All 3 entries tagged Book

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

Writing about web page http://www.badscience.net/

Homeopathy is a system of medicine which is based on treating the individual with highly diluted substances given in mainly tablet form, which triggers the body’s natural system of healing.

Dilutions are made up to either 1 part tincture to 10 parts water (1x) or 1 part tincture to 100 parts water (1c). Repeated dilution results in the familiar 6x, 6c or 30c potencies that can be bought over the counter: the 30c represents an infinitessimal part of the original substance.

Quotes copy/pasted from http://www.homeopathy-soh.org/about-homeopathy/what-is-homeopathy/

So a 30c dilution will be a one part tincture diluted in to 100 parts of water, which is diluted with another 100 parts of water, which is diluted with another 100 parts of water, repeat another 27 times. Homeopaths claim that the result of this process is an effective medical treatment.

In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre describes a 30c dilution thus:

Imagine a sphere of water with a diameter of 150 million kilometres (the distance form the earth to the sun). It takes light eight minutes to travel that distance. Picture a sphere of water that size, with one molecule of a substance in it: that's a 30c dilution.

If you read the above linked homepathy page you will of course find an explanation of how such a substance can be an effective medial treatment. The explanation is not one I find credible, but there are plenty of people who do.

Another part of this book which has stuck in my mind is the manner in which HIV and AIDS has been handled by the South African government.

South Africa's stand at the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto was described by delegates as the 'salad stall'. It consisted of some garlic, some beetroot, the African potato, and assorted other vegetables.

Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who works for the NHS and the topics covered in this book are almost exclusively of a medical nature. It's not just about medicine though, or even just about bad science. It's very often about the appallingly inaccurate and/or misleading manner in which most science stories are reported by the media. It's about how a study which finds that under certain circumstances the number of instances of X appears to have risen from the previously observed 4% to 6% will appear in a newspaper as 'new study finds 50% increase in cases of X'. It's about how a lot of medical studies have flaws but how, despite what some people mistakenly believe, those flaws do not necessarily invalidate the findings. It's about how some people can't understand that when the scientific community decides that something previously considered to be true is not actually true after all, or is only true under certain circumstances, this is called progress, not failure. It's about how in this country a storm of controversy can rage for the best part of decade regarding the use of a vaccine, whilst in the rest of the developed world it's use continued unabated by any such contraversy. It's about how some people will dress up common sense as something proprietary, the difference between someone who lies and someone who bullshits and about how people who do one or more of these things in relation to matters of science have managed to make a lot of money out of it.

You should read this book.

Mike Willis : 21 Dec 2009 16:08 |  Tags: Book Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Microserfs

Writing about web page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs

This is a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. It came out in 1995 and is set in the pre-Windows 95 era. Thus reading it today serves as a bit of nostalgia tip. Apple is portrayed as a company on the decline, hurting from it's beating in the 'look and feel' lawsuit, hoping that a switch from Motorola 68K to PowerPC will help revive it's fortunes and with staff who are hanging on hoping to cash in on a redundancy package. There's mention of the hype around a company called 3D0 and of companies throwing huge amounts of money at that so very mid 90s concept of 'multimedia' whilst trying to give the impression that they have some idea what it actually means and how you to make money from it.*

Unlike the very similar in concept but set a decade later Jpod and I think every other Douglas Coupland book I've read, it is not set in or around the author's home of Vancouver, Canada. Instead it's set in Redmond, US, and later Silicon Valley. Despite the title and initial setting it is not a book about Microsoft or working at Microsoft. Rather it is about some people who happen to work at Microsoft and later a start up created by an ex-colleague.

As with all of Coupland's novels it is seems to be more about concepts and ideas than the characters, with the events which occur serving merely as a mechanism by which to explore the preceding. It doesn't tell a story with a clearly defined start and end, rather it recounts the events that occur during a particular section of the protagonist's life. It's written in the form of a journal by a guy called Daniel. He's in his late 20s and for the early chapters of the book lives in a house with nine phone lines along with five fellow Microsoft employees, one of whom is already a stock option millionaire. It's a tale of working long and irregular hours out of a passion for the work. Of all night coding sessions and 3am snack runs to the supermarket. Of living to work rather than living to work. Of an increasing awareness that people of the same age, even some in the same line of work, are starting to do 'normal' things. Normal things being settling down, living in houses they don't share with several other single people, buying furniture that isn't from Ikea and having interests and lives separate to work.

I read JPod first and enjoyed it. I've seen it refered Microserfs for the Google generation, which having now read Microserfs it obviously is. Though I think it's more like an attempt at Microserfs for the Google generation. Microserfs is more, well, it's events are far more plausible than those of JPod and over all it's the better of the two because of that.

* Remeber that multimedia craze? There were 'multimedia capable' PCs, which in practice seemed to mean they came with a pair of speakers, a graphics card capable of displaying more than just text and a CD drive. There were 'multimedia games'  and 'multimedia titles', which tended to mean they contained lots of low resolution video clips and stuff to click on. Then of course there were 'multimedia devices' such as the Philips CD-i on which you could not only play multimedia games such as Cluedo and Burn:Cycle, but also watch films in Video CD format. Which as I recall had a tendency to look worse than VHS and some films didn't all fit on one disc so you had to change them part way through.

Mike Willis : 23 Nov 2009 20:39 |  Tags: Book Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Short History of Nearly Everything

This book which attempts to give you an overview of how stuff works, from the Universe at large to down to the cells that comprise your own body. It was recommend to me by a friend and having read some of their copy I bought my own. Overall I enjoyed it, though it was little inconsistent in holding my interest and the author does talk rather a lot about the people who discovered things compared to what they discovered.

The book is not quite as long as it's thickness suggests, at least not the part you want to actually sit and read. The end of it caught me by surprise as there was still a good half centimetre thickness of pages left. Those pages are largely taken up with citations of sources for the myriad of facts contained within the book.

If you want to know more follow the link for a whole bunch of reviews by people with more inclination for writing them than I can currently summon.

Mike Willis : 21 Oct 2009 12:56 |  Tags: Book Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem