Disgusting Behavior

I don't care on what side of the health care debate you might fall. Free speech and dissent are part of what makes this country cool, but hurling epithets such as "nigger" and "faggot" adds nothing to the debate. It is just disgusting and inexcusable behavior.

Placebo: Not Just a Drug Trial Obstacle

Evidently I'm too lazy to write, so I'll just link to someone else's work.

Wired has a very interesting article regarding the placebo, the "sugar pill" used in drug trials. Basically the pharmaceutical companies are having more difficulties getting drugs passed by the FDA due to what appears to be an increasing efficacy in placebos compared to drugs under test, and even compared to some drugs already on the market.

If research can uncover the mechanism behind the effectiveness of placebos, then in possibly many circumstances doctors could actually help patients with a little artful lying, without resorting to expensive drugs with associated side effects. This is intriguing because (1) what are the ethical implications of lying to a patient to heal them, and (2) what is the density of artful lying required before the placebo response stops working?

Slow or Not too Slow

On my last semi-annual visit to my parent's house* my mother mentioned her computer -- a very nice graphics workstation with lots of memory and storage -- has been slowing down over time. With my background the first thing that came to mind was "this is a typical Windows design flaw. Time to reinstall and everything will be faster." But then I remembered her machine was running XP, and, in spite of my philosophic differences with the Microsoft Corporation, XP has shown itself to be a fairly stable operating platform (with proper care and feeding). Granted there are things like viruses and their ilk or hardware problems that can make a system slow, but barring these things the question centers around a cause that is just a part of running the system over time.

It turns out to be (not so surprisingly) difficult to diagnose a problem given a vague symptom. Operating on the assumption there is no virus or hardware problem, there seem to be three common candidates for cause. The first is the standard file system fragmentation. The second is process overload, of which system tray crowding is a symptom. The final common culprit is also the most ephemeral: perception -- is your machine really slower than when you first started using it, or have your expectations of how fast it should be changed?

So the file fragmentation issue is probably the easiest to cure. In fact there are several things one should routinely do for a healthy system.

The next step is to see if there is stuff running that really isn't needed. This can get very tricky, very quickly. The most obvious thing is to uninstall any programs you don't actually use. Most of us, however, are pretty sure that everything on that list of installed programs belongs there. No one can help you if you are a pack rat.

Even when we install programs we actually use, there are certain things that get set to run in the background that have questionable value (think of all those "quick-start" icons that end up in the systray). There is a post at Microsoft that has some detail about cleaning up background programs (after of course a discussion on defragmentation). Please note that setting certain things not to run, done incorrectly, can lead to your system not working. The post I mentioned links to this site which seems to have a fairly comprehensive list of programs (along with DLL's) and what they actually do. (I feel the need at this point to state that unless I come to your house and do the clicking, any computer breakage is your fault, not mine.)

Another interesting possibility I ran across in researching this issue is there are too many fonts installed (be sure and read the updated article for even more information on performance and other processes). You heard me; fonts. Evidently having thousands of fonts installed in XP will slow it down. Who knew. If you have too many fonts installed on your computer, your homework assignment** is to see if there is a way to access them without actually having them installed.

The perceptual issue is probably the hardest to address. Unless one is OCD about timing how long the computer takes to do certain tasks, there will generally be no record regarding historical performance.

So I guess the upshot of all this is that your computer, like any other workspace, should be cleaned and maintained on a regular basis. If not, the gremlins of clutter will do . . . well . . . they'll do what the gremlins of clutter do. You have been warned.***

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* Hi mom, we'll be there for Thanksgiving.
** Do your own damn research.
*** None of this of course covers infection by viruses and their ilk, or hardware failures.

I'll do it! Just don't scare me any more!

How many emails have been received in ALL CAPS telling us some scary thing or another? Skepchick has a nice exposition of the anatomy of one of these crap emails regarding cancer. The rhetorical devices used are found in many emails of this vein, and I think a little awareness of these devices can go a long way to raising our critical hackles in similar messages.

This Is Science News?

I almost spit my coffee all over my keyboard this morning. Fox News' science and technology section had this story. It would be one thing if they mentioned the predictions of astrologers as a small part of a larger story on the eclipse, but the astrology is their story. I'm not trying to say that there is no news story here, but something like this belongs in the weird news section, not the science section. Metaphysical claptrap is not science.

The finger of shame is waggled at Fox News also because their journalism here is a bit lazy. In addition to the aforementioned offense, they link to the AFP story on Yahoo which is a bit more reasoned. For a small, blog-like news organization this is an acceptable practice. But Fox is a large news organization with many resources. Don't they have someone to write a reasoned science-y article about the eclipse? Even better, couldn't they just afford to print the AFP story in its entirety?

Shame on you Fox News. Shame on you.

Although slightly more reasoned, the AFP straddles the line with their story. It's almost like they have written this tongue-in-cheek, "hey look at what these goofy astrologers are saying," wink wink, nudge, nudge. The problem is that an uncritical reader could take this as some type of acceptance for astrology. "But the AFP thought the astrologers were knowledgeable enough in the ways of science to be quoted."

I guess the heart of my gripes lie in the cognitive disconnect between the general population and the scientific population. Since much has been written about this already, I'll just link you here.

It's All Natural

I get kind of annoyed when I'm at the grocery store, much to Danielle's chagrin, when people blindly obsess "natural" products. It strikes me at times as a marketing ploy, because is there a food product out there that isn't natural? Velveeta cheese probably comes the closest to non-natural food -- I'm convinced it's plastic -- but this is really just playing with the definition of natural.

Steven Novella has a little article over at Skeptiblog that covers this topic nicely. Admittedly he quickly moves from natural food to natural medicine, but I think it is a great exposition on the "natural = healthy" conception. My only complaint (a very tiny one) is he makes the blanket assertion that health food companies knowingly use consumers' predilection for natural products to make money; it seems he attributes to them no motives other than monetary gain. While I would be foolish to claim this isn't the case for some companies, I would also be foolish to think that there are no vendors who actually believe in the "natural is better" state of their products, misguided as they may be. But don't let my little criticism detract from what is an excellent article.

Full disclosure: I bought into the health food/herbal remedy thing for a while. That is until someone pointed out arguments like Novella makes.

[Edit: the following is a post script added after Veronica's comment. 7/21, 15:17]

I probably should have clarified my position a bit better.

I get annoyed when people uncritically obsess "natural" products; i.e., if you tell me a product is better simply because the label says "natural", then we're going to argue. A point Novella was making was that there is no one, generally accepted definition for natural food. The situation is a bit different for foods with the "organic" label; there are certain guidelines which must be met to apply it, but no such guidelines for "natural" exist.

Blindly applying "chemicals are bad" is along the same lines. It is not the case that every chemical is harmful. But even beneficial molecular compounds can be harmful in the right quantities. This again is a point Novella made.

And again in the same vein, it's not the case that "processed" is necessarily bad. Almost all of the food we eat is processed in some manner or another. Even organic produce goes through machines which sort and wash; this is indeed processing. One of the few exceptions to this may be produce one buys at a farmer's market, but this is as far as I know a very small percentage of the U.S. food market.

What most people mean when they complain about processed foods seems to be that they don't agree with the method in which the food was prepared. The chemical food complaint seems to be that the preservatives, coloring, or flavoring is harmful to the body. I also think that some mean both when they talk about processed foods.

To the processed complaint I would say don't eat what you don't like. For example, I don't eat canned vegetables not because I think there is something inherently dangerous in the canning process, but because most canned vegetables taste like mush to me.

The chemical complaint is slightly harder to address. Preservatives are in general a necessity of modern cheap food storage and distribution. One can certainly buy products without preservatives, but the price is higher for several very logical reasons (think supply and demand). Dyes and flavorings are more nebulous yet, as they are usually just listed as such on the label. Here I would have to put some faith in the FDA and the scientific process behind their oversight. Let me state right now that I don't believe the FDA or any other government agency is infallible or free from outside influence. But if you are one who thinks the FDA or the scientific process is there to serve only the interests of large companies and do nothing for the consumer, then we have a fundamental difference of opinion which likely can't be reconciled in the comment section of a blog. My point here being that if an additive is shown to be harmful the FDA will eventually move to ban it from inclusion in food, especially when science is accompanied by public outcry. Is this process slow and unnerving most times? Yes, but it's what we have. If studies can show that an additive is harmful, consumers have the freedom to not purchase products with those additives even if the FDA is slow to act.

(I should add here that there is a burden on the consumer to (1) give some degree of attention to scientific studies, and (2) be able to discern good from bad information. The difficulty is this is a VERY large can of worms of a different variety. I won't go into it here.)

Finally, the healthy aspect. This is the hardest for me to discuss, simply because I have not studied in any detail human physiology. I would not disagree with the statement that eating fresh vegetables, meat, etc. (fresh meaning non-pre-cooked) is healthier than the alternative. This is mainly because of some of the things that are put in pre-packaged foods to make them taste better, namely salts or sugars. It seems to be well documented that too much salt or too much sugar in ones diet is a bad thing. But this falls to the consumer to watch, and it is not necessarily the case that a product with the "natural" label frees one from having to consider what is in it.