Open letter to Regina Spektor

Dear Regina,

I hope you don't mind me calling you Regina but as I listen to a fair amount of your music I do feel as though I know you even though you don't know me.

Your song “Laughing with” on the album “far” refers to how people always turn to God in times of crisis. It is a delightfully catchy tune and a little thought provoking. It starts...

No one laughs at God in a hospital

No one laughs at God in a war

No one’s laughing at God

When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God

When the doctor calls after some routine tests

No one’s laughing at God

When it’s gotten real late

And their kid’s not back from the party yet

No one laughs at God

When their airplane start to uncontrollably shake

No one’s laughing at God

When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else

And they hope that they’re mistaken

…

The full lyrics can be found on AZLyrics although you know them off-by-heart I am sure. I write because I think the underlying sentiment is one often heard but seldom rebutted. We are irrational creatures, we grasp at straws when hope fades, we see patterns in pareidolia, and we find cause and effect in coincidences. 

Can I suggest that in the interests of balance the following verses are added?

No one trusts in God when approaching a red light

No one believes in God enough to throw away their armour

No one thinks first responders should cast aside the jaws-of-life 

and be equipped instead with holy verse

No one laughs with God in a Tsunami

No one challenges God when faced with stoning or amputation

No one thinks the airplane can fly only on the wings of prayer

No one is an unbeliever when faced by crusaders

No one turns first to God when an intruder enters their home

No one laughs at science when seeing the ultrasound of tiny beating heart

No one follows God when falling in love for the very first time

No one mocks the laws the physics when crossing the Golden Gate Bridge

No one clamours for the holy book when starving or freezing

unless it is to light a fire 

While I appreciate that the music industry is notoriously dogmatic about copyright enforcement I offer these verses under the Creative Commons License (BY). Thus feel free to use adapt these in any manner you see fit.

I trust you won't find it presumptuous for me to write to you in this manner and hope that you will consider the proposed revision. I accept that I have very little chance of being a songwriter but in this case I have plenty of experience of the subject matter at hand as I am human.

Yours sincerely

Bobby Abraham

Food budgets - an accidental lesson in diet

Nearly two months ago the confluence of two events led me on a journey of  discovery about myself I didn't even know I was embarking on.  These two events included; being asked what I had eaten for breakfast at the start of a course I was attending - I had had nothing but felt it easier to lie to fend off the "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" rejoinder  and the serendipitous introduction of a smart phone calorie counter application in my life.  These two independent events initiated a series of lifestyle changes I wasn't looking for, didn't think I needed yet have had a profound impact on my life.

In a nut shell I have lost 8 kg (17.6lbs) in 8 weeks, cured myself of chronic heartburn and developed an ability to run between 5 to 10 km daily.  This has been encouraged and fostered by measurement and feedback - not unlike how the consumption graph on your car's dashboard encourages more fuel efficient driving.

Let me get something out the way before I begin to explain myself - for much of my life I have typically eaten anything I wanted with the only consideration being cost.  Over the last two years I have moved to the top of my BMI range from somewhere in the middle.  I would have been oblivious to this except that I  had also changed from the 32" waist to a 34" waist.  This all occurs slowly, with stealth and in a manner that leads one to suspect that clothes are shrinking, that clothing manufacturers are changing their designs and sizing templates.  With such naivety I can hardly describe myself as a life coach or nutritionist so feel free to ignore or dismiss my lessons as not applying to your particular circumstances.  I also would not be surprised is my lessons are already outlined in numerous dietary books and self help programs but if so I haven't read them - ironically I am not that interested.

So Lesson one:  "We generally are rubbish at predicting calorie counts for the food we eat"

Using MyFitnessPal I either scanned various products bar codes, or read the nutritional information, to see how accurately I could predict how many calories it contained.  I was rubbish at this - so rubbish that I might as well have just picked a random number.  

So Lesson two:  "Know what your food calorie budget is" 

This is where the accidental lesson began.  I set a target to loose 7kg (13lbs).  I wasn't particularly concerned with how quickly this happened just that it would eventually happen.  Based on a weight loss of 1lbs (0.45Kg) per week I set myself a target of of 1700 calories a day.  Not only had I never before been on any diet of any kind, I had no idea how much food this was. 

So Lesson three:  "Know what many calories are burnt when exercising"

Now if one is typically eating in excess of 2000 calories a day you will be hungry if you cut back.  When living off a financial budget you don't just have to limit what you buy, you can also find ways to earn more.  Equally with calorific budgets - the secret is exercise.  If you want to eat 2300 calories a day then ensure that you exercise for 600 calories.  In my case this equates to 40 minute run.

So Lesson four:  "Weight change is related to calories consumed less calories burned"

We typically perform financial budgets on a monthly basis but food budgets are best done on a daily basis.  The amount you exercise today effects the amount to can eat today.  Using this approach you can increase or decrease your exercise on a daily basis to account for the meal out or drinks you are having after work.

I believe the Atkins and Paleo diets are short sighted for the following reasons:

• They tell you what to eat instead of equipping you with the knowledge needed to modify your lifestyle.
• Saying you must NOT eat some foods but can eat as much as you want of other foods is not sustainable in the long term.  It is like deciding you will save money by only buying "yellow or red" items.  You will save money briefly on some impulse purchases but ultimately you will fold and abandon this crazy, illogical approach to economy.
• Palaeolithic people spent lots of time and effort gathering food and surviving.   They had shorter lives and spent much of their time in an urgent quest for food.
• They are diet fads, followed by purveyors of pseudo science and those who care more to make a quick buck on a diet program than your health.  
• Any diet fad that denies lesson four is a pseudo science.

There is no magic involved in loosing weight - you either eat fewer calories, exercise more or better yet both.  Why waste time and often money on crazy diet plans that are not designed to modify your eating and exercising habits for life?  It is not a healthy strategy to adopt these high protein, low carbohydrate diets over an extended period of time so why adopt them for even a short period of time.   

So Lesson five:  "Eat what you like most and is healthy BUT stay within your calorific budget"

When forced to eat within a caloric limit I became very discerning about what I ate.  Was the fudge brownie ice-cream (260 calories)  preferable to a chocolate fudge cake (270 calories) or indeed a 2 finger Kit-Kat (107 calories).  My choice might change on a daily basis but as I control what I eat I can weigh up pleasure and impact on my limited budget.

So Lesson six: "Eat breakfast"

Over a number of days I noticed that on days that I had larger breakfast I would eat less at lunch time and less in the evening.  For many years I have skipped both lunch and breakfast and then had a large evening meal.  This meal is typically equivalent to all the calories I eat spread over the entire day.   However when you are really, really hungry you don't make rational choices about what you eat and thus eat the easiest and quickest food.  This is usually not conducive to healthy eating.

Since eating breakfast and hence less in the evening I no longer suffer heart burn, a problem that has plagued me for the last couple of  years.  This was sometimes so bad that I would wake up in the night in absolute agony.  I haven't experienced this once in the last 8 weeks.

So Lesson seven: "Abandon foods that can be avoided with only short term discomfort but with long term benefits"

When making financial savings it is better to reduce your ongoing costs instead of once off costs.  Likewise it is better to give up full cream milk or sugar in coffee instead of a rejecting a slice of Xmas cake.  The former choice will save you calories for the rest of your life while the later can be offset by either exercise or another once off food sacrifice - you decide.

Lastly Lesson eight: "Use geeky tools to make it fun - the data doesn't lie"

With smart phones it is easier than ever to monitor what you eat.  It is often as simple as scanning the bar code of the snack or food you have eaten see MyFitnessPal .  It is also easy to automatically log your exercise using applications such as RunKeeper.  This will map your route, distance and calories burned based on the speed, distance and elevation.  Using these tools has been been informative, relatively easy and resulted in me loosing 8 kg (17.6lbs) in 8 weeks that has included Xmas and new year.

The Unintended Consequences of Moving Into the Cloud

One of my new year’s resolutions was to become more virtual and less tangible - both concepts I am afraid I’ll need to explain. For several years I have purchased newspapers several times a week, most recently from the corner store, but for long periods delivered to our door if we could be assured that it would arrive before we left for work. Morning news is old news by the evening.  

We have previously bought music on iTunes, at least until we as a family fell out of love with Apple. We have bought music and books from Amazon, even relying on Amazon prime for cheap and fast physical delivery. We have received two DVDs, and later blu-ray discs, on a weekly basis from LoveFilm and somewhat less frequently when we were busy or the disc selection was, in retrospect a horrible mistake. There were many of these mistakes and they would sit under the TV taunting us to either watch them or admit defeat and return them unwatched.

This has all changed. Some of the changes are good, some bad and some of the consequences are surprising and unintended.

My to-do/resolution list included the following;

1. subscribe to digital editions of newspapers only
2. throw out all my music collection, it was not that big anyway and it was to much work to collate it, music was lost between devices.
3. cancel the dvd/blu-ray by post deal. Those return envelopes drive me crazy.

This list has given rise the following actions:

1. Upgraded the broadband connection from 30Mb to 100Mb - cost £10 more per month
2. Subscribed to Kindle edition of Guardian - cost £9.99 per month - savings of about £19 per month.
3. Upgraded to Spotify Premium - free for six months with broadband upgrade deal - thereafter £9.99.
4. Subscribed to Netflix streaming and cancelled LoveFilm postal subscription - a saving of £2.00 per month.
5. Moved to a cloud backup solution - perpetual backup of new and modified files - no cost, included with the broadband package

A savings of £11 per month.

Although we have been doing this for less than a month it is clear that there are some distinct advantages. Notably Annalise and I each get to read the paper on the kindle and tablet devices as early as we can open our eyes each morning. Reading the "paper" (will the term have any meaning in the future?) on these devices at the breakfast table amongst the coffee, bagels and cereal bowls is much easier as it takes up little space and the cat appears to be less inclined to pounce on it.

The side effects are surprising - I visit the corner store less often - in fact I have yet to visit them this year. There is no negotiation with others for the various sections of the paper. There are thus no impulse purchases resulting in healthier eating and fewer arguments, at least about who gets which section of the paper. I do however feel less connected to the local community as we have previously interacted with the people working in the corner store. Also, in a twisted sense of logic, because our recycling bin is half empty at the end of week it actually feels less green.

Two of our kids have had jobs delivering papers. Is this one job, open to 13 year olds, destined to go they way of the chimney sweep?

The use of Spotify has increased the extent to which we listen to music. We share the account within the family and thus share and exchange play lists. The music no longer resides on individual iPhone, Android or computers but is cloud based and accessible by everyone. We do make offline play-lists an these are downloaded to the device, so that when we are going on car trips or holiday we don’t need to stream music over expensive or non-existent mobile data streams. This whole experience has been extremely successful. The only negative is that the Spotify premium only allows one device on-line and active at a time and this means that when Annalise and I are jogging I usually need to put my phone in "airplane" mode.

The LoveFilm operating model allows for several queues to be managed by different members of the family. While we see movies in the theatre about one or twice a month we add current movies to the LoveFilm queue and then, surprise surprise, they arrive several months later when they are released on DVD. We often received discs we no longer wanted or had seen in the interim. Having two discs in the house meant that these were chosen by at most two people and invariably they were Shrek 2 and Shrek 3, actually this only occurred once after which we banned Sophie from going near the disc queues.  


Worse was when one started the movie and then decided it wasn’t worth continuing we had nothing else to watch. I am a great believer that time is far to precious to waste watching a poor movie. So how does changing to a “watch instantly” model alter the dynamics? For one there is less to watch. Netflix doesn't have my favourite movie “Amelie” nor many others. It does has lots to watch though and one chooses them as you sit down to watch with everyone present. This is much more democratic and spontaneous. It is also cheaper and better yet we share it with Emily while she is at University. It also streams to our phones, tablets, computers and of course the TV. We get less post and we never visit the post box any more. Of course this is Royal Mail's loss.

I have been struck by the implications for society if everyone were to do what we have done. The postal service would carry less post and the postman visit us less. Corner stores would do less business and may well go out of business. We would see less of others in our street. I should note that we always do our grocery shopping on line and it is very seldom that we visit a physical supermarket.

We have a wall in the lounge devoted to books, we love books. However the reading experience of electronic books on the kindle is very good and in some way preferable to a physical book. But what about the book shelves? Are they destined to carry books from a special era seen as quaint by future generations?


We are not throwing out the paper books and in fact over Christmas we gave each other more paper books than e-books but the tide is turning and we are spending less and less on paper and more money on e-books. It worries me that these books in kindle format and they are propriety and non-transferable though. Again each e-book purchased is one less parcel delivered through the post.


Is it inevitable that we while becoming more connected with people on the virtual world we will become less connected with those within our physical community?

O2 Wifi Hotspot Insanity

I have been frustrated on each occasion over the last three months that I have visited a public wifi hotspot. Frustrated because while I have been paying O2 for wifi access it hasn't worked ever since I upgraded my iPhone for an Android HTC Desire (see the backstory).

More generally my problems have been, the inability to "merge" two or more calls into a single conference and more significantly an error message each time I attempted to access to a BT Openzone hotspot or a Cloud hotspot.

I have had a complaint with O2 for many weeks and have provided details to numerous people but received little help.

A few weeks ago I did resolve the merge call problem. The solution to this is that O2 only provide this on their iPhone tariff. Changing back to the iPhone tariff, from a same priced smartphone tariff, resolved this immediately. They don't admit this anywhere but this was the only change required. Suffice to say that an iPhone is not required but the standard iPhone "bolt on" tariff includes the merge call feature and other tariffs do not. No-one I ever spoke to at O2 understands this. Hopefully this will save some-one else some grief.

Regarding the wifi access, my fix is to change the the user agent string so that the browser reports itself as an iPhone.

The default user agent reports

"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; HTC Desire Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"

This clearly identifies the phone as an Android HTC Desire. Changing the user agent string to the same as the iPhone gives

"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16"

This can be trivially changed under Android Froyo version by typing in "about:debug" in the location bar of the stock browser and then selecting menu -> Settings -> UAString and then selecting iPhone.

This works for both the Cloud and BT Openzone hotspots. This is only required to register the device for the first time. Thereafter the MAC address is recorded and access is automatically granted to future connections. This problem has cost me many hours of phone calls and numerous cups of coffee in various hotspots to resolve. It is good that the solution is so simple but annoying that O2 themselves were never able to resolve it.

Using the iPhone user agent string is likely to be only appropriate for customers on the iPhone tariff but I believe that O2 checks for only a small, exact, set of user agent strings during the hotspot registration process. Thus if you get an error across all hotspots then it may be that the user agent reported is not one that O2 is looking for. This is a system that is so brittle and error prone that they should at least have the appropriate logging in place to diagnose these problems but alas they don't.

I hope this helps someone avoid some of the frustration I went through.

update - 4 Nov 2010

O2 has offered a £30 goodwill credit for my trouble.

On Book Burning and a World Gone Mad

The on-off plan to burn a bunch of copies of the Koran on 9/11 by members of the misnamed "Dove World Outreach Center" led by pastor Terry Jones has sparked almost universal condemnation.

The act is provocative, arrogant and naive and I have little respect for the right wing, religious fanatics behind this. Various responses have been proposed for dealing with this act and the inevitable backlash including; banning it, stopping media coverage of it and protesting against it.

What I don't understand is this medieval belief that burning any book can somehow threaten any religion. Books contains ideas and a narrative that cannot be destroyed by burning a copy. Burning copies of the Koran, the Bible, the Talmud or Darwin's Origin of the Species can only have a impact when people are denied or prevented from studying these texts for themselves. Clearly this is not the case here.

Imagine a very different response to the current crisis, one occurring in a parallel universe. One in which Bibles, the Talmud and other "sacred" texts are all burnt alongside the Koran. The burning ceases to be a sectarian act and becomes as impotent as the burning of the catholic Guy Fawkes on the 5th November each year. The burning of a book is so much less a sanction than the Fatwā issued against Salman Rushdie and others and should thus be preferable.

So while tolerance should be encouraged let's not lose sight of what matters and what should not matter. Material possessions, including books, can be replaced. Religious hatred, a willingness and eagerness to take offence and spoiling for a fight do no favours to society. These small minded people must have a god or many gods with very insecure egos. They must lack faith that the ideas and ideals contained within the pages of these books are strong enough to survive not just modern scrutiny but even the incineration of a minuscule number of books.

We don't view it as a national outrage when a copy of the Oxford dictionary or a French dictionary are burnt. In fact I can't recall a public case of such dictionary burning occurring because such an act is futile. If it were not then Al-Qaeda would be focused on the printing and subsequent burning of copies of the American Heritage Dictionary as the easiest way to bring about the collapse of the Great Satan.

Live and let live, read as much as possible, as widely as possible but don't be offended if someone, somewhere burns a copy of your favourite book.

Now where is my copy of the iPhone developers guide and a box of matches ....

Apple I{Pad/Pod/Phone}

So today Apple announced that 8.75 million iPhones were sold in the last quarter since the start of the year. This is around 95 000 each day. The iTunes market place for applications has grown making it the largest platform for smart phone applications and I have a habit of checking, or stroking, my iPhone several times an hours during the day. From Twitter feeds and FB to news, weather, SMS and email it seems difficult to remember an existence untethered from the internet. So what is the problem? Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Well maybe, except that confidence breeds arrogance and contempt and us customers are fickle creatures. On Thursday 25 March I tweeted the following -

"Have fallen out of love with my iPhone, this happened on Tuesday but I've been in denial since. Will keep it next while for sake of children"

followed by

"It is it's lack of multi-tasking, inflexibility and I lust after and android phone. Curses on google and their evil plot to rule the world."

and

"OMG just realised how insensitive it is to breakup via twitter/fb and from the handset in question. Sometimes I can be a real jerk."

Ignore the inappropriate apostrophe and focus on the content. The phone that did everything I wanted had, over the course of 12 months, begun to grate. Just as the missing toothpaste lid begins to sour a relationship the following began to niggle at me:

1. The Lack of Multi-tasking. This prevented the download of news feeds in the background, the streaming of music while tweeting, the ability to map my bike rides or runs while taking a picture.
2. The need to have a mac in-order to develop applications for the platform. In this day of multi-platform development, to limit to development tools to a single development platform might make marketing sense for Apple but it is just not cool.
3. The Google Android OS was released on the HTC Hero, Desire, Legend and Nexus One phones, along with several other models from Motorola, Samsung and others.
4. The Android OS is open-source, multitasking and exposes much more of the phone functionality to the developer. While Apple is creating a walled garden Google is sowing wild flowers that are starting to bloom.

There is reason to believe that Apple is worried. At the same time as Steve Jobs announced the iPhone OS 4.0 upgrade Apple also made a change to their developer agreement that controls 3rd party development of applications for the iTunes marketplace. This change enforces the constraint that applications must be developed using the tools developed by Apple - the same ones that only run on the mac. This is very unusual in that typically a software company will simply publish "look & feel" constraints and APIs that must be used and satisfied but this is much more controlling and I can't think of a precedent. Almost, but not quite unlike, dictating that your novel must be written with a HB pencil.

So why would they do this? One reason is that it kills a large piece of Adobe's business of producing applications that run across various platforms including the iPhone. There appears to be no love lost between Apple and Adobe and this supposes a school ground squabble between a bully and slightly weird kid that has spiralled out of control.

I believe a more significant reason is that this precludes the porting of applications developed for the Android to the iPhone and iPad. Given that the Android is an open platform it is much more tempting for developers to target this platform. Especially if they can port their applications to the iPhone and its many millions of users.

Will this work? Well according to Eric Schmidt, Google partners are shipping 60 000 phones a day and with new Android phones being released each month this is likely to increase. The hardware specifications of the new Android phones exceed to the specifications of the iPhone and with the intense competition there is likely to always be at least one manufacturer bringing out a new model ahead of Apple's one a year release date.

GetCliky gives provides some trend data for mobile operating systems. Although this varies from country to country.

I still have my iPhone, but I am developing for Android and conducting serial adultery with several Android phones before easing into stable, long-term relationship.

42

42 is the "the answer to life the universe and everything", the atomic number of molybdenum, the angle in degrees for which a rainbow appears, the number of minutes taken to fall through the earth. It is found repeated 3 times at place 242,422 in pi.

This is the first day of the next week of my life and each will be spent dwelling on the significance, the wonder and doom associated with the the number 42. Now, despite the sunshine, the quiet house, the fresh day, the week long holiday taken in anticipation of this event I kind of prefer the number 41.

Ten23 the outcome

Three weeks ago Annalise and I downed an entire bottle of homeopathic Belladonna and Arsenic as part of a nationwide stunt to expose homeopathy for the quackery that it is. Today two things happened - coincidence? I think not.

• Firstly, the House of Commons select committee on science and technology released their report into Homeopathy and it was scathing. They advised on the closing of homeopathy hospitals and against the funding for any more more research into homeopathy.
• Secondly the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) issued guidance that there is "no scientific or pharmacological basis for homeopathy".

I believe most users of homeopathy users its practioners mean well and many sincerely believe that homeopathy has worked for them but we humans are deluded creatures and see cause and effect when there are none. This is where science and random, controlled trials are used to measure objectively the efficacy of treatments.

There are also those who advocate homeopathy for the treatment of AIDS, malaria, cancer and other serious conditions - these people are at best naive and at worst evil.

Today was a small victory for science against 18th century superstition but it could be made all the sweeter if only the accusations of being in the pay of "Big Pharma" were true - I could do with the money.

The full report can be read here

Homeopathy and the 10:23 Campaign

On January 30th, 2010, at exactly 10:23am, large groups of skeptics will gather in the town centres of around a dozen cities in the UK and consume a full bottle of homeopathic pills, in order to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathy. Marsh explains why…

Homeopathy in the UK is alarmingly pervasive – setting aside the fact that the industry is worth an estimated £40million per year, the National Health Service actually plows £4million per year of taxpayers’ money into providing sugar pills as a Complementary Alternative Medicine – much of which goes into the upkeep of the four government-run homeopathic hospitals. That figure doesn’t even take into account the £20 million spent on the redevelopment of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. According to the British Homeopathy Association, more than 400 GPs regularly refer patients to homeopaths. Homeopathy is everywhere. And then we have the UK’s leading pharmacy, Boots…

Boots are as much a British national institution as the Royal family, the BBC and the sense of quiet superiority over our former colonies. Yet this well-respected and trusted organisation lends its well-earned reputation to quackery in the sale of homeopathic remedies (including it’s own-brand range) alongside real medicine. What’s more, their decision to stock these sugar pills is compounded by the fact that they have no real belief in their effectiveness, as became clear in the laugh-a-minute evidence check session, where Boots’ Professional Stand-up Com… sorry, Professional Standards Director Paul Bennett admitted the company’s policy of selling homeopathic remedies was based not on a belief that they work, but in a belief that they sell, and sell well. And that’s before we even take a look inside the Pandora’s box that is the Boots Learning Store – Alternative Medicine module (sample statement: ‘Foxglove (Digitalis) extract is used in the treatment of heart failure’).

Fortunately, homeopathy hasn’t been without its detractors and skeptical voices here in the UK – with David Colquhoun, Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst, James Randi (of course) and a whole range of other science writers and bloggers confronting homeopathy with sanity. Still, it’s not the science writers who have had the most success in getting information to the public of late – while having real science to hand is essential in helping dispense with the pseudoscience, it’s perhaps been the contributions of comedians and satirists that have had most success in spreading real information to the man on the street. For every Edzard Ernst picking apart the latest meta-analysis, we need a Dara Ó Briain telling the world ‘It’s just fecking water’; for every Quackometer showing where regulation is failing to keep homeopathy in check, we need a Mitchell & Webb to show us how ludicrous homeopathic healthcare actually is; for every Tim Farley answering the question ‘What’s The Harm?‘, we need a Tim Minchin asking the question ‘if water can remember a long lost drop of onion juice, how come it forgets all the poo it’s had in it?’ (the best answer to this, by the way, came from a satirist who claimed it was due to succussion: ‘As you beat the memory into the water, you beat the shit out of it’).

In short, the fight to raise awareness of homeopathy is best fought when everyone can bring what they have to the table, whether they’re ‘experts’ or otherwise. And this, essentially, was the inspiration behind the 10:23 campaign.

At the Merseyside Skeptics Society, we took inspiration from the success of the Australian Skeptics campaigning against ear candles via the publishing of an open letter, stealing the idea outright to pen An Open Letter To Alliance Boots appealing to them to remove homeopathic remedies from their shelves. From there, the 10:23 campaign grew – a website was launched with the aim to have a resource where people can go for basic information on homeopathy in simple, accessible English.

The goals of the 10:23 campaign are equally simple and accessible – to help raise awareness of what homeopathy is (and what it very much isn’t); to give individual writers and bloggers a banner and brand name to use when doing their day-to-day homeopathy-debunking, helping make their work easier to find and promote (do a quick search for #ten23 on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean); and to promote critical thinking to a wider audience.

As the campaign’s progressed, two questions have come up time and time again, and it’s probably a good idea to answer them now: ‘What’s next for the 10:23 campaign?’ and ‘Why is it called the 10:23 campaign anyway?’ I’ll answer the latter first… Yes, it is partly to do with the Avogadro constant. There are those that may think using this as the name for the campaign is something of an exclusive, scientific in-joke that would put off the non-science-savvy – here, I must disagree. Instead I believe it gives an opportunity to talk about the levels of dilution involved in homeopathy, and what effect they have on the ingredients of the sugar pills. What’s more, there’s more to the name than simply Avogadro, which leads me to the second questions…

On January 30th, 2010, at exactly 10:23am, large groups of skeptics will gather in the town centres of around a dozen cities in the UK and consume a full bottle of homeopathic pills, in order to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of homeopathy. Similar events will be taking place in the US, Canada and Australia. While the scientific evidence is there for people to find, we’re hoping this very public demonstration will help give people the motivation to go look for it.

Contact your nearest Skeptics in the Pub group for information about how to get involved. Organisers of local skeptical groups can email contact@1023.org.uk for more information. See you on January 30th!

Cornwall trip

There are few things as alluring as high cliffs and the Cornwall coast has some fine specimens. This year, for Christmas, we hired a cottage within comfortable walking distance of sea cliffs. We knew it would be cold but, ensconced within an old cottage, with log fire the weather was entirely enjoyable.

Within the ruins of a castle on the Tintagel Headland. This was captioned "family, ruins, rainbow" but Stephen pointed out that with a quick scan, ignoring the punctuation, it parsed badly.

The weather was conducive to rainbows - where ever we looked one would be arcing across the sky.

Ah - a respectable cliff, if it can't kill you then it is not a cliff ...

On Christmas eve we released as batch of 10 Chinese Laterns from the cliff edge, the conditions were perfect and the floated upwards looking not unlike a distress flare. Fortunately we had alerted the coast guard before hand.

Upwards until they flickered out and returned to earth.

A most enjoyable trip. It has been a rather hectic year, work wise, and thus we travelled less this year than we have for a long time. Resolution for 2010 - "work life balance, work life balance, work life balance ....."

Alternate Nostril Breathing

During an episode of QI last week Stephen Fry brought up alternate nostril breathing. Supposedly, breathing in through one nostril sends oxygen to one brain hemisphere and through the other to the other brain hemisphere. This is "demonstrable" by checking for improved cognitive function related to each of the two hemispheres.

I just spent five minutes trying to kill off my left hemisphere, through oxygen deprivation, by blocking a nostril - no luck. Don't both nostrils send air to the lungs in equal amount?

The yoga literature seems awash with breathing exercises for alternate nostril breathing. For example http://bit.ly/81L2XC describes right nostril breathing as "to increase the Pranic energy , the physical energy, to revitalize the body. It increases the efficiency of digestive system, also boosts the nervous system." This is a slightly different claim from the idea that alternate nostril breathing can enhance brain function in one the two hemispheres.

Am I missing something or is this totally rubbish? I did find two studies on this subject done by the Yoga institute, neither of which appear to have controlled for the placebo effect.

Any test that compared cognitive function during left and right nostril breathing would have to:

1. Ensure that subjects weren't influenced by the "expected" better spatial reasoning associated with one hemisphere or the better verbal function of the other 
2. Ensure that the mental gymnastics required to breathe only though a single nostril was not affecting cognitive ability (ie. holding it closed with a left or right hand or closing one nostril without the use of the hands).
3. Postulate a possible, plausible causative effect such as oxygen absorption directly into the brain from the back of nose.

Is there any reliable evidence to support, what appears to be an absurd claim, that breathing though a single nostril has any benefit over breathing through both at the same time?

Wierd spam

Anonymous left the following the comment on the blog entry below

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Being fluent in Chinese (actually I used Google translate) this translates to

"Aid friends message, video chat rooms, adult mapping station, erotic video, erotic forum, beautiful pictures, 080 video chat rooms, are sister wall qk176, 18sxe adult Studios, 080 video chat rooms, free dating and sexuality at a piece, Taiwan adult network, erotic a film, chat friends, Taiwan Sex, Valentine's mapping, office workers chat rooms f1, adult network, are sister friends, adult video chat rooms Changhua, Taiwan situation Color network, free chat, beautiful friends, and G-string beauty photo, erotica, free video chat rooms, 777 adult area, IMs as text chat rooms, 0401 video sex, free porn videos, adult video, free video, is Mei wall self-timer, ut chat room, free video, free video g, forces of eight adult chat rooms ut,"

The question is why?

Usually this would have two functions:

1) Increase the number of search terms that would result in the page appearing.

2) Increase the chance of the page being classified as "dubious"

This still doesn't answer why anyone would either want alter the number of hits the page gets. Of course by including the comment text here - in English and Chinese I must have tripled the impact.

Follow up: Google finds at least 500 other blog comments with the same spam.

Keeping the faith in vitamin c

Recently Annalise brought home some vitamin c solvable tables from college. These were handled out with the intent to help protect the staff from colds.

Linus Pauling's made the claim in 1970 that taking large doses could both protect against colds and reduce their severity. The direct benefits of vitamin c supplements for this purpose have long since been discredited however the credibility of the Nobel Prize winning Linus Pauling has meant that this myth has largely persisted 40 years later.

Numerous controlled studies have shown that that those taking a placebo have feared no worse that those taking vitamin c supplements with regards the common cold. Despite the fact that there is so much evidence against vitamin c why does the false promise of efficacy still persist? There is large industry that makes a great deal of money out of vitamin c and it is in their interests to maintain the link between vitamin c supplements and healthy living.

I suspect that there is placebo effect at the college that may work to it's benefit. Those believing in the efficacy of the vitamin c and taking the tablets may be less likely to "give in" to cold symptoms and stay at home than those not taking the tablets, even though both groups suffer equally.

Even so, isn't it time we focuses on scientific methods of prevention like hand washing and general hygiene rather than advocating quack remedies like vitamin c.

IPhone catastrophe

Last night, while reaching for my tooth-brush my IPhone slid from my jacket pocket. It fell, bouncing off the toilet seat, swirled twice around the toilet bowl before settling beneath the water. It sat there glowing as though trying to hang onto life for as long as it took for me to draw a breath, scream and yank it out.

My immediate impulse was to switch it off but the off button had no effect. Slowly but surely my beloved phone lost more and more functionality. First the touch screen failed, followed by the volume buttons, wifi, and then 3G until finally it started a repeated cycle of rebooting. The battery, that a few minutes previously showed as requiring a recharge, now showed as half charged - a sure sign of a major cognitive malfunction.

It sucks to have waived the extra insurance. The phone is now incubating in a bowl of rice in the airing cupboard. If not dead, it is certainly comatose. I am resisting the urge to charge it in order to check on its cognitive function as I fear that this would precipitate a terminal short.

Here's the dilemma - Apple will replace it with re-furbished one for £146 - ouch! But as there is a postal strike now this requires a trip to the Apple store.

Usually this is a straight forward task but how is this possible without a working IPhone? Without the ability to check train schedules and departure platforms on the move, without the ability to plot optimal tube routes based on current tube delays, without the ability to access google maps and get route directions from the station to the store, without the ability listen to a podcast on the 75 minute trip, without the ability to call and text to summon up loved ones, to snap a picture of a quirky scene, to twitter or facebook my movements, to read and send email and browse breaking news stories or even to perform a Doppler frequency analysis of the noise of a passing train to determine the combined speeds...

No, venturing to the apple store without an IPhone would be like returning to a Victorian England with printed train timetables, asking directions, making conversation with a fellow travellers and being oblivious of all that occurs over the horizon until it is recorded on dead trees.

Pity the Victorians - how did they cope? I need to check on that that phone .....

Happy, happy timeshifted birthday eve

Tis the eve of my timeshifted birthday.  Plans have been laid, presents perhaps bought and wrapped.

Plans include; an early morning alarm, perhaps 5am because birthdays are precious and should be maximised, a sumptious breakfast, presents, rollercoasters, lunch, rollercoasters, play with presents, evening drinks followed by 9:30pm romantic dinner date, play with presents and then wind down the day in preparation for the birthday boxing day.

Why timeshifted? Because my tentative travel date to India is the day before my biological birthday and a birthday without family and presents and food isn't really a birthday at all.

January Freeze

Some pictures from an early morning bike ride today

Most people seemed to belive we were taking our lives in our hands by walking on this pond. It seemed solid and a could have been 20cm thick so I think it was safe, anyway to quote a favourite saying "nothing ventured - stay safe and boring". 

The rest of the pictures can be found by clicking on the picture below.

I am not sure if I'll be able to get any aerial photography this afternoon - the camera battery doesn't cope well with temperatures this cold.

Fire, Fire! Laptop computer catches fire

Stephen unplugged his laptop charger to bring it down stairs for Annalise to use. When he returned to his room 20 seconds later he heard a pop and a fizzing sound. When he opened the door smoke was coming from the computer sitting on the corner of his bed and this had filled the room.

When I got there 5 seconds later it was well on fire and the flames were about 30cm high as was the bedding. I grabbed it by the corner and carried it outside to the driveway. There it burnt until we poured a bowl of water over it. The bed also required water thrown over it and then a wet towel thrown over the mattress. The smoke was horrible. One of the battery cells had fallen out of computer and we scraped this into a bowl of water before taking this outside.






I called PC World's The Tech Guys to report the fire, We have two other laptops of the same make. This is a E Systems 4213 laptop. All three were bought 8 Dec 2007 making them exactly one month out of their 12 month warranty period. They refused to cover it, assess the safety of the other two computers or have anything to do with the incident.



Shame on you PC World. It is one thing for a device to stop working outside of its warranty period but quite another for it to self destruct by bursting into flame. We are very lucky that we were not asleep or out at the time. Oddly while our smoke detectors go off frequently due to burning toast or bacon they were never triggered by the battery smoke.

A video collage of the last week

Places my camera has been over the last week.

Subway madness

I occasionally walk down the high street at lunch time from work to the Subway where I purchase a 6" veggie delight sub for £2.00. Today I was dismayed to discover I had left my wallet at home and was reduced to scraping change from the bottom of my bag.

They know me because I always ask for olives and jalapenos and jalapenos and jalapenos with a few extra jalapenos. Only I say "Halepenos" and they say "Jalapenos". It is a constant sparing struggle and neither I nor this otherwise fine institution are prepared to concede defeat.

Well today, being of limited means, after purchasing a 80p Guardian newspaper instead of a 90p Times I noticed a limited period "Meal Deal" at Subway. This is a 6" sub (the picture shows meat on it) with a cookie and drink for £2.49. This suits me as I only had £2.55 and could get a drink and cookie for only 49p more than I usually pay.

I order this deal but decline the ham and just have the cheese and olives and jalapenos and jalapenos and jalapenos with a few extra jalapenos, as is my want. But when I come to pay they don't want to give me the drink and cookie because I didn't order the ham. When I point out the I did NOT order my usual "Veggie Delight" but the "Special limited time only Meal Deal" and just declined the ham they were incredulous. It would have been no problem it they had put ham on my sandwich and I had scrapped it off and tossed it away but ......

I prevailed but "only this once because i am a regular customer". To bad that tomorrow I will be at my other office and won't be able to try this again - nothing like a crusade against stupidity!

Baño del Papa, El

We went to see a screening of Baño del Papa, El tonight.

This was a brilliant movie. It was beautifully set between Uruguay and Brazil and deals with the impact, or lack thereof, of the Pope's visit there in 1988.

I can recommend it.

Trailer here but without english subtitles.