Europe starting to realize homeopathy is nonsense

From Der Spiegel:

ScreenHunter_01 Jul. 23 12.37 For months now, a bitter battle has been taking shape in Great Britain between defenders of homeopathy, who are supported by no less than Prince Charles, and detractors who point to the lack of scientific evidence that the remedies offer anything more than a placebo effect. The royal family themselves have been adherents to homeopathy for generations and even Queen Elizabeth is given homeopathic remedies. After the war, her father King George VI even saw to it that Britain's National Health Service (NHS), the country's subsidized healthcare system, picked up the tab for homeopathic treatments.

Homeopathy is based on two fundamental ideas that skeptics like Singh can only shake their heads at. The first is the idea of the law of similars. The inventors of homeopathy believe that the cause of a symptom should also be treated with the cause. When treating someone, a homeopath considers which substance would cause the same symptoms in a healthy person. Arsenicum album, for example, which the activists in the campaign tried to overdose on, should in theory cause restlessness and nausea in a healthy person. But in an ill person, it is supposed to heal exactly these symptoms. If a patient has a fever, then a homeopath will look for a substance than can cause a fever in a healthy person.

The second principle is that of dilution: The more a medical ingredient is diluted and shaken, the stronger its effect will be — at least that's the assumption. But most homeopathic substances are so strongly diluted that molecules of the active ingredient can no longer be traced. Homeopaths still believe in the effects because they are convinced the water has a “memory.” Scientific proof for the claim is wanting.

More here.



Beware those Black Swans

The bestselling economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we can’t make the world financial system immune to shocks –– but we can make sure it’s much more robust by building randomness into our planning.

Nassim Nicholas Talib in The New Statesman:

20100630_2010+26swan_w Let me summarise my ideas of how Mother Nature deals with the Black Swan. First, she likes redundancies. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of company executives) – and each has more capacity than is needed ordinarily. So redundan­cy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintain­ing these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness.

The exact opposite of redundancy is naive optimisation. The reason I tell people to avoid attending an (orthodox) economics class and argue that economics will fail us is the following: economics is largely based on notions of naive optimisation, mathematised (poorly) by Paul Samuelson – and these mathematics have contributed massively to the construction of an error-prone society. An economist would find it inefficient to carry two lungs and two kidneys – consider the costs involved in transporting these heavy items across the savannah. Such optimisation would, eventually, kill you, after the first accident, the first “outlier”. Also, consider that if we gave Mother Nature to economists, it would dispense with individual kidneys – since we do not need them all the time, it would be more “efficient” if we sold ours and used a central kidney on a time-share basis. You could also lend your eyes at night, since you do not need them to dream.

Almost every major idea in conventional economics fails under the modification of some assumption, or what is called “perturbation”, where you change one parameter or take a parameter henceforth assumed to be fixed and stable by the theory, and make it random.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Altaf.]

long shadow of the confederacy

CSA_Map_-_cropped5

The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth has come and gone, and with it a flood of books about the sixteenth president. But the sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising its own deluge of books of every size, shape and description. We will be fortunate indeed if in sheer originality and insight they measure up to Confederate Reckoning and The Long Shadow of the Civil War, new works by Stephanie McCurry and Victoria Bynum, respectively, on the Confederate experience. Most scholarly history on the Confederacy has been shaped, implicitly or explicitly, by a desire to explain Southern defeat. Devotees of the Lost Cause insist that gallant Southern soldiers inevitably succumbed to the Union’s overwhelming advantages in manpower and economic resources. The stronger side, however, does not always win a war, as the United States learned in Vietnam. This fact has led historians to try to locate internal causes for the failure of the quest for Southern independence. They have identified such culprits as poor political leadership, excessive individualism, desertion from the army by non-slaveholding soldiers, waning enthusiasm for the war among upper-class white women and disaffection among the slaves.

more from Eric Foner at The Nation here.

dead tolstoy

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William Nickell describes the death drama itself as Russia’s first great mass media event. The room in the stationmaster’s house in Astapovo where the dying Tolstoy was lodged was the eye of a news hurricane. A horde of reporters elbowing their way through crowds of onlookers sent out their despatches in thousands of telegrams to hundreds of newspapers, some of which gave over half their editorial space to a kind of frozen proto-blog. ‘Please delete that Tolstoy ate two eggs, incorrect: drank only milk tea,’ one telegram reads. The cameras were there, and the cinematograph. You can see Tolstoy on YouTube. The essential modern corollary of a media feeding frenzy, the self-flagellating analysis by the media of its own actions, was rampant, as reporters masochistically savoured the irony that they were trying to grab and sell a piece of the great anti-materialist. ‘We’re shams!’ wailed Sergei Yablonovsky, correspondent of the Voronezh Telegraph. ‘With counterfeit bodies, counterfeit souls.’ The result of the public scrutiny of Tolstoy’s death was that all those closest to him at the end, even those he bumped into by chance, came out with their own versions of events. Six doctors kept separate medical records of his last days. Government spies sent secret reports back to St Petersburg. Before Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana, he was one of eight people keeping supposedly private diaries of life there. Dushan Makovitsky, Tolstoy’s personal physician, was a doctor and a diarist.

more from James Meek at the LRB here.

toxic emanations

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It soon becomes evident that there are only a few protagonists in Maldoror’s grisly recitals, and that the chief one is none other than Maldoror, identical with the narrator himself. A few minor characters, with names such as Lohengrin or Lombano, flit past as occasional partners in crime; and there is an ample provision of nameless innocents, the victims of Maldoror’s tireless intentions. The one protagonist who might be expected to resist this paragon of evil is the Creator himself, but Maldoror has no truck with divine privilege, and sees off the deity in a stanza (strophe) steeped in blasphemous fantasy, in which the “Celestial Bandit” is depicted as a drunken debauchee shuffling away after a night at the brothel. Rather than simply suborn us through glamorous evocations of criminal pleasures, the deeper purpose of Les Chants de Maldoror is to sabotage the central clauses of the writer–reader contract, if not the protocols of literature at large. As a corpus of highly self-conscious prose cantos, Ducasse’s text is not only a compendium of boasts and blasphemies: it is constantly sharpening itself as it advances, providing a succession of ironic disclaimers that entirely wrong-foot its reader. Some will scoff and shrug off the book as a laughable parody of the Gothic; yet it is more accurate to say that it takes its genre seriously, so seriously as to transcend horror and disgust and ultimately to thrust the enthralled reader into a state of pure acquiescence to the narratorial will, as if to “de-brain” (“décerveler”, to use Alfred Jarry’s term) the innocent page-turner, who sinks into a shellshocked numbness, no longer even capable of “blushing at the thought of what the human heart is really like”.

more from Roger Cardinal at the TLS here.

He impersonated a human

ScreenHunter_07 Jul. 22 16.05

Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil. Married and a father of two, he wanted to work in Jerusalem, his city, and maybe also have an affair or a quickie on the side. That happens too.

He knew that he had no chance with the Jews, so he adopted another name for himself, Dudu. He didn't have curly hair, but he went by Dudu just the same. That's how everyone knew him. That's how you know a few other Arabs too: the car-wash guy you call Rafi, the stairwell cleaner who goes by Yossi, the supermarket deliveryman you know as Moshe.

What's wrong? Is it only fearsome Shin Bet interrogators like “Capt. George” and “Abu Faraj” who are allowed to adopt names from other peoples? Are only Israelis who emigrate allowed to invent new identities? Only the Yossi from Hadera who became Joe in Miami, the Avraham from Bat Yam who became Abe in Los Angeles?

No longer a youth, Sabbar/Dudu worked as a deliveryman for a lawyer's office, rode his scooter around Jerusalem and delivered documents, affidavits and sworn testimonies, swearing to everyone that he was Dudu. Two years ago he met a woman by chance. Nice to meet you, my name is Dudu. He claims that she came on to him, but let's leave the details aside. Soon enough they went where they went and what happened happened, all by consent of the parties concerned. One fine day, a month and a half after an afternoon quickie, he was summoned to the police on suspicion of rape.

His temporary lover discovered that her Dudu wasn't a Dudu after all, that the Jew is (gasp! ) an Arab, and so she filed a complaint against the impostor. Her body was violated by an Arab. From then on Kashur was placed under house arrest for two years, an electronic cuff on his ankle. This week his sentence was pronounced: 18 months in jail.

More here.

Thursday Poem

The Mystic Marriage

The fountain is stopped now
That made its water-noise
Into the small hours. Years ago
You thought it was rain,

Now, you sleep through everything
With the window open—
Late night jazz, a couple quarrelling,
Headlights, one mosquito.

‘It is three o’clock
In the morning. I am going
To the lovers’ bridge
In white mist, without you . . .’

I wake from that dream
Towards daybreak. You beside me
Still sleeping.
You were never a dawn person.

The fountain is on again.
Whole years have passed. And still
We have never left the south—
From which, if ever, each returns

Eternally changed, or not at all.
A white noise of swifts
Outside. Swallows sipping
Old dregs of misery—

The drained glass on the wooden table
Slowly filling with light.
And suddenly, a crash of bells
From Saint John of Malta

Hard by, and two flights down,
Approaching, lifting the spell,
A river of children’s voices
Growing and growing, out of the future,

• • •

Pure annunciation. Just in time
I retrieve it, like a dream transcript—
Our mystic marriage. Something, at last,
Has earthed itself inside you.

by Harry Clifton
from The Boston Review,
July/August 2010

Eclipse of the Sunnis

From The Telegraph:

Eclipse_main_1679560f Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I doubt many people in Britain knew the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. But since the civil war began in 2003, there has been considerable curiosity about the complexity of religious and political divisions in the Arab world.

In Eclipse of the Sunnis, the American journalist Deborah Amos describes how nearly two million mainly Sunni Iraqis have fled their country since the Americans and British invaded seven years ago. Her title references a now famous theory proposed by King Abdullah of Jordan that since the war a “Shia crescent” of influence has developed from a newly emboldened Iran through Shia-ruled Iraq, Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon. Abdullah contrasted these radical forces with the settled (some might say pliant and undemocratic) Sunni states such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The message was designed as a rebuke to the US for unleashing a Shia revival that would work against its interests.

More here.

Researchers discover water on the moon is widespread, similar to Earth’s

From PhysOrg:

Moon Last fall, researchers, including Larry Taylor, a distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, discovered “lunar dew” on the moon's surface — absorbed “water” in the uppermost layers of . This discovery of water debunked beliefs held since the return of the first Apollo rocks that the was bone-dry. Now, scientists, including Taylor and Yang Liu, research assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, have discovered that water on the moon is more widespread — on the outside and inside of the moon — with some similarities to water in volcanic systems on Earth.

Their research will be featured in the article, “Lunar Apatite with Terrestrial Volatile Abundances” in the July 22 edition of the scientific journal, Nature. Unlike lunar dew which is believed to come from an outside source such as solar wind which brings hydrogen into contact with the Moon's oxygen, the water discovered by Taylor and Liu is internal, arising from an entirely different origin. How it got there is not yet known. The water may have been added by impacting comets, which contain ice, during or after the formation of the moon and Earth.

More here.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

A neuroscientist imagines life beyond the brain

Robert Jensen in Killing the Buddha:

ScreenHunter_05 Jul. 22 12.59 There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman.

That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all—with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean.

Welcome to the world of “possibilian” neuroscientist-writer David Eagleman, to life in the space between what-is and what-if, between the facts we think we know and the fictions that illuminate what we don’t know.

Eagleman-the-scientist would love to rev up his high-tech neuroimaging machines to answer the enduring questions about the brain and the mind, the body and the soul. But Eagleman-the-writer knows that those machines aren’t going to answer those questions.

Eagleman rejects not only conventional religion but also the labels of agnostic and atheist. In their place, he has coined the term possibilian: a word to describe those who “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.”

More here.

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished — and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.

Wooden “Stonehenge” Emerges From Prehistoric Ohio

From National Geographic:

ScreenHunter_04 Jul. 22 11.52 Just northeast of Cincinnati, Ohio, a sort of wooden Stonehenge is slowly emerging as archaeologists unearth increasing evidence of a 2,000-year-old ceremonial site.

Among their latest finds: Like Stonehenge, the Ohio timber circles were likely used to mark astronomical events such as the summer solstice.

Formally called Moorehead Circle but nicknamed “Woodhenge” by non-archaeologists, the site was once a leafless forest of wooden posts. Laid out in a peculiar pattern of concentric, but incomplete, rings, the site is about 200 feet (57 meters) wide. (See a picture of reconstructed timber circles near Stonehenge.)

Today only rock-filled postholes remain, surrounded by the enigmatic earthworks of Fort Ancient State Memorial (map). Some are thousands of feet long and all were built by Indians of the pre-agricultural Hopewell culture, the dominant culture in midwestern and eastern North America from about A.D. 1 to 900.

This year archaeologists began using computer models to analyze Moorehead Circle's layout and found that Ohio's Woodhenge may have even more in common with the United Kingdom's Stonehenge than thought—specifically, an apparently intentional astronomical alignment.

More here.

Of Mutability

From The Guardian:

Of-Mutability “Nought may endure but Mutability,” wrote Shelley, joining an imposing line of English poets to have tackled this theme of perpetual change, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Wordsworth. Jo Shapcott's new collection – her first in 12 years, barring the Rilke translations of Tender Taxes – meets the term and its history head-on, even going so far as to call itself Of Mutability, a nod towards the grammar of those predecessors as well as their preoccupations. The excellent title poem, a deceptively casual sonnet, acts as something of a tissue sample for most of the book's concerns, from the mutations of cells to the disruption of the seasons, in a voice as mutable as the phenomena it describes, speaking sympathetically in the year 2004 to those who “feel small among the numbers. Razor small”, and suspect the pavement might be about to open under their feet.

Curiously, many of the poems seem more interested in equilibrium than mutability: those moments when opposing forces of change match or negate one another. Bubbles and droplets, which depend upon a perfect balance between internal and external air pressure to maintain their surface tension, bear much of the emblematic weight, appearing literally in a fountain or a stream of piss, or as metaphors for physical experience: “My body's / a drop of water”, “the soap film is my skin”. Even the poems themselves can feel like bubbles – formal, delicate, trembling with immediacy – and it seems that Shapcott craves the clarity or guilelessness these metaphors permit: “I breathe in and become everything I see”.

More here.

Why music is good for you

From Nature:

News_2010_362-music Remember the Mozart effect? Thanks to a suggestion in 1993 that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, there has been a flood of compilation CDs filled with classical tunes that will allegedly boost your baby's brain power. Yet there's no evidence for this claim, and indeed the original 'Mozart effect' paper1 did not make it. It reported a slight, short-term performance enhancement in some spatial tasks when preceded by listening to Mozart as opposed to sitting in silence. Some follow-up studies replicated the effect, others did not. None found it specific to Mozart; one study showed that pop music could have the same effect on schoolchildren2. It seems this curious but marginal effect stems from the cognitive benefits of any enjoyable auditory stimulus, which need not even be musical.

The original claim doubtless had such inordinate impact because it plays to a long-standing suspicion that music makes you smarter. And as neuroscientists Nina Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, point out in a review published today in Nature Reviews Neuroscience3, there is good evidence that music training reshapes the brain in ways that convey broader cognitive benefits. It can, they say, lead to “changes throughout the auditory system that prime musicians for listening challenges beyond music processing”.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Hero
………………….
On a cold winter night in 78
he drank two liters of Russian tea,
went to Red Square before light
and wrote on snow: “Brezhnev is an idiot!”

He was my god, my hero, my model world.
I imagined him struggling with his fly
when, busted by police, he had managed
to end the sentence with an exclamation mark.

Imagine doing something like this nowadays.
Imagine a hero dressed in a short sheepskin coat
standing in the piercing wind, his pants pulled down.
“Gross!” you’ll say and will be wrong.

Sometimes truth necessitates madness, and beauty is hidden
behind obscure details. To tell you the truth,
I’m still jealous of him who shed his urine
in the imperial garden of snow and laughed in the face

of the guards. Nothing beats in my eyes
a jester, his smile full of broken teeth.
When times in the yard are full of lies,
why sing like a nightingale in the emperor’s cage?

by Katia Kapovich
from Cossacks and Bandits
Salt Publishing, London, 2008

Video games come of critical age

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Morgan DFW's essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again contains “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” In that essay, Wallace wrote these momentous sentences:

Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture … seem both to take TV seriously and to suffer real pain over what they see. There's this well-known critical litany about television's vapidity, shallowness, and irrealism. The litany is often far cruder and triter than what the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger viewers find pro criticism of television far less interesting than pro television itself.

It would be difficult to overestimate the relief this sentence brought to many critics under the age of 40. It signaled that we had definitively turned the page on an era in which you had to go through the motions of holier-than-thou derision every time you wanted to discuss television or similar aspects of popular culture. Going through these motions had become painful and boring.

Wallace understood the huge role television plays in who we are and how we act. He proposed we take television seriously and do away with the knee-jerk scorn. Television, Wallace seemed to be saying, is beyond good and evil. It is both and neither. It is, simply, part of the structure of our experiences and any student of the human beast in his triumphs and foibles must pay attention to the medium.

A brief survey of how human beings in the developed world spend their time today will reveal that what is true about television is also true of video games. Everyone knows, by now, that these games are big business. Eleven billion dollars is, I'm told, quite a lot of money.

More here. [Photo of Morgan Meis by Stefany Anne Golberg.]

Flesh and Stardust: C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures Fifty Years On

Richard King in his eponymous blog:

Mush&tim_013 ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists,’ wrote W. H. Auden in ‘Poet and the City’, ‘I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ But Auden was exceptional. In Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Richard Dawkins swaps the costumes on this little playlet, suggesting that, more often than not, it’s the scientists who feel like shabby curates and the poets who are regarded as dukes. Of course, such timidity is entirely misplaced. Dawkins’s title refers to Lamia (1819), in which Keats accuses Isaac Newton of having destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colours. But Newton, of course, had done nothing of the kind. He had made one of the great discoveries of all time, a discovery that led on to spectroscopy, which has, in turn, immeasurably deepened our understanding of the observable cosmos, surely as proper a subject for poetry as any nightingale or Grecian urn.

Dawkins’s book began life as a lecture, delivered in 1997 in honour of the author C. P. Snow. And it so happens that last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Snow’s Rede Lecture for 1959, in which Snow identified, or claimed to identify, a division between ‘literary intellectuals’ on the one hand and scientists and engineers on the other. Delivered at Cambridge University and entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, its effect was to ignite a widespread debate – such, indeed, that the term ‘The Two Cultures’ was quickly absorbed into cultural life.

More here.

Vlatko Vedral recommends five books

Tom Dannet in Five Books:

41CuGQa3uJL Your first book is Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality? by Alastair Rae.

This is a completely popular book about quantum physics: there is not a single equation in there, I think. What he does is to go through all the major ways in which we try to understand quantum physics, all the major interpretations. It’s extremely good in that he writes in a very objective way and it’s very difficult to tell which one he supports. It’s very passionately argued as well, and it’s a beautiful exposition, very philosophical. I think it’s the best, probably my favourite, popular account of all the things we argue about on the fundamental side of quantum physics.

There are all kinds of strange views on what quantum physics actually is.

Right. There are connections with religion, then there are extremes saying it’s all in the mind: basically that nothing becomes real until we measure it and look at it and consciously record it. On the other side there is a point of view that it’s as real as anything else, out there independently of us and so on. He talks about these two extreme views and what quantum physics tells us about this very old question: whether the world is ideal or real.

Does he resolve it?

He really leaves it open because, to be completely honest about these issues, I don’t think we have something that’s universally accepted as the view: each has lots of positive points but also something that makes it a not completely plausible view to hold. That’s a really nice book.

More here.