Looking Out To Sea

Jeanette Winterson has written In defence of Homeopathy in the Guardian. To save you having to read through her long-winded and meaningless article, I have translated it for you.

My desperate publisher suggests I call Hilary Fairclough, a homeopath who has practices in London and Penzance. She sends round a remedy called Lachesis, made from snake venom. Four hours later I have no symptoms whatsoever.

I was ill. My holistic remedy was prepared over the phone. It’s like NHS 24, except neither of us are qualified to make a diagnosis and the remedies don’t work either! Anyway, I felt better after that.

Dramatic stuff, and enough to convince me that while it might use snake venom, homeopathy is no snake oil designed for gullible hypochrondriacs. Right now, though, a fierce debate is raging between those, like me, who trust homeopathy because it works for them, and those who call it shamanistic claptrap, without clinical proof or any scientific base.

I believe in shamanistic claptrap without clinical proof or scientific base. One incident of me getting better from a cold was enough to convince me. Continue Reading »

Making rolls is easier than you think. I used this recipe from the Crazy Squirrel, and it worked out well. I’ve yet to royally screw things up when making bread, despite not being choosy about my recipes. We had warm rolls for (late) lunch and there’s half a dozen left over for tomorrow’s lunch.

In future I would probably gloss the tops with egg or something to give a nice coating. And maybe do something to prevent the dough breaking into little bubbles from all the popping carbon dioxide. Maybe some egg would help that too: keep the bubbles on the inside.

For tea Helen made a vegetarian shepherd’s pie, made with some kind of beans. I forget the type. We came to the decision that, since there was no lamb, it didn’t deserve the name shepherd’s pie. So officially we made “gardener’s pie”. There’s plenty of that left over for tomorrow, which is good. Monday is a bad day to make an evening meal from scratch. Using leftovers is always advisable.

We have even less reason to make a proper meal tomorrow cos it’s Café Scientifique again. This time we’ll be discussing climate change with representatives from the School of Geosciences at Edinburgh University. If you can make it to the Filmhouse Bar for 8.30pm I might even buy you a drink. Come along!

I wrote this review during the Edinburgh Festival, in late August, but didn’t get round to posting it. In the interest of completeness I will be posting other stuff from this year’s festival and Fringe in the coming days. Enjoy.

I’m a huge Tom Waits fan. He’s probably the musician I listen to most, or the one I come back to most often when I’ve finished listening to a new artist intensively. Tom Waits is great. He’s also an old and well-established musician who doesn’t have to release and tour on an intensive schedule (ie, he works whenever he damn well feels like it). The last time he ‘toured’ the UK he played a single night in London.

So, like if you want to see the Beatles or the Stone Roses nowadays, you gotta see a tribute act. Which feels a bit unseemly, somehow; a bit cheap. But whatever it was, it was most definitely fun.

The show was quite short, but started at the suitably jazzy hour of midnight. The main man, Stewart D’Arrieta, is an Australian (does it seem to you that all tribute acts are Australian?) and sang and played the piano. He was backed by a two-man rhythm section and at a couple of points a woman came on for duets in ‘One From The Heart’ and backing vocals in ‘Hold On’.

The music covered was an even selection of Tom Waits’ career so far with the notable exceptions of his more experimental later stuff after he met Kathleen Brennan. That was probably more because he couldn’t do it justice with only piano, drums and bass. We bought a CD on the way out, recorded in studio, which used a wider range of instruments and had a greater variety of song accordingly — there’s some stuff that really needs guitar to reach full potential.

Mr D’Arrieta was dressed in the bar-fly jazz pianist get-up that you would associate with early Waits, from Closing Time and particularly Small Change. Between songs he recounted some of the apocryphal stories used at one time or another to explain some of the songs; and sometimes he broke out of character to explain the personal or cultural significance of the songs. I had never noticed the beauty of ‘Kentucky Avenue’ properly before he did this.

If you’re even slightly interested in Tom Waits’ music I recommend you see this show. Even at an hour long (probably curtailed for the sake of the festival) it was fantastic fun. Opening with ‘What’s He Building?’ was also a moment of genius.

I’m ever so happy that they’ve made a film out of The Northern Lights, called, predictably enough, The Golden Compass. Well, can’t have everything I suppose. I was just talking about the whole series to a friend recently: I had to heavily recommend it. It’s really fabulous, and I might read it again soon, because I can’t remember much about the beginning of the story.

The general theme of authoritarian religion and its pernicious effect on the way people behave has not been well received in the United States of America. There is a clip from Fox News with talking-head interviews with someone from the Freedom from Religion Foundation and a Catholic priest. The whole thing is a horrible indictment of what presumably passes for ‘news’ on the Fox network, but even worse is that it doesn’t address any of the relevant points.

Where is the spokesman for the movie? At least the director should know what he intended, rather than watching a bunch of morons discuss a film they haven’t seen.

They all looked like idiots. The priest made appeals to popularity, which have nothing to do with whether (a) the film promotes atheism or (b) whether this is a bad thing. In fact, these questions remained essentially unanswered. The Freedom from Religion woman was obviously pretty incoherent on that point too. I have no affinity for the other two but her performance was embarrassing. The anchor man was awful: not only did the priest get given ‘respect’ (what for, exactly? For agreeing to come on the show and talk rubbish?) but he called the other woman stupid and attributed someone else’s statements to her. I am impressed they found a phrase even more odious than militant atheist though, but they did: “known atheist”. (You have to say it with the same tone as ‘known kiddie fiddler’.) That one’s for the history books, I think. OMG he prolly eats babies!

Is the movie designed to promote atheism? (Spoilers ahead.) That’s a difficult question. There is religion, God and angels in the book. But it’s set in a fictional world where the ‘divine’ world reflects that of a tinpot dictatorship, with a decrepit godlike figurehead and a militaristic enforcer who wields the power. It’s probably more accurately anti-theistic and anti-authoritarian, since it really addresses the dangers of having powerful cabals who create arbitrary social rules. It’s as much an argument against Stalinism as it is against the Catholic Church.

But it also prompts readers to reflect on the way in which religion is viewed in modern life. If the Catholic Church think that this level of introspection is a threat to them, who am I to deny them?

David Colquhuon points to a fabulous story from the French medicines regulatory authority. It seems they are recalling two homeopathic preparations which have been mislabelled, with potentially no dangerous repercussions. The specific mislabelling in this case is that preparation A was put into the bottle marked for preparation B and vice versa. The little vials of water (because that is what they are, after all) are identical in every way that can be determined by modern science or medicine. Indeed, the big cheese at the Society of Homeopaths (you remember, the ones that ignore their own code of ethics?) had this to say at a select committee examination:

Lord Broers: I have a simple, technical question about homeopathy and drugs. Is it possible to distinguish between homeopathic drugs after they have been diluted? Is there any means of distinguishing one from the other?
Ms Chatfield: Only by the label.

This makes me wonder: by what means does one break into the business of selling water wholesale in individually labelled bottles? Could I start today?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that homeopathy suppliers really do go through the rigmarole of shakey-shakey-shakey. Ten times in each direction, then dilute by 1 in 10 and start again. For every single bottle. That can’t be a quick or easy process. I bet I could undercut the market significantly by selling Edinburgh Council’s finest supply of tap water.

Creationists seem to expend extraordinary effort “proving” that evolutionary theory contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. I had thought this was the beginning and end of the thermodynamics/bad science link. It seems I was wrong.

I’ve noticed it a lot recently in obesity discussions. It appears, stated very succinctly, in a comment on Feministing:

It is silly to say that all you have to do to get thin is to eat right or exercise well. This is not a bloody thermodynamics problem.

Unfortunately for the commenter, this is a thermodynamics problem. If you expend less energy than you take in then the surplus must go somewhere. Some will disappear with inefficiencies and some will be excreted, but a lot will just hang around. You can’t magic it out of the way by appeals to ‘metabolism’ or ‘biology’ or ‘genetics’. Really. Because if you could, it would mean fat people would be perpetual motion machines: the extra weight is “free energy”!

Anyone who claims they can’t change their weight is living under some seriously embedded delusions. There is nothing special or unique about the human body. It doesn’t conform to any grand plan unaffected by your environment. If you eat less you get thin; if you eat more you get fat.

If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are ANOREXICS + SUMOS??

The first Iain M Banks novel I read was Against a Dark Background. It lives up to its name of being suitably miserable in outlook, as well as being an awesome book. One of the many outlandish inventions, in this case from the latter part of the book, is a monocycle vehicle described as (if my memory is not too addled) a “tank killer”. It appears on the front cover of the old-style books. This guy’s invention, the RIOT wheel, is as close as I’ve seen anyone get without the futuristic go-anywhere capabilities.

There are a lot of stupid things in this world, and although automated grammar checking doesn’t rate as very important among them, it is still very stupid. Trying to get real, human grammarians to agree on points of grammar (especially in a language as mongrelised as English) is bad enough. Add in to the mix the inevitable artistic desire to break and reforge rules, and the computers have no chance at all.

But they keep on trying, letting Microsoft Word infuriate people on daily basis with the suggestion that they might want to change “which” to “that” (or is it the other way round?).

Continue Reading »

As previously mentioned, on Friday night we had friends over for wintery food. Events had conspired that we were both in the house all day Friday, although Dougal was running at considerably less than full power, having been poorly the night before, so we had plenty of time to get food prepared. In the end, I ended up making all the savoury food with Dougal taking charge for the sweets.

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The biggest conceptual difference between “ordinary” mathematics and computing is the difference between a description of something, and a description of the process used to get it.

• What is a Victoria sponge? Well, it’s a light sponge without decoration, often containing a layer of jam and cream.
• Yeah, but how do you make one? That’s where it gets difficult. You need an exact recipe, with accurate proportions and timings. Even then it takes some modicum of sense to do things properly. (One has to remove the eggs from their shells before beating them, apparently.)

Continue Reading »