tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83049601857750333532024-03-13T02:40:33.368-04:00The Almanac of OBXNeilHurry up and Think.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-44182062261181628652011-05-05T13:15:00.004-04:002011-05-05T13:39:20.567-04:00The FairTaxNew feature...I'm dedicating the next few months of my blog, a desperately needed return to writing, to the FairTax. Herein, I'll explain components of the FairTax, and what I hope are easy to understand examples of the implications it would have on the microeconomic level (you, me, families, and individual businesses within the United States), as well as the macroeconomic level (business and government interaction as well as global economic interaction). <div><br /></div><div>So, what is the FairTax?</div><div><br /></div><div>First, ignore the name. It's a philosophical argument, and one I'll address later. My definition of fair may be different than yours, depending on what we're talking about. That's not superfluous, by the way, nor unimportant.</div><div><br /></div><div>1) FairTax is a national sales tax on <i>new</i> goods and services.</div><div>2) It would replace all forms of income taxes, corporate taxes, and payroll taxes.</div><div>3) It includes a "prebate," a monthly stipend to offset the estimated taxes spent on necessities such as food and medicine, up to the Federally-defined poverty level, based on family size. </div><div><br /></div><div>Comments and questions are welcome, and encouraged. That said, be specific about your misgivings and criticisms. Additionally, bear in mind that the FairTax bill is about 200 pages long, and really only because of the format necessitated by legal language: it's really very simple. By contrast, our tax code is nearly 17,000 pages long, not including ancillary regulations on goods, services, and economic sectors. Finally, economics is a big subject, so crafting responses requires specificity, not blanket statements such as, "It sucks," or, "Everybody will be screwed!" Why do you think it sucks, and how so will everyone (and just who IS everyone?) be screwed?</div><div><br /></div><div>Lastly, the title links to the Senate Version of the bill, via the awesome opencongress.org.</div><div> </div><div><br /></div>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-39104608594242081312010-05-20T18:07:00.003-04:002010-05-20T18:49:20.816-04:00Things I worry about...1) If all of this were to fall apart, I don't think there are enough resources available to do this again. All the easy resources have been used up, and it takes some heavy industry and high technology to recover what we're using now. <div><br /></div><div>2) We are extremely vulnerable to sudden extinction from a variety of sources, yet it's on almost no one's radar.</div><div><br /></div><div>3) That conspiracy-theory nuts are even a tiny bit right.</div><div><br /></div><div>4) The growing reach and intrusion of the Federal government, most especially the unnerving growth of power in the Executive branch. Things are OK for the moment, but all that power is just accruing, and waiting for a nutbag to slip into office. Remember, Hitler was elected. </div><div><br /></div><div>5) The appalling growth in pseudo-scientific beliefs, unto hostility towards the hard-won knowledge and methods of human scientific endeavor. Science delivers the goods. Woo merely picks your pocket.</div><div><br /></div><div>6) Disturbing degradation in political and interpersonal communications among Americans. Perhaps it actually has always been this way, but both the scale and vehemence, due to technology, is very worrying. </div><div><br /></div><div>7) The Earth's climate is not a stable thing. It has changed, and it's undeniable. What shivers me is the sheer unpredictability of it all...no one really knows...it could be far worse than our worst guesses. Then again, might not be much of anything.</div>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-63747669933497698592010-03-13T12:57:00.001-05:002010-03-13T12:58:44.293-05:00Haiku 3<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); "><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><br /></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message"><br /></span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">A transformation:</span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">Bacon, eggs, and toast became </span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">my friends' new baby. </span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message"><br /></span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">Food Lion chicken lunch.</span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message"> Where to eat privately? Ah! </span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">Where one returns carts.</span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message"><br /></span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message"> Everything we buy </span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">we don't buy with money, but </span></h3><h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; "><span class="UIStory_Message">we buy with our time.</span></h3></span>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-50360535480430196662010-03-10T15:58:00.003-05:002010-03-10T17:11:42.020-05:00Quick and Dirties...1) It appears we went into Iraq A) to secure the 2nd-largest oil reserves in the world for American companies to control, and B) to continue petroleum being denominated in dollars. In this light, I don't think the invasion was such a bad idea. However, I don't sleep all that well when I think about how many Iraqi civilians this is costing.<div><br /><div>2) Daily, I grow more convinced that perpetuation of belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, et al, isn't just silly, but culturally destructive. I understand wanting to keep children innocent, but I don't agree with it.</div><div><br /></div><div>3) There is no forbidden knowledge. There is evil in the world, and parents have 2 choices: 1) sacrifice your child's innocence and impart the truth of evil to your children, or 2) let them find out by suffering reality. Note: this isn't aimed at specific readers I know who are parents; this is a culture-level thought.</div><div><br /></div><div>4) Politicians portray themselves (increasingly) as moral and upright, of late touting their faith. The electorate eats it up. There are two problems with this: 1) It appears that faith doesn't offer protection of any kind against fallibility and immorality in the political population. 2) If one thinks about the job of politician and the nature of the decisions involved, especially if weighted against the interests of non-Americans, it's actually ludicrous to insist on the most moral candidate. What we really want is the most ruthless candidate to protect American interests, someone who will do the evil we would find difficult. I think that's actually what we get, but I no longer see the point in playing the image game. It wastes time and is dishonest.</div><div><br /></div><div>5) Incidentally, I couldn't care less how any public figure wets their privates, or with whom if it's consenting. I fail to see how someone's sexual appetites impact economic or military decisions, neither of which require the kind of morality the nation at large elects people because of. </div><div><br /></div><div>6) Far too many Americans believe that because they were born in the United States, their shit doesn't stink: that they are inherently superior to other nationalities and human beings. This attitude disgusts me beyond conveyance. There is some slight understandability to the attitude of racial superiority, or of a bias due to heredity, even if they are bogus. An accident of birth, however, in which someone is born into a particular political construct, boggles the mind how folk blunder into justification for radical nationalism.</div><div><br /></div><div>7) Few Americans have any knowledge of American history beyond our mythology. Pointing out the following is considered revisionist: we committed genocide on the indigenous Americans; held slaves, then oppressed an entire population solely on the base of race; were intolerant to the point of violence to even white people who weren't born speaking English; have involved ourselves in more than one war for purely economic reasons, yet lied about it (to this day). Etc., etc. To this day, as a nation, we make bad decisions that future generations will regret. I'm a huge fan of the United States, but I'm not kidding myself that we aren't as well off as we are because of some bloody, sinister history. The take-home is that we don't do these things, and we're creating a civilization in which it's easier to be a good person. With that, I wish people would listen a little bit harder to people who currently have grievances with society: we've been on the wrong side of history before, so upholding the status quo may not be the best idea ever. We aren't where we are because Americans are a more moral people than anyone else. History proves that nauseatingly arrogant assertion a bald-faced lie. If we stop resting on the laurels of winning World War 2, we'd discover that the best our nation has done has been when we embraced compassion. I'm just saying we should do more of that.</div><div><br /></div></div>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-80039282191045243322010-03-08T19:47:00.002-05:002010-03-08T20:05:08.297-05:00Some HaikuTwenty-year old car.<br />Rust fore to aft. Chemistry<br />is the enemy.<br /><br />Push. Pull. Grunt and groan.<br />Physics versus chemistry.<br />Force wins over time.<br /><br />An ocean of voice,<br />We drown in Internet, yet<br />Screens full of empty.<br /><br />Grocery store carts<br />are only full when children<br />are in the baskets.<br /><br />Empty bank account:<br />Financial amusement park<br />without any rides.<br /><br />The world is pieces.<br />I don't know geography.<br />Where depends on there.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-243017778647770592010-03-03T10:00:00.002-05:002010-03-03T10:35:36.053-05:00Maybe we should all get therapy...I have a friend (no, really, it's not me) who is seeing a therapist. S/he has only been a couple of times, but is already looking forward to her/his next session. While s/he and I debated the merits of dream interpretation (we both agree it's little better than astrology. S/he and I were able to list a few truly universal archtypes for humans, but even so, culture diversifies how we relate to those archetypes far to radically for anyone to be able to compile a book with universal symbols and their meanings in dreams.<br />For example, everyone has a mother, a father, everyone is born, and everyone dies. Now, it might seem obvious, but think about how you view those universals, then start thinking about how other people you know relate to those, if indeed you know. I am close to my mother, not very close to my father, but don't have a deep, overt emotinal relationship with either. None of us talk about fears, hopes, etc: emotional stuff. I'm pretty hip on humans, so I'm pretty wild about birth, but I neither have a vagina, nor see one as a sexual object, so my views on birth are fairly clinical. I don't for an instant believe in a soul, so I think death is oblivion, the same as before I was born. Thus, I don't worry about reward or punishment, but nor do I really have a terror of death, as I really can't do anything about it, yet I've no idea when, so why worry about it. Compare my views on those archetypes and contrast them with yours. There will be differences which would make any universal symbolism problematic to explain and justify. S/he and I both agree that those who advocate dream interpretation as something beyond a personal, subjective interpretation, as a science even, are not only jumping the gun, but may be running in a race that doesn't even exist), we both agreed that psycho therapy is...theraputic.<br />I asked if it is because when explaining one's situation to a stranger, one has to rethink the issue at hand in order to get the relevant points across. This has the effect of forcing the teller to KNOW what the issues at hand are, which is invaluable in self-reflection. I also wondered if having an objective stranger made her/him more likely to tell the therapist things s/he hasn't and/or wouldn't tell her/his friends. The answer to both was yes.<br />Interestingly, my friend told me those deep, dark secrets. After testing them outloud, s/he found that they really weren't all that earth-shattering, and it was easy to put them into context and perspective. Additionally, it appears that therapy such as this is all about the afflicted discovering the answer for themselves, via some savvy questioning to be sure. It's an exercise in assigning meaning to the events and feelings in one's life, without all the baggage (which is often, but not always desirable) that comes with friends and lovers.<br />It all sounded pretty healthy, and it made me wonder if everyone wouldn't benefit from, at the least, having the option of therapy. I thought about this because of the monstrous health care debate in Washington. There is a bit of merit to the idea of "increasing access" to healthcare, but what's really meant, I think, is advanced testing, and prophylactic medical care. In truth, anyone in the country can get emergency care, so access to immediate medical care isn't an issue. What I wonder is if a little mental health access wouldn't do worlds of good more for everyone than complicated, expensive (we'll pay the same for our health care one way or the other: either up front or in taxes) insurance plans for physical care.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-49394066879321709902010-02-16T19:22:00.003-05:002010-02-16T20:58:11.215-05:00Bitter Much?So, it's done. It's over. It's behind me for another 364 days.<br />But whatever could I be relieved over? What's passing prompts passion enough to pedantically post? Why, Valentine's Day, of course.<br />No sooner has the gleam and glitter of Christmas had even a moment to dull than the creep of corporate-clad candy bleeds its morbid red across stores large and small. Like plague boils, stuffed bears of every size, color and shape erupt amid heart-shaped sappiness, each with its own nauseating scribble of devotion, be it poems that no doubt put acres of the mentally challenged to work, or prose declarations having the emotional sincerity of an inmate attending court-ordered rehab. Like buckshot, the day after Christmas the seeping of next quarter's earnings pricks the shelves of stores nationwide, then, like an unattended wound, floods every nook and cranny conceivable to the eye. From warehouse displays making profitable use of lawn and garden centers, to blooming like mold around convenience-store displays (where you can find a card just as big as your love right next to BootyMasters Monthly).<br />Yes, I am how the other half lives. Either you're single in the United States, or you're not. Perhaps a small percentage lives in a brief period of deliciously angst-ridden ambiguity about their realationships, not having a clear idea of their intents and desires until the next Sandra Bullock or Meg Ryan romantic comedy provides direction, but otherwise it's one or the other.<br />So I see the ensuing hemmoraging of guilt as a cultural reminder for couples to assure their others they don't take them for granted, or purchase a brief stay of reprimand and consequence if they do. That's how I see it for couples. For singles, Valentine's Day is a delightful reminder to not take your lonliness for granted. You earned it.<br />Long gone are the days of gradeschool, wherein everyone received a valentine. Everyone was indocrinated to believe they and everyone else deserved one just for being. What that really was, was an introduction to kinderpity. As the years wore on, and the cupcakes went from homemade, to store-bought, to fresh from the mark-down bin; as the bags of lacy lollipops and confection hearts (stamped with come-on lines so awful only the most socially inept of first-graders ever put any of them to the test) went from carefully-counted and wrapped assorted foils and tissues of internal bleeding reds and blood-in-your-unrine pinks, tagged with personalized to's and from's, to brown paper grab-bags of dollar-tree cheap, sugary and remotely heart-related; as the years wore on and the polygamous orgy of grade-wide valentines whittled down to callous monogamy, the expectations of youth were stones piled high around ones heart, that collapsed in the hormonal seas of adolescence. Raised to believe you deserved a valentine, one day the reality that someone has to want to give you a valentine arrives just in time hasten the evisceration of your self-worth.<br />Every Valentine's day is saturated with the color of a freshly-fought battlefield, and don't think for a second that's an accident. For us singles, every rejection, a valentine that might-have-been, is stuffed with caramel, or almond nouget, or peanut butter, a Whitman's sampler of failures of worth. No one will give us the pleasures we never will have. Every failed relationship is the bouqet given to someone else. Every word of recrimination from an ex masquerades as the soft, fuzzy representation of a viscious, carnivorous mammal. Like your ex, it's best to play dead and hope they'll lose interest. Even break-up sex is no better than the gold-colored plating on a gas-station trinket hastily snatched up in a moment of relational horror at forgetting to soothe one's partner that one doesn't take one for granted: one turns your skin green, the other your soul.<br />Every Valentine's day is carefully crafted to refresh the wounds that might've (silly you) grown into twisted scars over your self-esteem. Aisle upon aisle of crimson regret, of gold-trimmed failure. This Valentine's day, your own breaking wind is the only sweet nothing that might whisper in your ear.<br />Don't take your lonliness for granted, singles! You earned it. Somewhere in a heart-shaped universe is everyone who chose to leave you. They reside amid the countless who never thought you worth the bother to begin with, as countless as the hairs on an insipid bear. Perhaps, in the days to come, you can court tooth decay with that discounted candy. Like your long-gone lovers, plague will leave a delightful hole behind. Don't try to kid yourself, if you're sad enough to buy yourself a card. That message wasn't crafted for you by some lonely, if possibly feeble, sloganeer hoping agaisnt hope to make contact, but for those so emotionally out of touch thinking that some smarmy phrase best captures what they feel, perhaps because it captures that same feeling for 30 million other people.<br />You've earned your distance from the rest of humanity, so enjoy it. Your lack of interpersonal skills set you apart, literally. Jesus may have come to save all humankind, but saints don't have to be so generous. They're allowed to be picky, and it would not do to offend St. Valentine. Thus for one night a year your satin sheets will turn into sackcloth, every stuffed bear you touch will shed handfuls of hair in the presence of your emotional Hiroshima, and champagne will turn to bitter herbs in your mouth when you toast your singlehood. It would be best if you simply slit your wrist on those roses' thorns.<br />But then February will offer up the 15th. Vanlentine's day will be tossed into bins at half-off, about as much as your self-worth a mere 24 hours ago. The bright nosebleed of commercial romance will cease, and slowly scab over, and fade like a crime scene, or Shannon Doherty's career. You'll be allowed 364 days to forget, barring holidays, which would be so much richer if you had someone to share your memory blacking-out drunk with, that every bit of your measure in our society is dependant upon how much another values you. You'll see nary a bear as they wander off to hibernate, curled up around their noxious prose. The mentally challenged will go back to packaging light bulbs, and doing a real day's work. You won't have to worry about seeing roses, as they rarify to anniversaries and apologies. Tossing your socks anywhere, and leaving your laundry unfolded will once-again become an enviable mark of freedom, instead of a cotton pile of shame.<br />You've made it through another Valentine's day, and next year you'll have grown into another person, one who can face the Valentine's next knowing you're older and less unattractive than you are right now. Perhaps we'll all luck out, us singles, and a liberal administration will start a new entitlement program, one wherein the government sends everyone in America a valentine's card. If they can subsidize corn, and sugar, I see no reason why romance can't be covered under Medicare, and self-worth get a matching contribution from employers. 364 days to go!OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-20435483664877703742010-02-09T00:39:00.003-05:002010-02-09T01:52:20.307-05:00Sarah Palin goes to a party, and enjoys tea.So, Sarah was at the Tea Party convention the other night. I watched most of her speech, but dropped out when she had the sit-down chat. Too bad, as I understand I missed her checking notes she had written on her hand. Oh wait, I live in the 21st century: that shit will be online forever. Excellent.<br />Now, what I wonder is this: considering her track record with Q & A, would it really have devestated her image to carry a pad out with notes on it? I mean, really, is it so important to appear able to speak "off the cuff?" Poor dear didn't practice her speech enough either, as she stumbled several times and once obviously lost her place. I'm cool with that, however, even if I feel I would have been more prepared. I just don't understand why she keeps trying to hide weaknesses instead of being practical about overcoming them.<br />Now it may surprise those who know me that while I find the thought of Sarah in the White House horrifying, I have a grudging respect for her. While I'd never drop a thin dime on her book, I'll likely check it out of my college library (it will almost always be there: I go to college with teenagers; they don't read books). Call it a morbid curiosity.<br />The Tea Party is an interesting movement, in theory at least. Basically an amalgamation of independant voters, those disgruntled with both political parties (as well they and you should be). I'd have thought that getting independants together under any kind of banner, much less a convention would have been as sucessful as herding cats. Understanding that the Tea Party doesn't represent the spectrum of all independants, I'm impressed with the effort, even if I find the political philosophies of nearly all the convention attendees interviewed by CNN by and large repellant. And let me be clear that I admire Sarah only for continually putting herself out there. One also has to admire her walking the walk about her abortion views, even if I hold divergent and wildy more complex views. Largely, I think she is a power-hungry catchphrase machine, who is playing every supporter of hers for a fool. In her speech, she said exactly what her supporters wanted to hear, and they love the idea of her so much, they don't waste a moment thinking critically about what she's saying.<br />Allow me paraphrase because I'm far too lazy to mine quotes.<br />That we're fighting a war on terrorism, and using criminal investigation techniques and mentality are the wrong tactics. Completely wrong, unless your aim is not to use precise techniques to prevent attacks and aprehend terrorists, but instead to solve the problem by blowing up as many Muslims and people of brown skin as possible. Logically, we shouldn't be wasting our money on investigating the drug trade and weaving intricate webs to catch as many drug-related criminals as possible, but should carpet-bomb Columbia, and raze every town south of the border. Why waste the time trying to work your way as high up into a criminal (or terrorist) heirarchy as possible when you can just kill as many people as possible, including innocent women, men and children. That would prevent them from breeding more non-Americans just like them. Besides, despite tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Muslims, Arabs, and brown-skinned people dead, I don't think we've reached the eqivalency yet. It's never been stated, but isn't it something like, for every one of the 3000+ Americans killed on 9/11, 9000 or so Arabs must die? I know I'm not tired of revenge rhetoric.<br />Lesse, what's next.<br />"Common sense" in our Federal spending. Can't really argue too much with that sentiment. I do wish she'd have at least hinted how much more complicated it is than that appealing bit of rhetoric. Sure, I think the current attempts at health care reform are misguided, but I sure didn't hear any solutions to the pressing issues of Medicare and Medicaid ensuring Federal insolvency in a decade or two. Our budget deficit is worrying (but for all the wrong reasons: it's disturbing because of how it weakens our currency. Oil is denominated in dollars, which is bolstering the value of the dollar. If oil were to be denominated in any other currency, it would send our money into free-fall. Then China would then dump its currency reserves onto the market to try to recover some of their losses, further wiping out the dollar. Incidentally, both of the above are why we are in Iraq, not weapons of mass destruction) but advocating lowering taxes at the same time? Voodoo economics, anyone? Favoring the supply-side of the economy has now 30+ years of empirical evidence, during which time no recessions were prevented (we're in our 4th since Reagan took office), the divide between rich and poor has grown into a chasm, and deficits are the rule, not the exception. I wish if she's going to open her mouth, she'd have some real intelligence about economics behind it.<br />"It's been a year..." referring to the economy, "...can't blame the previous administration." Well, one could, but from one point of view that's correct: we should be casting a very critical towards the last 15 sessions of Congress. Besides, it took nearly 8 years to get into the recession. I'm tired of it too, but I know it takes time to pull out of one as well. Even longer for it to be felt in the "real" economy (how I despise that phrase). To reiterate the above, it's complicated. The Government is not a person, can't household financing isn't entirely applicable. Sigh<br />I must away to bed, but let's throw one more stone. Sarah stirred outrage that the Christmas Day attempt at blowing up an airliner, which she declared a miracle that it didn't go as planned (a miracle? Really? God intervened and stopped the bomb, through means awe-inspiringly inexplicable, such as the bomb-makers ineptitude? Really?), outrage that the terrorist is being prosectued with rights granted by our Constitution. Now, I understand the kneejerk reaction. He is not a US citizen, why should he be graced with the protections afforded our Constitution? Well, he was aprehended in US territory, and is thus subject to US law, not US lynchy, mob-ruley gut feelings. Let me offer this argument. I'm in no way a theist, but the Constitution is founded on the premise that the rights guaranteed in it are HUMAN rights, not exclusively American rights. These rights, as theist never tire of arguing, are in fact God-given rights, and our legal system was founded, theoretically, at least, on the premise that these HUMAN rights cannot be abridged. We live in a country that recognizes these human rights, and bases its laws on them. I'm an atheist, but I appreciate and enjoy the liberties and protections of the Constitution, even if I don't think them granted our species by a deity. But if one does believe our country is founded on Christian principles, and these rights are inalienable to the species, just how do you justify denying them to whomever pisses you off? A US citizen who attempts or commits mass murder is protected, and processed with these rights firmly in mind. It's hubris and jaw-dropping hypocrisy to deny these lauded (and entirely reasonable) rights, written down in our Constitution, to anyone simply because they're not American. Anyway, if I can say nothing else about Sarah (and I can, to be sure), she sure does get me thinking.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-21274094059183255572009-12-18T22:52:00.003-05:002009-12-18T23:21:38.116-05:00I've got a crush on you...I left my cell phone on top of my car. A few cellular misadventures later, I walk out of US Cellular with a Motorola Crush, the only touch phone that didn't require a data plan to get a discount (<em>Seriously, like any of us need an excuse to spend more time on the internet</em>.) It's the fifth day and it's simply irrational how much I adore this phone. Is it perhaps because it's a smart phone, and I identify? It's much more likely that my life is devoid of spouse, children, and pets, and thus I'm just sad and nerdy (<em>is there a correlation</em>?) I considered (not briefly enough, to my shame) breaking out my camera in order to take pictures of it to post on here. Thoughts of becoming one of those people who post pictures of their pets, doll collections, or any new scores on ebay stayed my hand. The best thing about the phone is that it doubles as an mp3 player, so I've finally got my podcast groove back on. Being that it kills two birds with one stone (<em>barbarous image, really</em>), replacing both my confettied phone and stolen iPod, I was able to rationalize the cost. Very interesting how motivating getting my podcasts back, and having mobile learning is.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-69824658676980761582009-05-03T07:50:00.002-04:002009-05-03T07:54:25.589-04:00Brain Under Construction<span style="font-size:130%;">Six Finals and Assorted Papers Due This, and Next Week. All Resources Devoted to Paid Academics. Brain Will Resume Normal Function in Two Weeks. Please Use Detour:</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"></span><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo"><span style="font-size:130%;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo</span></a>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-91146325182421861782009-03-06T13:43:00.003-05:002009-03-06T13:57:03.894-05:00Futurama Friday<span style="font-size:180%;">Futurama Friday: The Future is NOW!</span><br /><em><span style="font-size:130%;">Well, not really, but it sure is close.</span></em><br /><br /><br /><br />If you haven’t been asleep for the last 25 years or so, or been fed on an entertainment diet of Jane Austin melodramas exclusively, then likely you’ve bumped into science fiction in the various and sundry medias. Whether it’s a children’s show about hyper-intelligent kids from the future stuck in our present-day high schools, or ridged and crested aliens issuing sinister ultimatums to human space-farers in impossibly form-fitting outfits, there are iconic images ingrained in our cultural periphery. From silvered starships twinkling with unnecessary lights swooping past the screen, to flames dancing around a command crew right before some obtuse rewiring of equipment saves the day, these images are as familiar to most people as the gas station brands you pass by daily, but perhaps don’t shop at. Aware, yet unaware at the same time.<br /><br />One iconic image from our imagined futures is that of a doctor (no matter what species) clad in skin-tight silver, waving a whistling widget above a patient, rays of futuristically-colored light bathing a wound that miraculously heals. As often as science fiction gets it amazingly, and consistently wrong, once in awhile it does get it right, and our reality shapes itself to our imaginations.<br /><br />Researchers at the school of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University are well into research into science-fiction medical technology. They are well into human clinical trials using lasers to weld, or solder human tissue together. If that seems completely counter-intuitive, it is.<br />Everyone knows what a laser is, even if they couldn’t explain it technically. A laser is a beam of light, but light that’s been altered for very special properties, most of which we’re aware of. A laser beam is often called coherent light. If you light a flashlight in the dark, light bursts from the bulb in an ever-widening cone, which, because the light spreads out over distance, gets “weaker” the further away from the light (or power) source. So while a flashlight is great for rummaging around in a darkened car for beer money, it’s not so good for checking out owls in a tree a hundred feet away.<br /><br />Stars are really just the same (though they produce a lot more “kinds” of light than a flashlight bulb does, or even the bulbs we use in our homes, as any pot grower can tell you: you need special bulbs that produce more kinds of light to grow weed) only further away. There are stars that are so much more massive than our sun, trying to grasp the scales is almost (but not entirely) impossible. They are also orders of magnitude (each order is roughly 10 times larger than the previous order. 100 is an order of magnitude larger than 10. 1000 is two orders of magnitude larger than 10.) brighter than our sun, but because they are so far away, they look dim. We only get a little bit of the light they produced. All the rest has spread out to other parts of the universe, just like our flashlight has spread its light out all over the trees, so only a little bit falls on the owl we’re looking for.<br /><br />Now, as anyone who’s risked their parent’s ire by snaking their mom’s magnifying class knows, it is possible to take some of that light, and reverse the spread. Light’s pretty flexible, really, even if trying to define what it is essentially is an astoundingly difficult task conceptually (which is why we won’t here). Light bends, and pretty darn easily at that. Light bends (and slows down!) a little when it passes through our atmosphere, or through glass, or quite a bit when it passes through water (rainbows another day, I promise). Have a properly shaped piece of glass, and you can bend light so it “spreads” the opposite way, or concentrates it (only to a point though. You’re just changing the direction light travels, and even through a magnifying glass it will spread out again). Trust me kids, it’s worth the spanking to wander around outside with a magnifying glass on a clear summer day. It’s amazing the power such a small amount of light has. <em>Curiously, I’ve only ever known boys who turn this power onto ants, or caterpillars, wielding the fiery power of destruction upon them in a disturbing bit of megalomania. Interesting. </em><br /><br />I suspect it might have been this kind of not-so-charming experiment that set the mental gears of some pre-pubescent scientists spinning, setting them to wonder if there was a way to keep light concentrated. Indeed, it is possible!<br /><br />I’ll spare you the physics of lasers, if only because I’m still working through them, and haven’t gotten to the point of confidently being able to translate them easily. But we do know it’s possible to concentrate light so that it doesn’t spread out like regular light (at least, not to the same extent that regular light does. I’m simplifying here to an almost ridiculous degree, but at the same time, one doesn’t need to know the physics, and chemistry [nearly the same thing] of mixed and heated eggs, flour, sugar, and milk to enjoy cake). We’re surrounded by lasers.<br /><br />Laser light’s applications all depend on how much power is put behind them. Very weak (low power) laser light can be used to send data through fiber optic cables when it’s pulsed, or send cats into a wild frenzy if jiggled on a wall. It can be reflected in certain ways, and read to encode music, or movies. It can also be given a tremendous amount of power to weld metals together, or slice cleanly through them. Even if we likely will never run into a cutting laser, we know they exist, and it’s the cutting power of lasers (whether through automotive steel, or the hulls of alien starships) that makes using a laser to replace stitches so counter-intuitive.<br /><br />Lasers are already widely used in medical procedures, from use as precise scalpels in non-invasive surgeries (snake a small tube fitted with a laser into a little hole in the body, and a surgeon can make internal incisions deep within the body without cutting a person wide open) to cutting and reshaping the eye to improve vision. But laser have always been used for cutting tissue. It makes no sense that you could “weld” or “solder” biological tissue with one. Apparently, it does.<br /><br />Since 1994, teams from Tel Aviv University have been researching lasers for just such a counter-intuitive use. The terms welding and soldering are also surprisingly accurate. To one degree or another, lasers generate heat (it’s energy, after all), and it appears that precisely controlling this heat has surprising effects on different kinds of tissue. At carefully controlled temperatures, certain tissues actually weld together, though on the abstract I found from Tel Aviv U, they admitted that the biological mechanisms responsible are “not fully understood.” Soldering requires the presence of a biological medium (albumin was mentioned specifically. This is an umbrella term for any water-soluble protein. Egg whites contain certain kinds of albumin. I wonder if the soldering process is akin to making a fried egg on a cut?) introduced to the cut, which under the right temperatures welds the edges of the tissues together.<br /><br />This has awesome implications. The team claims that this method dramatically reduces scarring, is easier to learn that suturing, and can reduce infection as no foreign bodies are introduced (such as a needle and thread), and because it forms a watertight seal. They do admit some technical challenges, the most daunting being that the temperatures have to be calculated precisely for each and every procedure, but experience will build a database to write software based upon it, so computers could likely determine that in the future. Really, how cool is this?<br /><br />Imagine the lives that could be saved by repairing internal hemorrhaging without slicing open the torso. The risk of infection reduced to negligible concern, recovery times measured in hours instead of days or weeks, and scarring from “major” surgery reduced from a throat to navel scar to two or three mere pinprick-sized holes. The need to stock closets of suturing supplies reduced, the amount of antibiotics reduced, and especially the amount of pain medication radically reduced. I’ve long advocated that reducing the cost of health care will be done via technology (and elimination of needless insurance), not by socializing it to artificially control its cost. Case in point!<br /><br />It may be such that one day, every home medical kit will have a little wand that moms wave over scraped knees, and other boo boos, and kids will watch fascinated, tears forgotten, as their wounds close up like magic. No more need for antibiotic ointments, or ripping off band aids in teeth-grinding anticipation. It may, sadly, deprive scab-pickers of their vocation, however. How one evaluates that loss is decidedly personal. What I still wonder, however, is when doctors will start wearing the silver jumpsuits. Probably the same day they use their personal jet-packs to fly into work.<br /><br />Links for more information:<br /><a href="http://stanford.wellsphere.com/general-medicine-article/laser-for-stitching-wounds/606051">http://stanford.wellsphere.com/general-medicine-article/laser-for-stitching-wounds/606051</a><br />This has a short video giving you the bare bones.<br /><a href="http://www.tau.ac.il/~applphys/research_welding.htm">http://www.tau.ac.il/~applphys/research_welding.htm</a><br />This is the abstract from Tel Aviv University. More technical, but just general enough.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-57628318167576780472009-03-01T21:25:00.002-05:002009-03-01T21:28:39.997-05:00Skeptical SundayWorking on one right now. Hope to get it posted while it's technically still Sunday. Let me ask my readers, which is basically you, Gretchen, are there any subjects you'd like me to tackle, something near and dear to your hearts?OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-82984327561475376232009-02-23T20:11:00.002-05:002009-02-23T20:18:25.472-05:00Microblog Mondays<span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>Douchionary</strong></span><br /><br />Douche from the French, shower: 1) A stream of water or air applied to a body part or cavity. 2) An instrument for applying a douche. American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Edition p255<br /><br />Douchiness: The quality of being a douche, whether whole or in part. In scientific notation, exponential quantities of being a penis, cunt, or whore, expressed in powers of douche: total, complete, unbelievable, et al.<br /><br />Douchy: An expression describing noticeable levels of douchiness.<br /><br />Douche Canoe: What one travels in when immersed in complete douchiness.<br /><br />Douche Bag: A human vessel for carrying douchiness, theoretically of infinite size.<br /><br />Douche Lord: 1) One to whom other douches defer as having the superior quantity or quality of douchiness. 2) Male having transcended the limits of being a penis.<br /><br />Ménage a Douche: Three or more douche bags, usually traveling via douche canoe.<br /><br />Douche Master: Douche bag who helps others discover their inner douche.<br /><br />Douche Fu: Self defense techniques practiced mainly by douche bags, though can be used to combat douchiness.<br /><br />Douche Camp: Congregational location for various douche bags, douche masters, and douche lords to commingle unequal quantities of douchiness until equilibrium of equal douchiness is reached by all. Often produces compete douchiness, requiring douche canoes.<br /><br />Douchetastic: Expression of admiration for incorporating douchiness where none was thought possible.<br /><br />Douchaccino: The bitter drink of being unalterably stuck in the company of a douche bag.<br /><br />Douchage: Informal, all the douchiness one has left in one’s wake, douche bag or not.<br /><br />Megadouche: a douche bag exceeding his or her normal ability to douche. Only one is able to fit per canoe.<br /><br />Instadouchional: Formalized and traditional modes and practices of douchiness.<br /><br />Douchebaggery: Improvisational acts of varying douchiness.<br /><br />Douchependant/Douchependancy: Douchbags whose effective douchiness is dependant on proximity of other douche bags. The number and strength of douchiness varies as to whether the needed douchebag is a bag, master, or lord.<br /><br />Douchesaur: A limitless megadouche.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-65058940859368493632009-02-23T02:49:00.002-05:002009-02-23T03:12:45.459-05:00Skeptical Sunday!<span style="font-size:130%;">But a day late...ah well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>Big, Greedy, Unscrupuous Pharma</strong></span><br /><br /><br />Corporate Conspiracy Theory #4:<br /><br /><em><span style="font-size:130%;">“The pharmaceutical companies are making up diseases to sell us their drugs.”</span></em><br /><br />I’ve heard this actually come out of more than one person’s mouth. This makes absolutely. no. sense. if you think about it. Are they advertising drugs to treat existing diseases? Yes, they are, and they market them to the hilt. You can certainly accuse them of “repackaging” or “rebranding” diseases, and giving them a sexy acronym, but they aren’t making diseases up out of thin air, and then bilking you out your money.<br />Drug companies have a very powerful incentive to make things that actually do something, and treat very real diseases that they spend millions of advertising dollars on: reputation. If they sell millions of sugar pills, that treat a fictitious disease, they are going to get sued sooner rather than later, no one would ever trust a company that got caught selling a sugar pill, ever buy their products again, and the company would die.<br /><br />If you buy into the above Big Pharma conspiracy, here are the assumptions you have to make:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">1)</span> That they really make up diseases (which, you can look up on PubMed and see, yes, there is literature on each and every disease advertised), and that a television commercial, or magazine ad is going to somehow convince a large number of people who do not have the fictional disease that they do. This assumes an ridiculous amount of gullibility on the part of the general public.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">2)</span> That they do this instead of making real drugs to treat real diseases. So they're what, spending hudreds of millions of dollars just looking busy?<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">3)</span> That all these now-convinced people, victims of marketing, will go to their doctors, who are also in on the conspiracy, because what doctor isn’t going to lie to someone who could sue him into the poor house for a box of logo pens, demanding the drug for the fictitious disease, and the doctor will, of course, oblige, sniggering in his complicity.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">4)</span> That these sugar pills are actually loaded with stuff that mimics side-effects, which will enhance the placebo effect, and remove the symptoms you don’t have for a disease you never did.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">5)</span> And all this while, you’d have to assume that not a single person within the pharmaceutical company has a shred of morality, that every single doctor in the medical community has a lifetime’s supply of pens to keep her mouth shut, and that everyone in the FDA is so far in the pockets of every Pharma, that not a single one would ever speak out.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>“But, but, but they have to make up stuff and sell drugs, because they’ve invested so much money into their drugs.”</em></span><br /><br />Well, yes, that’s why real drugs that work are so expensive. You’re not just paying for all the testing for the one that works, but for all the others that didn’t! It takes years to develop a drug that works and doesn’t kill people, and <em>it’s not 7-11 employees doing the researching folks</em>, but highly trained,educated, <strong>expensive</strong> people. They deserve to be profitable, or else there’s no point in making the drugs. If you think they should be giving the drugs away because it’s wrong to charge people who are sick, take that same logic to your grocer and see if he’ll give you food because you get hungry. Heaven help you if he buys into your philosophy because he’ll be out of business in a New York minute, and then where will you be?<br />Good Lord, people, everybody loves a multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster, which is completely frivolous, uses insane amounts of resources, is horrific for the environment, usually contributes nothing to the intellectual or artistic progress of anyone, and hopes it makes buckets of money. Manufacture a drug that may relieve human suffering, possibly offering hope for the first time in history for its sufferers, perhaps even save someone's life, but make so much as a dime, and you're a greedy, evil fucker. Am I the only one who sees the moral inversion necessay here?<br /><br />Yes, bad things have happened. People make mistakes, some things aren't found out before damages are done, and yes there have been cases of corruption. Nothing's perfect, but the nature of the industry is such that it's pretty much self-correcting.<br /><br />Pharmaceutical companies are not making up diseases to sell drugs. They are marketing their drugs in the hopes that if you have the very real disease, your doctor will prescribe it. They are expensive because it was expensive to make them. The more profit they make, the more new drugs they can research. And some of that profit is fun money for a job well done, and they deserve it. Why is this last paragraph so difficult for people to believe, but the gigantic conspiracy theory, with millions of people keeping their silence in its interdependent assumptions is the preferred reasoning for some people? These are the same people who would <em>never</em> be fooled by that bogus advertising, but insultingly think everyone else is being fooled. Unreal.<a href="mailto:pers-1045141603@craigslist.org?subject=When%20you%20hit%20the%20bottem,%20you"></a>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-731134830715192492009-02-22T11:35:00.002-05:002009-02-22T11:37:01.729-05:00Sorry!!!Likely not to get a skeptical sunday blog up today. I've got something to do today, and schoolwork all week have priority over the blog, even though I tried to get one done aheads of time. Maybe tonight, but don't hold your breath.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-68744584425010821902009-02-17T19:10:00.002-05:002009-02-17T19:15:38.268-05:00Tangent Two-Fers DoneTangent Two-Fer Tuesdays are kaput. Tuesday is relegated back to an irregular, unfeatured day. I am considering starting a Friday feature, and doing regular, if thematically-freeform postings on Wednesdays.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-21358217160222396182009-02-15T17:18:00.002-05:002009-02-15T17:23:09.129-05:00Skeptical Sunday!<strong><span style="font-size:180%;">The Second Law of Thermodynamics</span></strong><br /><strong><span style="font-size:180%;"></span></strong><br />It’s often cited as refutation of evolution by creationists, and sounds pretty convincing if A) you take their definition as actually what the law says, and B) completely ignore the world around you. It’s usually phrased something like this...<br /><br />“A system will always increase in disorder (entropy)” thus the argument goes that complexity cannot develop from simplicity, as any system will tend towards maximum entropy, thus evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.<br /><br />The real laws of thermodynamics deal with the exchange of matter and energy (remember, they are equivalent in a relativistic universe) within a system. It’s actually more complicated than it’s most often presented because it deals with some pretty abstract concepts. Simplifying it, while useful to convey the sense of it, robs it of its specificity and accuracy, and also leaves it open to misinterpretation.<br /><br />It’s taken me weeks of research to feel confident enough to address the issue, and attempt a compromise between simplicity, and complete accuracy. The second law could be stated this way...<br /><br />No exchange of energy will be completely efficient, and some of that usable energy will always be lost as heat. This process will continue until all the usable energy in the universe has not only been converted to heat, but that heat has spread evenly across the entire universe, and no information about the past is recoverable, because the universe will be the same energy level (temperature) in every square inch.<br /><br />I hesitated to include that last clause, as the transmission of information is a complex subject. Anyway, energy is defined as “the ability to do work.” Heat is energy as well, but it is the most “disordered” state energy takes. Its disordered state means that it cannot be used to do work (per se! We might disagree about that definition as we use heat for a variety of uses, but just go with it, as our day-to-day definitions aren’t of any importance to the universe.) So, while disordered is somewhat accurate, it’s also misleading. Entropy is often defined as disorder, but it’s better stated as the dispersion of energy in a system, or that systems tend to go from less stable states to more stable states. In other words, the universe is working towards the most stable state it‘s capable of, which is an even distribution of its energy, and without energy being “concentrated” in one place or another, there won’t be any transfer of energy, or any work able do be done.<br /><br />So, the second law (which is why there’s no such thing as perpetual motion) doesn’t have anything to say about complexity, whether it’s nuclear, chemical, or biological complexity. In regards to biological evolution, it pretty much obeys the law as far as it goes. Life forms go through a long chain of transformations to convert sunlight into other useful forms of energy (or matter, as the case may be), and they do it with less than perfect efficiency, and lose some of that energy as heat, contributing to the entropy of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics, while it does govern biological fuel consumption and uses, doesn’t at all forbid life forms from becoming more complex as they do so.<br /><br />For example, we consume food, and thus grow, creating first our complex biological systems in utero, then as new cells (order) in our bodies as we grow older. While we develop and learn, our brains create new pathways, etc., etc. We are living examples of complexity developing from simplicity, and it requires energy to do so. All the second law warns us of is that we don’t get all the work possible from the energy we consume. Incidentally, the whole universe appears to be geared towards increasing complexity, so it comes as no surprise to me that biological life forms follow suit (years of study of chaos theory and fractals, and I still have barely scratched the surface. It’s why I went back to school, to get a new understanding of it by learning the math.)<br />Acorns, snowflakes, crystals, puppies, even nuclear fusion, are all examples of increasing complexity. The sun’s a beautiful example, really. It uses a tremendous amount of energy to fuse two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom, an arguable more “complex” element. That would be the work. In the process, some of that energy is lost as heat. Lucky for us, eh? Complexity happens all around us, all the time, it’s just going to cost the entire universe one day. Perhaps we should make the most of our time here, hmm?<br /><br />So the universe couldn’t care less how complex a system is. Have at it, just realize that when it’s all said and done, no matter how complex a system gets, at some point there will be no more usable energy for it do so. That’s all, really. Nothing about how complex a system can or can’t be to use the energy, nor evolution, which incidentally, doesn’t assert that life forms must get more complex. Evolution is the theory that life forms change (evolve) over time to fill biological niches and pass on their genetic material, and they do so by natural selection determining which traits are passed on to successive generations (and boy is that an oversimplification!) Evolution couldn’t care less how complex you are. Bacteria are orders of magnitude less complex than we are, but have evolved to fill just about every niche there is, evolving a stunning array of diverse traits to do so.<br /><br />So, add equal parts understanding of evolution and thermodynamics, bake for one semester of biology and physics, and viola, you have a complete dismissal of the “violation of the 2nd law” argument. For what it’s worth, creationists, you’d probably sleep better at night if you just looked at it this way: there’s what the Bible says God did, and there’s the actual universe, what God really did. The difference between the two could be thought of as only a matter of accuracy, not veracity. Think of it this way: the universe is like a skyscraper God built. The Bible is like a flyer advertising His services.<br /><br />Mayhap this is a better analogy: the Bible is trying to describe a painting. When you look at the world around you, that’s actually looking at the painting. Science is analyzing the painting, looking at the brushstrokes, to see how it was painted. Even you’d have to admit, no matter how well written, the description doesn’t do the painting justice.<br /><br />Random Act of Quotation!<br /><br />“If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?” <em>Steven Wright</em>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-34520409505401699932009-02-08T23:46:00.004-05:002009-02-09T20:16:50.931-05:00MicroBlog Mondays!This is most concise explanation of the Large Hadron Collider I've yet seen. Sooooo cool. Incidentally, this largest of scientific instruments, ever, is in a very real sense, the most powerful microscope on Earth!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNpucos9wc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNpucos9wc</a><br /><br />I'm just in awe constantly when it comes to the universe. That it takes an instrument so large people work <em>inside</em> of it, that crosses two countries (even though I suppose a telephone booth could do that too), and so powerful (so much so that the LHC can't be run in winter: they wouldn't have enough power to heat the city of Geneva!!) to "see" not just the smallest things in the universe, but perhaps the smallest things possible in the universe, is just amazing in its strangeness, and complexity, and such profound mystery.<br /><br />A cool thing about being an atheist is not having any kind of mythological indoctrination for the origin of the universe. The sheer dread mystery of its beginnings, and even if there was another universe before ours, of different physical laws perhaps. A creationist arguement is that the fundamental constants are too exquisitely tuned for life to be chance (the nontheist rebuttal, that if we're here talking about them, then the constants of the universe couldn't be any different, we're possible, and here because of the constants, the constants are not here because of us, has the same virtue as the creation arguement: it only convinces the side it's coming from) doesn't take into account that, true, if you change just one value of one of the constants then life becomes far more unlikely, if not impossible, but different combinations of values might yield universes where "life" might indeed arise, and our universe may not be the first and only universe.<br /><br />Interesting note about the Jewish creation story: it's different than most other myths in that it's so...procedural. Other myths have great beasts battling, pantheons of gods warring, gods and goddesses dying to become the universe: genesis is almoat a to-do list. Not judging, but it lacks drama and narrative drive. Does show the Jewish penchant for exacting rites and ritual, the character of their god, no wonder they have a thousand damn laws in the old testament, lol.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-4031318481016236882009-02-08T19:12:00.003-05:002009-02-08T19:24:02.777-05:00Skeptical Sundays<strong><span style="font-size:180%;">Skeptical Shorthand for Your Health<br /></span></strong><br />If it sounds too good to be true, it is.<br /><br />Your body can only use so many nutrients at a given time. Future energy reserves are stored as fat; everything else is excreted. It’s a waste of your money to purchase mega dose supplements. Even a multivitamin is largely superfluous if you regularly eat a balanced diet. Some vitamins and minerals are even toxic in large doses.<br /><br />Your body is complicated! Drugs are not (yet) intelligent. If something claims to affect your body in some way, but mentions no side effects, or potential interactions with other substances you can assume: 1) it has not been properly researched for its claim, and 2) it likely has no benefit. This is a rule that surely has some exceptions, but they only prove the rule.<br />Just because the vendor of a “health” product is not a pharmaceutical company in no way means they aren’t unscrupulous. In fact, if a vendor’s untested product is meant to be taken propholactically, it’s almost certainly a scam to bilk you out of money.<br /><br />A multi-billion dollar international pharmaceutical company who’s very existence is dedicated to researching chemicals and designing effective products, and yet they missed the apricot extract that’s 87% effective against cancer, and magically only affects cancer cells. Sorry, this just isn’t likely. More likely they’ve tested it and found it’s worthless.<br /><br />“They don’t want you to know!” Oh bullshit. Notice that none of these supplements have patents. A drug company would slap a patent on an effective herb so fast it would make a homepath’s head spin. You can guess why you’ve never heard of a drug company slapping a lawsuit on any of the vendors of the products “They don’t want you to know about!”<br />No legitimate drug ever has the word “miracle” tagged to it.<br /><br />Real drugs have clinical trials. Supplements have testimonials. Hmmm.<br /><br />Diet, exercise, and a positive attitude are the only things that conclusively improve and maintain health with no side effects.<br /><br />The acidity of the food you eat has no effect on the internal pH of your body outside of your stomach. Acidic foods do not cause disease, so don’t waste your money on those diet books.<br /><br />The only health benefit water has is being water. It cannot be chemically or structurally changed to be better absorbed, nor can it carry the “benefits” of ingredients that were once held in suspension in it. Water has no “memory”, so don’t waste money on products based on that principle. Certainly don’t waste money on expensive machines that purport to change the chemical or structural properties of water to enhance its health benefits. Water is neutral Ph, hence why your body loves and uses so much of it. Water cannot be ionized, though it can contain ionized particles. An ion is a charged particle that has either net positive or negative charge, so gained by adding or stripping an electron from a particle. Note to self: article describing the amazing properties of water and the science behind it.<br /><br />Heavy metal poisoning is extremely dangerous. Chelation is the only known method for removing heavy metals from your body, and is nearly as dangerous as the poisoning itself. 1) It should only be done under the supervision of a doctor! Do NOT buy any drugs from, or submit to a procedure from anyone who is not legitimately trained in scientific medicine! 2) Your body has no mechanism for removing heavy metals (the exception being molecular compounds containing certain metals, which are designed to be flushed from your body) so there is no basis for any product to make the claim that it helps flush metals from your body: there is no mechanism for it to help…they are lying to you.<br /><br />If something claims to be able to “cure” a broad variety of ills but has no side effects, especially because it’s “natural,” IT IS A SHAM.<br /><br />If ANY health system justifies its effects based on quantum physics, IT IS A SHAM!<br /><br />If any health system uses the “supernatural” card (the energies for their healing are undetectable by modern science, but trained adepts can see, feel, and manipulate them. Bullshit! We have a civilization made of machines that can see, feel, and manipulate invisible energies our bodies cannot, in fact are incapable of perceiving) IT IS A SHAM!<br /><br />Eat well, exercise often, do things that promote a positive attitude, such as love, sex, and moderate vice, fight depression by filling your time with worthwhile things and acknowledging even small accomplishments, get plenty of sleep, nap often, drink plenty of water, and enjoy the money you save by being healthy and not spending your money on crap.<br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">Random Act of Quotation!<br /></span></strong><br />Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body.<br />De Saint-RealOBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-28165993059318732672009-02-03T22:28:00.003-05:002009-02-03T23:21:10.672-05:00TANGENT TWOFER TUESDAYReading some new books, too into them to break away, so some video content for you!<br /><br />mildly amusing...<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO_KILnJdHw&feature=channel">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO_KILnJdHw&feature=channel</a><br /><br />not sure how offended I should be by this one, and there's a whole series of them!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ibV8dVuto&NR=1">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ibV8dVuto&NR=1</a><br /><br />this is ok<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NahyfTAVNqk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NahyfTAVNqk</a><br /><br />Screw it. You can't go wrong with Carol Burnett<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9T8i4FkNVo">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9T8i4FkNVo</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3eqWYGahgA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3eqWYGahgA</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp-W5nr9N14">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp-W5nr9N14</a>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-58479586476407674492009-02-02T17:53:00.005-05:002009-02-02T18:02:51.144-05:00MICROBLOG MONDAYSA new feaure (maybe).<br /><br />A relatively brief essay by me, though the subjects may be expanded on, or may be based on far longer essays which may appear in the future. This is more a writing exercise for me than for your benefit, dear reader, but enjoy it anyway.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>Good things about science and our civilization:</strong></span><br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">A Recurring Topic</span></strong><br /><br /><p><span style="font-size:180%;"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></strong></span></p><p>As we discover daily, the world, the universe, reality itself is far more complicated than we ever dreamed. As we advance, in communications, medical, and virtually all other technologies, we create an ever more complicated, and interconnected civilization. Due to the real, concrete advances we have given ourselves, more people than have ever lived enjoy longer, healthier, and generally happier lives.<br />Ascribe whatever moral motivator you will to the beneficial application of the advances of science, it’s irrelevant to me. Historically, it takes more people doing right by each other than not to form larger societies, no matter the cultural or religious influences. This bolsters my conviction that humans are innately good creatures, though flawed. Perfection is a pretty subjective concept anyway.<br />What makes the times we live in so wonderful above and beyond the marvels we almost daily create, is that as we increase the complexity of the world we live in, generally to the benefit of most people, we increase out interdependence on each other. For a society such as ours to function, it relies on increasing numbers of people being educated, and working together.<br />It takes a complicated hierarchy of individuals to mesh different levels of expertise into usable advantages. We laud Jenner for discovering vaccines, but think on the modern culmination of vaccination. It takes people smart in business (smart here denotes cultivated intelligence, by being both educated and trained, not natural Einstein genius. We’re ALL capable of cultivated intelligence) to secure resources to get a manufacturing business started, relying on the expertise of builders, designers of equipment, ad infinitum, to get the business physically established. Then specialists in certain diseases to research, and further specialists to design the usable vaccines. Even further, talented bureaucrats to design programs to disseminate the vaccines.<br />As we advance in just this area of expertise, which is predicated on huge numbers of people educated, and researching multiple branches of biology (microbiology, immunology, evolutionary biology [back off Creationists!]), the result is tens of millions of lives saved, which is deaths prevented (I feel I sometimes have to throw that perspective out there, the anti-vaccination crowd growing louder, and slowly making inroads, shame, shame, shame on them), every year.<br />Our civilization is built on the discoveries and methods of science. It also requires us to more deeply depend on each other to reap, and multiply the benefits. Science is a good thing ya’ll.</p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Random Act of Quotation!</span></p><p>"Science increases our power in proportion as it it lowers our pride"</p><p>Claude Bernard</p>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-58642709226052457692009-02-02T01:16:00.012-05:002009-02-02T01:56:21.315-05:00SKEPTICAL SUNDAYS<p><span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>Weasel Words and Red Flags,</strong><br /><em>Or how to save money by not spending it on crap.</em></span><br /><br /><br />In the world of logic and logical fallacies, weasel words are words peppered throughout a speaker’s or writer’s argument, usually adjectives, that can be used to deride their opponent, or an opponent’s argument. They have a negative connotation, but weasel words can also be used to affirm an argument, making it seem more appealing by whatever tactic the author chooses: more scientific, more humorous, more civilized, more well-thought out. The reason one should be on the lookout for weasel words in an argument is that they are irrelevant to the point under debate, and the one who uses them liberally is generally on the intellectually poorer side of the argument.<br /><br />But weasel words aren’t limited to argument, and can be useful in spotting crap. In this instance, when they are used in advertising they are generally called red flags. While it is commonly understood that red means warning and/or stop, being that I live on the beach, it’s much more poignant. When the red flags go up here, no swimming is allowed in the ocean. No matter what the ocean looks like on the surface, the conditions are such, with currents and undertows, that you are likely to die. Just like in life, there’s no lifeguards, or law enforcement on the beaches to keep you from swimming. You are supposed to know what the red flags mean, then it’s up to you. Go jump in, it’s your choice.<br /><br />In the realm of alternative medicine, red flags abound. Some general things to consider when looking over some pill, supplement, treatment, or dietary and lifestyle change that makes a claim, whether in the store isle, or on TV:<br /><br />First, there is no such thing as <em>“alternative medicine.”</em> There is only medicine that <span style="font-size:130%;">works</span>, and medicine that <span style="font-size:130%;">doesn’t</span>. We have come a long way in the last 200 years, which has been, at the outside, about how long scientific medicine has been around. That is to say, treatments submitted to rigorous tests to establish if there is any effect, beneficial or otherwise. As well, this has gone hand in hand with an ever increasing knowledge of how the body actually works.<br />Second, there is no outside cure for a great many of the common ailments caused by disease organisms other than your immune system. There are things to ease the symptoms, but a great deal of your doctor’s work (or your alternative medicine scam artist’s) is actually done by you. This is in no way an endorsement for not seeing your highly educated, trained, and usually very dedicated doctor.<br /><br />Third, I have some caveats regarding the generalizing I’m about to do, the current limits of human understanding about the body, and my attitude in general, which I will offer in closing to hopefully counter some judgment on the reader’s part. If you need them now, just scroll down.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">ONE ( We Begin)<br /></span><br />So on to our first red weasel. <span style="color:#6600cc;">“NATURAL”</span> an utterly meaningless, and unregulated term. Hmmm, perhaps not completely unregulated. The FDA requires on food that you ingest, that “natural flavors” must actually be derived from a real source, as opposed to laboratory derived. If it is natural bacon flavor, it must actually come from a pig (or at least a majority of it). I’m forever tickled that pills are labeled as “natural.”<br /><span style="color:#6600cc;">“NATURAL”, “ALL NATURAL”, “MADE FROM ALL NATURAL INGREDIENTS.</span><span style="color:#6600cc;">”</span> Don’t get me wrong, it may very well be that something is indeed made from non-laboratory/manufactured ingredients. If it is food, regulated by the FDA, it almost certainly is. If it’s alternative medicines, you roll the dice, with odds that always favor the crank.<br />Some of my contention with “natural” is this, pointed out more thoroughly by many others, including Brian Dunning of Skeptoid: Toadstools are natural, lead is natural, arsenic is natural, ultraviolet radiation is natural, so is the lethal radiation of nuclear decay, cowshit is natural. I think you get my point. Just because it says it’s “natural”, doesn’t mean it’s safe, or even that it actually is naturally derived, being that there’s no regulation for OTC supplements, so long as they don’t overtly claim to prevent, treat, or cure any disease.<br />What you read when you read <span style="color:#6600cc;"><span style="color:#330000;">“NATURAL” on something, is something like this:</span> <em>“This is from a natural plant, grown in untainted soil, with only natural fertilizers, no pesticides, far from urban air and pollutants. In fact, this was harvested in a rainforest 1000 miles from modern humanity, with absolutely no impact on the pristine environment. It was transported by electric car to a hippie commune, where deeply spiritual people used no modern technology to transform this all-natural substance into a pill (pr whatnot) inside a plastic bottle, arriving fresh, as nature intended, to my grocery or health food store.” </em><br /></span>Sadly, there’s no regulation on the word natural in relationship to supplements. Natural has become a marketing tool, completely devoid of meaning, so I would counsel setting aside your expectations. Yes, aspirin is natural, of course. It can be derived by boiling the bark of a willow tree (though I’m not entirely sure if it’s species-specific) and that’s just what the Romans did. I challenge you to go do that next time you have a headache, bearing in mind that you have no control over the effective dosage, and have to consume everything else that leeches out from the willow bark, including the flavor, and I’ll be impressed at your commitment to “natural.”<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">TWO (The Long One)<br /></span><br />Oh, and you expect it to work, too.<br />Also sadly, as long as the claims are kept vague, there’s really no regulation regarding what supplements imply they do, which is heal. Coupled with a mistrust in all things human made and science in general (don’t get me started), our current “green” movement has been hijacked by charlatans out to get your money. Here’s another choice red weasel: <span style="color:#6600cc;">“BOOSTS/ENHANCES/SUPPORTS/INCREASES <em>insert bodily function or the word</em> “vitality” <em>here</em>” </span>What’s so sad is how little education it really takes to get at least a generalized understanding of how the various systems in your body work. Even a cursory knowledge will plant suspicion in your mind when products make such vague claims. Let’s address <span style="color:#6600cc;">“VITALITY”</span> first. It doesn’t mean anything, even though it sounds like it does. There is some historical literature regarding “vitalism”, a long-discredited theory of life and medicine, wherein the body and life was dependant on “vital energy” for existence, and the flow, or balance of this (and in some cases various) energies affected your health, and imbalance was thought to cause disease. If you think this sounds valid, especially all you Chi and Chakra folk, I’ll address this a little later, hopefully letting you down gently. For the rest of you, just know this theory of disease was conceptualized BEFORE the germ theory of disease, and has yet to ever have any supporting evidence for any variation of it.<br />If the producer of the product you’re considering subscribes to this, you gather as you read the website or shiny product label, adorned with fairies, don’t waste your money. If they believe in “vital energy”, that’s their business, but they’re dong you a financial disservice by asking you to buy something that doesn’t do anything.<br />As for “vitality”, ask yourself this:<br />what does that mean?<br />Is that a valid term?<br />How would I measure it?<br />Does it mean I will have more energy?<br />Do they mean what I mean by energy?<br />A cup of coffee would "give me more energy."<br />Does it mean it will make me healthier?<br />If so, why aren’t they allowed to say in what way?<br />If it increases vitality, how will I know?<br />Will my heart rate increase, my feet sweat more (dear lord, no!), halos in my vision?<br />Does it do anything specific?<br />Why aren’t they allowed to say what it does specifically?<br />Ask yourself these, and any other troubling questions that pop into your mind while you look very carefully at the price tag.<br />As for the other terms, in regards to affecting the functioning of your immune system, digestive system (or health, they’re all big on saying it supports digestive/immune health. This appears to be just vague enough to slip under the FDA’s radar. Whether it’s the term support, or the vague use of health, I’m unsure), or any other system in your body, be very skeptical of these nebulous claims. All of these systems are very complicated, with various and sundry stages of function. If it supports digestive health, ask yourself, “How does it do that? Does it increase enzymatic action in my saliva? Does it regulate acid production in my stomach? Does it somehow increase the absorption of nutrition in my large intestine? My small intestine? Does it give a handshake to the symbiotic bacteria in my gut? Does it affect the muscles in all those various digestive components to work better, or more efficiently? Does it somehow affect the waste removal systems? What exactly do they mean?” When you or someone you know goes to the doctor for a digestion problem, you usually get a medicine that affects a specific problem, a particular aspect of digestion. The immune system, endocrine system, circulatory system, all of these are multi-layered, complicated, and interconnected. The ailments for these are pretty specific, and thusly so are the medications, so a panacea for overall system health starts to make no sense, and sound like either ignorance on their part, or supreme contempt for your part.<br />The only thing I know of that affects all aspects of any of these systems is diet! I won’t fail to mention exercise either, as it greatly affects the efficiency of these systems as well, mainly through efficient delivery of nutrition. Diet is important because you, theoretically, consume all sorts of vitamins and minerals, plus necessary carbohydrates, and roughage. Your systems need a diverse array of chemicals to keep each and every different stage of the systems running, and on a daily basis at that. Now, think on the Amazonian Teabag extract, and ask yourself (really asking the manufacturer), “Do you really expect me to believe that this one thing does the same thing as 2 dozen vitamins and minerals, especially when you don’t tell me exactly where, or what aspect of said system your product effects?” Use your perfectly healthy nervous system to walk yourself to the produce aisle.<br />A final note about the above red weasels. If they aren’t exactly implying that they cure something, or affect a disease process, or alleviate a vitamin deficiency, then they are doubtless implying that you should take their supporter, booster, enhancer propholactically. To avoid problems, take 2 pills twice a day, and buy monthly. Pretty insidious. I want you to picture this in your mind: the snake oil charmer talking to his ad executive, telling her to say this without actually saying this. Don’t forget, being that if you cross the line into specifics, the FDA WILL come down on you (never hard enough, sigh) both of them have lawyers present as well.<br />Why are all these nebulous wordings necessary? Because these people selling you their likely bogus health supplements have not proven their products do anything. They have not gone through the rigorous processes that drug companies must go through to:<br />1) Isolate the active ingredient.<br />2) Prove the efficacy of their product, and establish safe dosages.<br />3) Document the number of, and severity of side effects.<br />The overwhelming majority of health supplements (things like “herbal” supplements [yes, yes, yes, I know what your thinking. I will address that in the caveats upon closing]) have never gone through that process. Some have, and there’s negative evidence for effect, yet they are still sold as somehow having an effect on your health. Several new age therapies also have been tested, and still are being tested, showing negative effects, or indistinguishable from placebo. I’m staying close to the supplement, pill-form of alternative medicine. Getting into those other modalities also requires tackling the mindset associated with them, which can get complicated. Another time? Good.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">THREE (Bear with the Tangents)</span><br /><br />I want to make two things clear in this part.<br />1) Diseases have a natural progression, either simply due to a life-cycle, the time it takes your body to mount an effective response and win against the organism, but most likely a combination of the two. If something is meant to be taken propholactically (boosts, enhances, supports) then it is pointless to take it when the disease process has started. Bt my real point with this one is explaining “confirmation bias.” You get sick, and take a supplement. Even though it’s likely bogus, and it’s your own body’s immune system that kills the disease, your associate your feeling better with the pill you took, and will carry that belief with you even when someone points out to you that Australian Dingo Placenta was shown in a clinical trial not to do a damn thing. That’s confirmation bias, and we are all susceptible to it. Trust me, all sickness runs its course in due time. Now eat your chicken soup.<br />2) All real medicine has a real effect. It doesn’t matter to me if the active ingredient did come from a Dingo’s womb, but you do need to prove the extract actually does something, and I’d appreciate if you’d isolate which chemical(s) in the aforementioned placenta do what you’re claiming, establish how much of it I need to have an effect, but also how much is too much, and if you don’t mind, please replicate the chemicals in a laboratory so that my body can’t tell the difference, and we don’t have to kill any more pregnant Dingoes. Real medicine has real effects. We use them for the beneficial effects, and since there’s no free lunch, balance the good against the negative side effects. All those medicines that have those horrible side effects on TV, they actually do what they say they do, and it’s up to you and your doctor to decide if you want to risk the side effects. Medicines have side effects because, while they affect certain processes, or functions, they have no way of knowing you only want those processes to affect just the liver, so they affect everywhere that process happens, which may cause problems if they affect the same process in your pituitary gland. But who knows, you might luck out.<br />Supplements not only aren’t allowed to make specific claims, but they don’t list any side effects. Isn’t that strange? Makes me think it’s either a sugar pill, or whatever’s in it doesn’t do a damn thing at all. It’s cheaper, and healthier to go eat a apple, chock full of proven nutrition. If something’s had the money to go through the levels of testing our pharmaceuticals have gone through, it’s going to cost a lot of money. Even generic drugs are expensive, comparatively. I’m not saying price is always an indicator. There is plenty of bullshit out there that’s got a ridiculous asking price. I’m just here to save you money, whether it’s $5.99, or $59.99.<br /><span style="font-size:130%;">I haven’t even gotten into the weasels of red in this section yet!</span> They are:<span style="color:#6600cc;"> RESEARCH SHOWS,</span> and <span style="color:#6600cc;">STUDIES SUGGEST</span>, and sometimes, though more in verbal advertising, <span style="color:#6600cc;">SCIENTISTS SAY/AGREE</span>. Research means it’s in the process of experimentation. The results aren’t out yet. You don’t even know where they are in the research. It could be that research was just started because someone suspected an effect, but the lab isn’t even open yet. It might however, mean that legitimate research is being done by reputable organizations, and some preliminary paperwork is available, but regardless, don’t put the cart before the horse. You don’t get a prescription for anything manufactured under the auspices of research shows. RESEARCH SHOWS is empty techno babble, and means nothing: absolutely nothing.<br />Studies is such a vague term, you should ignore that one as well. While plenty of studies are legit, they aren’t clinical trials. Another example of dyslexic cart harnessing. Also, a study bandied about in the way alternative medicines use them could honestly mean anything, including that one person looked at a beaker, and pronounced he had studied it. Ignore this one unless you can track down literature, and it produced by reputable sources.<br />SCIENTISTS SAY/AGREE, and indeed they may, but they never tell you who, or what their specialty is. 20 veterinarians agreeing that the cosmos is collapsing doesn’t make me despair for creation.<br />All these are used to make the products sound authoritative, effective, safe, and to make you think somebody actually did the work. Well, to be fair, a chemist did make that $4.99 starch pill you're taking.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">FOUR (Nice and Short)<br /></span><br /><span style="color:#6600cc;">“THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW.”</span> Mmmm hmmm. It’s all a big conspiracy by government, Big Pharma, and no doubt the Illuminati. Right, why suppresses it, when they could make a mint selling these supplements, and home remedies legitimately? This one just drips of pure marketing. It’s an instant <span style="font-size:130%;"><strong><em>Do Not Buy</em></strong></span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">FIVE (Sucker Punch)</span><br /><br /><span style="color:#6600cc;">ANCIENT WISDOM.</span> I’ll be very brief. I will be the first to affirm that our ancestors were in no way stupid, but they were not technologically advanced, and had NO IDEA how the body really worked, beyond perhaps that the heart pumped blood, and a few other obvious things. And I will gladly proclaim their hits (remember aspirin?), but unlike some, I won’t ignore the monumental number of misses. Theirs was a world of trial and error (so is science, but very systematized, with ever increasing technology, and transmission of accurate information doesn’t depend on WORD of MOUTH) and riddled with ignorance. We have and are discovering that they got a few things right, but they got a spectacular amount wrong. A few hits in the Iron Age in no way means everything they did must be right. It’s like saying because you can balance your checkbook, your differential calculus must be right. And why do Orientals get special medical reverence? Ancient Oriental medicine is chock full of just as much “does not work, never did” as Europeans. Lastly, just because a culture has been doing something for 1000 years doesn’t make it work. Some traditions are stupid.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">FINIS (Been waiting for this)</span><br /><br />So there are some of the weasel words and red flags to be on the look out for when shopping in the world of alternative medicine. You’re looking for something that works, to relieve symptoms and pain, and make you feel better. I hope this essay gives you the skills to evaluate what’s likely to not really do anything but put your wallet on a diet. The best way to stay healthy is not in a pill. It’s diet, exercise, moderation of your vices, and a good attitude. When your sick, use the proven medications, all of which (well, perhaps not aspirin) were clinically trialed, and prescription once, so they have a long history of efficacy and safety, which you can look up anytime. If you’re really ill, consult your doctor, whose training, experience, and expertise you rely upon.<br />In closing, I just want you to know, I don’t have anything against the idea of supplements and alternative medicine in general, per se. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that if you want me to buy something, I should know exactly what I’m buying. If your claiming it affects my health, all I ask is proof that it does that. The above weasels have been used in the promotion of snake oil after snake oil, so if I seem harsh, it’s just because I have standards: efficacy and safety. Why shell out money otherwise?<br />Nearly all of our pharmaceuticals come from plants, or other biological sources. I’d never deny that. That in no way means, however, that just because it comes from a biological source, it does anything at all, much less that it’s inherently good for you.<br />As for energy-based modalities, such as chi, charkas, or meridians in the body. Sorry folks, there’s no evidence for those energies. The body is an energy system, to be sure, and it’s that, ahem, vitality that no doubt was the genesis of the aforementioned belief systems. But 1) we’ve learned that the body is a chemical engine, using the heat generated from the transfer of electrical energy from chemical bonds (this is way simplified) being created and broken, and 2) we are very, very, very good at detecting and measuring invisible energies. For example, the Voyager 2 probe is over 9 billion miles away. It’s radio output is equivalent to a 20 watt light bulb. We can and do receive radio transmissions from that probe. We have instruments that can see a 20 watt light bulb 9 billion miles away. Sorry, but there’s no empirical evidence for chi, and all the rest.<br />Sure, there is plenty that we don’t know, in fact far more than we do. I’d advise against leaping on the gaps in our knowledge as a place to lay your favored belief, which inevitably turns out to be hope. Those gaps have a way of quickly closing within a human lifetime these days. Sure, evidence for other modalities may show up one day, and I even think it would be fun if they existed, but it would require altering our whole physics to incorporate them. Until that day, however, it makes no sense to give them any credence, as decades of study (tee hee) have shown nothing.<br />I'm not against every supplement, or alternative therapy. There are a few that actually do somewhat what they claim, and research is being done on them. This in no way makes the rest of them in any way correct.<br />Anyway, do good things for your body, <em>real</em> good things, and good things for your mind, and you'll find you inevitably do good things for your wallet.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><strong>Random Acts of Quotation!</strong><br /></span><em><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">On Evidence...</span><br /></strong></em><br />"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."<br />Henry D. Thoreau<br /><br />"The fact that an opinion is widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd." Bertrand Russel<br /><br />"Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful"<br />Ann Landers</p>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-18496019485460765472009-01-30T16:51:00.002-05:002009-01-30T17:15:40.080-05:00A Featureless FridayI haven't been surfing the web all that much, so I don't have any funny links or pictures. I've spent the last few days hanging out with friends (see previous post) so I haven't been doing the reading I normally do. Much of my energy for socio-politial writing has been going towards school. My disk defragmentor wouldn't work for C: drive because I didn't have enough space left on it, so I copied all of my various and sundry writing folders, and tossed them into my D: drive, akin to dumping all of your paperwork into a box in order to vacuum (what? you mean you don't store all your important papers on the floor? How Bizarre! How else will you know where they are if you don't have to step over them every day?), so I'm a bit too disorganized to go in and fish out some near-complete essays to finish. I've been doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and listening to weighty lectures on my IPod, so I'm not in a very humorous mood today.<br /><br />Aha! I garnered a book of quotations from my folks the last time I was there, so I'll do a few <span style="font-size:130%;"><strong><em>Random Acts of Quotation!</em></strong></span><br /><br />Politicians:<br />"A conservative politician is one in office." Columbia Record<br /><br />"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river." Nikita Khrushchev<br /><br />"A political war is one in which everyone shoots from the lip." Raymond Moley<br /><br />Repentance:<br /><br />'The best part of repentance is the sinning." Arab Proverb<br /><br />Others:<br /><br />"If you try to cleanse others, like soap you will waste away in the process." African Proveb<br /><br />Luck:<br /><br />"Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit!" R.E. ShayOBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-14440736870677364232009-01-29T15:53:00.005-05:002009-01-29T16:18:06.126-05:00Eve of DestructionI woke up this morning, more than once, a sad caricature of a human being. Walking home from school yesterday, I happened upon Dee, a delightful and talented friend of mine. Both eager to visit with me, and pitying my sad financial state (while I realize I only get better at them, it would be nice to finally win one of those damned essay contests) she offered to buy me a drink and some snacks at Striper's. We went to the 3rd floor, where spirits are served, and I reacquainted myself with my old demon, vodka.<br />When one is in the early stages of inebriation, one doesn't wish the evening, or the feeling to end, as you well know. We retired to Dee's apartment for a delightfully stimulating evening of conversation, fueled by liberal amounts of yet more vodka. Over an 8 hour period, I easily consumed nearly a fifth of Stoli and Smirnoff.<br />I awoke in the callous embrace of suffering, holding me as tightly as any lover invited to one's bed would, and such a generous lover suffering is, selflessly giving and giving. This hangover was arguably a work of art in its magnificence, and like many dedicated artists, I was consumed by that which I had created. The rolling waves of nausea were actually enjoyable for their complete integration with my being, and as well for their sheer perfection. I actually staved off the inevitable as long as I could to remain immersed in such meticulous misery. When at last I could no longer hold back that which demanded to be brought forth, I assumed the position of pious submission in front of that cool, white, impersonal diety, that was stoically eager to receive my offering unto it. It is often said there are no atheists in foxholes. As well there are none is this position either.<br />Akin to surrendering one's will to the will of deity, I was sundered from willful control of my body, and as I made offerings of not just my abandoned digestion, but my dignity as well, an orgasmic, if not religious, feeling washed over me. My muscles locked in waves of spasm that purged my sould as well as my stomach, and from deep within swelled yet more suffering, glorifying in its monstrous elegance, its distilled purity. All pain that went before was mere prologue: this was transcendant pain, that split my skull, and all conceptions I had previously had of suffering, with Truth.<br />With at last the sacrament fulfilled, I was drained, admittedly on many levels, including literally. I, trembling, made my way to a chair, allowing the daylight streaming through the open windows to slice through my eyes like spears of a spiteful god, and rattle like hammers against the back of my skull, shattering all conceptions I possessed of identity into a haze of misery of delicate power, and utter completeness. Like a symphony, each moment would bring notes of exquisite agony from a new point within my body, and I could only admire the intricate balance of subtle suffering, and monumental agony that played counterpoint to each other, a coherent cacophany of pain, with a broad palette of intenisties that shaped my enduring consciousness with deftly overlapped emotional and physical textures: sharp, dull, smooth, silky, plunging, cutting.<br />This was indeed the "Starry Night" of hangovers, an enduring masterpiece that scarred my soul with its magnificence, as all great works in history pierce and scar us. As even the mighty Pyramids shall one day blow away into the desert, so too did this wonder of the world ebb, as all things must to relentless time. Even so, I will enshrine this morning in the museum of my memory, where it will hold a place of honor, that I may again and again revisit, and cherish its power, its beauty, its mystery. Prints are available in the giftshop.OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304960185775033353.post-26729113346060133202009-01-27T20:42:00.008-05:002009-01-27T21:37:41.518-05:00New Feature # 2<div align="left"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;"><strong>Tangent Two-fer Tuesday</strong><br /></span><br />Anytime the subject of blogging comes up between my dearest dear, Gretchen, and I, she’s always after to me to increase my output, which is the epitome of random. In my defense, I have school, and a whole host of google docs I am constantly contributing to. That said, I also waste inordinate amounts of time on Facebook, and read as if I’ll never get to again if I stop, so my defenses are pretty thin. I’m just undisciplined. I have a whole folder of unfinished blogs, because I only write while I have steam, then something shiny twinkles, and off I go, only to return to the blog I started many moons later.<br />Gretchen is, of course, brilliant, (or else I’d be nice to her only because she’s Jon’s wife), and is, of course, one (of two) of the readers who follow my blog, even though I write as if the whole world is reading (one day, muhahahaha!) A good idea is a good idea, no matter where it came from (cupping is NOT a good idea), and she had a good idea. She suggested that I start writing thematically, with inane, yet relevant witticisms alliterating the theme to the day of the week. Ok, why not? I do want to accumulate a body of work to refer to, perhaps publish one day, and the best way to do that is to write. Maybe these theme days will help me focus, finish, and fling my essays to the world.<br />I’ve got one already, Skeptical Sundays, since I’m aiming to establish a career in science, science journalism, and popularizing science. That will rotate between exposing cranks, snake oil, pseudoscience, and downright dishonest people (John Edwards, step to the front of the line), and offing argumentative tips and techniques, all aimed towards improving any reader’s critical thinking skills.<br />Tangent Two-Fer Tuesdays will offer two posts, but that’s about it. They may be related to each other, they may not. They may be long (good odds as I’m a babbler), or short, or lists, or something entirely new. Gretchen’s point is well made, that people like regularity and consistency, else why would TV series stay on for years at a time?<br />People also like regular features, so Tuesdays are a day to try out this or that. Tuesdays are to give me flexibility, and provide readers with variety. I’ll think about more as I get into the habit of posting on these days. </div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;">New Feature to the Features</span>: <span style="font-size:130%;"><strong><em>Random Acts of Quotation</em></strong></span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">"That which doesn't kill fools, needs to be made stronger." Me, 2008<br /><br /><strong>Tangent #1</strong><br /><em><span style="font-size:130%;">Irregular Feature…</span></em><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">Bards and Brainsuckers: Books I’m Reading<br /></span><br />1) <em><span style="font-size:130%;">Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus</span></em>, by Mary Shelly. I’m too poor to acquire nice, leatherbound editions of classics, so I collect collections of mass market, or occasionally Trade paperbacks, of genres I’m interested in. I’m collecting and reading classic science fiction novels, and while Frankenstein isn’t technically quite science fiction, it’s sci-fi enough that I consider it the first sci-fi novel ever written, far predating Verne or Wells. I’ve had this edition for over a year now, and it has lived on the “Shelf of Shame.” This is a shelf dedicated to all the books I should have read. You know, many of the ones you were forced to read in high school and college. Whenever I hit the thrift store (the BEST place to shop for books, but support you local bookstore too!) I inevitably come out with something that has endured, no matter how inexplicable. Frankenstein was written in 1816, which is an era in English literature I just despise. It’s contemporary with Jane Austin, to give you an idea of the kind of language it uses.<br />On the good side: it’s fascinating how NOT like any of the movies it is. It’s also a hoot to read of the affected mannerisms of the period, wherein overindulgence in passionate emotions would make men swoon, and be consigned to convalescence for weeks on end. How pussy is that? On chapter 7 of 24.<br />2) <span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell</em></span>. Published in 2007, it’s a weighty 613 pages (nothing to me), but supposedly a layperson’s guide to economics, bereft of charts and jargon. Sounds good. I’m on the last page of the introduction, and I already approve of the plain, direct style. This should prove informative, without the associated dryness I’ve so far encountered with most texts on economics, but with more meat that pop-economics books (though this book is on it’s 3rd edition in just two years…impressive.)<br />3)<span style="font-size:130%;"> <em>Religion in American Politics: A Short History</em></span>, by Frank Lambert. Uber-timely with a 2008 copyright, this book sates two of my obsessive lusts: history, and my conflicted views on religion. Just a few pages in, and already I’ve slated it as my go-to-bed-yet-stay-up-3-extra-hours book.<br /><br /><strong>Recently finished books:</strong><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>The God Delusion</em></span>, by Richard Dawkins. My second read of this elegant, powerful volume by “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Unlike Sam Harris, who gets brutal in his critique of Christianity, Dawkins is merely blunt, as his point is well made: why does religion deserve and get special treatment when it comes to criticism? Good question, but the real power of this book comes in his simple explanations of scientific principles, especially evolution, graced with beautiful perspective that left me shivering with awe.<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Pushing Ice</em></span>, by Alastair Reynolds. A rising star in science fiction, and currently my favorite genre author, Reynolds skillfully paints a grand canvas of immensity and grandeur, both in space and time, but keeps the focus on the human characters and their relationships. Too few modern authors get that the play is about the people, not the sets.<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Letter to a Christian Nation</em></span>, by Sam Harris. It’s not that I don’t agree with many of Harris’ sentiments, but too often he delivers them with palpable venom. I think it’s both healthy, and essential to call the various Christian sects to task on their hypocrisy when their moral absolutism actually increases human suffering, but Harris ignores the fact that Christians are a spectrum, not an extreme. Point by point he’s often (but not always) on the mark in his criticism, but just as often fails to distinguish particular versions, denominations, and interpretations of Christianity. What could have sounded like a thoughtful dialogue, giving the various churches much-needed food for thought, ends up sounding like a rant, and unfairly lumping all Christians into a uniform mass, completely forgetting that while religious, they’re still people. As an atheist, I think Harris’ approach is completely unproductive.</div><div align="left"></div><div align="left"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><strong>Tangent #2<br /></strong></span><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-family:arial;"><em>Facebooked!</em></span><br /></span><em><span style="font-size:130%;">This is an exercise an old Lost Colony chum tagged me to complete, which I ignored for weeks on end. I finally started looking at what other people were writing about, and realized it’s a terrific exercise in self-reflection. Besides, I had nothing else to write about for #2, so thank Bill Gates for cut and paste.</span></em></div><div align="left"><br />Rules:<br />Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.<br />(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people, then click publish.)</div><div align="left"><br />1) I've an extremely addictive personality. I have yet to successfully quit smoking, have to tear myself away from games lest I turn into a dead husk in front of this computer, and must always keep one eye on my drinking, just for starters.</div><div align="left"><br />2) I've made the bargain with myself to remain on the constructive side of functional, despite the above. Having demons and monkeys at least means never having to sleep alone.</div><div align="left"><br />3) In regards to the above, at least I love animals. Ferrets are by far and away my favorite pets, with dogs and Benders running neck and neck for second.</div><div align="left"><br />4) I am an atheist. To paraphrase Dawkins, every believer is an atheist about all the other religions. I'm no different, I just include yours.</div><div align="left"><br />5) I love to write. I hate to write. I love to write. I hate to write. Gardenfuls of petal-less flowers about that one.</div><div align="left"><br />6) I do not use the word "friend" lightly, certainly not in the frivolous way Facebook uses it.</div><div align="left"><br />7) I love making lists.</div><div align="left"><br />8) I'm terrible at completing them.</div><div align="left"><br />9) I'm somewhat terrified that while I yearn for greatness, I'd likely be contented with comfortable mediocrity.</div><div align="left"><br />10) I am terrible with money. Please see #1.</div><div align="left"><br />11) I have moments of unequivocal intellectual brilliance. I have no idea how to do this consistantly.</div><div align="left"><br />12) I sometimes want to get paid for just being me. Please see # 9</div><div align="left"><br />13) I have hierarchies of love, devotion, obligation, and other emotional aspects associated with other people. Please see # 7</div><div align="left"><br />14) I am often ashamed that I appear to learn how to be a better person by being a complete shit to others. I console myself that at least I do learn.</div><div align="left"><br />15) Every year I suffer fools less and less. These people I am yearly less ashamed about being a total shit to. Please see above.</div><div align="left"><br />16) I could stay in school for the rest of my life, and no pile of shit would satisfy any pig more than I would be satisfied. </div><div align="left"><br />17) I often fail to perceive the difference between due pride and undue arrogance in myself. I rely heavily on my friends to tell me the difference. </div><div align="left"><br />18) In regards to the survival of our species, I'm the most optimistic person I've ever met. </div><div align="left"><br />19) I sometimes debate whether we deserve to, however.</div><div align="left"><br />20) I try very hard not to use the word believe anymore. There's not enough space on here to explain why.</div><div align="left"><br />21) I have experienced no suggestive, much less convincing, evidence of life after death, of any kind. Admitting this has made me acutely aware of the suffering of others. Please see #14 This can be correlated with # 4</div><div align="left"><br />22) I sometimes envy religious people their absolute convictions. It is far, far more difficult to actually think through tough moral and ethical problems on a case-by-case basis.</div><div align="left"><br />23) I do not think any of the world's problems are insolvable. There are, however, far too many people who are intractable, and therein lies the problem.</div><div align="left"><br />24) I don't think we are the only life in the Universe. Regardless, most people believe that we are. I am daily flummoxed that they don't act as if that were the case.</div><div align="left"><br />25) No one's better at being me than I am. I'm daily thankful I got the job.</div>OBXNeilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03947916667921874629noreply@blogger.com1