn’t published. No methods, results, conclusions to appraise. Nothing… It’s 17 months after “nature’s superdrug”: I want to know where the published paper is.
I love this stuff. Here’s Goldacre on nutritionist-free diets, and in another piece he skewers canned oxygen. Does anybody know if Goldacre’s put together a book of all this stuff?