Month: September 2006

Stepping Carelessly Astern of the Cow

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I ran across this and this today: yet another reason why everyone ought to be educated to competence in the basics of biology, physics and chemistry.

From the cited press release in the first link:

For the first time since Product Licences of Right were issued in 1971, companies will be allowed to include information about the treatment and relief of minor, self-limiting conditions based on the use of the product within the homeopathic tradition. For example, labels may indicate that a product may relieve the symptoms of common colds and coughs, hay fever or chilblains. All homeopathic medicines authorised under the new scheme will have clear and comprehensive patient information leaflets to help consumers use their medicines safely and effectively.

Professor Kent Woods, Chief Executive of the MHRA, said, �This is a significant step forward in the way homeopathic medicines are regulated. Products authorised under the National Rules Scheme will have to comply with recognised standards of quality, safety and patient information.�

The only patient information that ought to be included is: “This crap does not work. Do the math”. Sometimes I think that the entire UK is just slowly circling the drain.

When I was a graduate student working on a project involving colloids, I ran across some seriously strange alternative medicines based on “colloids“. I ran across the infinite dilution concept in homeopathy at the same time, and it came up again when I was doing the piece on Emoto, people who are inclined to believe that water has emotions are also inclined to believe that a medicine becomes stronger when diluted to Avogadran proportions. This, Ladies and Gents, leads me to my personal quote of the day, from Skepchik:

Would you sit in a bathtub someone just peed in? Would you swim in an ocean that someone just peed in? There�s a difference, and if you can�t tell that difference then you deserve to spend your life sitting in a tub of pee.

Bureaucratic Peace, Pragmatic Peace

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“Countdown to Genocide” by J. Peter Pham & Michael I. Krauss describes a situation that strains our sympathies:

Sudan seems intent on accelerating the massacre in Darfur: the government has actually proposed that the African Union troops depart when their mandate expires, to be replaced by 10,000 troops from the same Sudanese army that created the Janjaweed in the first place. Thus is set in place the most massive calculated campaign of slaughter, rape, and displacement since the Rwandan genocide (a slaughter that itself could have been mitigated had the then-head of UN peacekeeping, one Kofi Annan, not hamstrung General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the blue helmets in the benighted Central African country). By best estimates, at least 250,000 men, women, and children have already been killed in Darfur. At least another 2.5 million people whose homes have been destroyed have taken shelter in miserable camps partially under the watch of the African Union military that will be withdrawing.

A new biography The Man Who Fed the World is reviewed by: Ronald Bailey in WSJ. The now-92-year-old

remains a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and president of a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. He believes that biotechnology will be crucial to boosting world food supplies in the coming decades and decries the underfunding of the world’s network of nonprofit agricultural research centers.

He also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. “Activists have resisted research,” he notes, “and governments have overregulated it.” They both miss the point. “Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is.”

Okay – is it ever possible to beat Insta? I started this, taught a class & when I got back he had both up. Does anyone else sometimes suspect that he’s cloned himself?

VD Hanson — A War Like No Other

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Hanson, Victor D., A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, Random House, 2005, 397pp.

Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War,” written almost 2500 years ago, still sells roughly 50,000 copies a year in English translation. Why? From a literary perspective, as the first true example of historical narrative recorded in the Western world, the book clearly deserves pride of place in importance and general interest for classical or literary scholars. As an account of thirty years of catastrophic war between democratic urban Athens and oligarchic rural Sparta (431 – 404 BCE), it has more than its share of drama, intrigue, anachronism, and tragedy for any general reader. But why should the war itself have been become a metaphor for republican and democratic hubris for the last several centuries? Why is it still the subject of heated discussion even in our current era? And why should this tale of agrarian Greeks butchering each other so long ago have been required reading for generals and diplomats since the Renaissance?

Read more

Rethinking Election Pessimism

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Larry Kudlow suggests that there is reason for some optimism:

As pessimistic as I have become about Republican chances to keep the House, there may yet be hope. Front-page stories yesterday in the Washington Post and today in the New York Times essentially predict significant GOP losses and a growing likelihood that the Dems will finally capture the lower chamber for the first time since 1994. The reason I’m starting to rethink my pessimism is simply that the mainstream media always gets it wrong. As soon as they start ganging up on the GOP on the front pages, the likelihood becomes greater that the tide may be turning the other way.

I sure hope so. I don’t read Tradesports’ Republican House reelection odds as positively as Larry does. OTOH, I think that he is probably right about the MSM as a contrary indicator. My hunch is that the Tradesports number is too low, either because the market is being manipulated or because the only info the market has to go on comes from recent polls, which I suspect are not accurate. Only time will tell who’s right, of course, and I could be way off in my hunches.

Despite the Tradesports ambiguity, Larry’s post is a great rejoinder to Republicans’ gloom about the coming election and is worth reading in full.

UPDATE (Sept. 8): See Lex’s comments below, and also this post in which he and I continue to debate this issue.