Category: General

Here’s some listings for my episode (huh…”my” episode) of Stargate Atlantis. I’m a guest star!

tv.com link

http://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s4/415.shtml

Air date is apparently Feb 1, 2008.

Saturday October 20 at the Lions Club Hall (47130 Hope River Road) in Chilliwack BC. Doors at 8pm. The opening band is “Buckle Up Russia” around 9:30. Thickets around 10:30.
Costumes “mandatory”. Pumpkin carving contest! Prize for best costume! Games! Drinks!
Capacity is 150 people, tickets are $20 – call 604-795-4248 to acquire. There will be snacks, which is included in your ticket price!
Toren needs a ride!

I just learned that a lot of lines that Stinky Wizzleteats sings during the song “Happy Happy Joy Joy” on Ren & Stimpy’s episode “Stimpy’s Invention” are taken from the film “Big Country” with Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston and yes, Burl Ives, who won an Oscar for this film.

The trouble with herbals

October 6th, 2007 by Ben Goldacre in herbal remedies, bad science |

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Saturday October 6 2007

The news this week that herbal remedies can be ineffective or dangerous is boring: but come with me on a journey through time (time… time…) to the origins of medicine.

Herbs contain bioactive compounds. That’s why they can be effective, but it’s also why they can have side effects (some will inactivate your contraceptive pill, others will cause renal failure). Huge numbers of bioactive compounds extracted or derived from plants are used today in medical practice, including even common stuff like aspirin. There is little difference between herbal medicine and medicine in terms of what is used, only in how.

Digoxin in foxglove is very good at treating atrial fibrillation, a common kind of irregular heart movement. Unfortunately the dose range is very narrow, so it’s really quite easy to kill your patient. From the moment of its discovery, pharmacologists worked hard to standardise the dose.

They started with standardised preparations of the plant, but this proved dangerously inconsistent, because the quantity of the active component in foxglove was so variable, so new strategies were developed: standardised preparations of each batch of plant were tested in animals first, to work out how potent they were, and so on. Eventually we worked out how to extract the digitalis, and it could be weighed out.

Now people do careful studies of large numbers of patients on digoxin to see which dose is most beneficial, to understand how it works, and careful monitoring of side effects takes place, from individual clinicians writing about their concerns in medical journals all the way up to the yellow card system, where doctors and even patients can send in their concerns to the MHRA, however trivial or unproven they may be.

This process of enquiry, and standardisation, and testing, and verification, and negative findings, and dismissal of ineffective methods, and more, is one of the great developments in medical and intellectual history. Many people were disappointed along the way, as their ideas and theories were proved to be unfounded. Digoxin pills and foxglove both contain the same ingredient, but it is how they are managed and handed over that differs.

Until a herbal practitioner can show that giving a whole plant instead of an extract really is better, they’re making stuff up when they make those claims. Similarly, until they can show that using herbs at such low doses that they have no measurable effect is somehow beneficial, beyond the placebo (and placebo is great by the way) then they’re shooting with the stars.

But there are structural problems in the way that herbalists work: they have failed – over millennia – to collectivise, so they do not work together on research, but rather as independent commercial traders. They do not move to university settings, where the culture of critical self-appraisal might infect them, and possibly extinguish them too, if their ideas don’t stand up.

And where alternative therapists do move into universities, they wall themselves off from the most valuable influences. CAM therapists don’t rub shoulders with colleagues from other disciplines, who could share ideas and insights with them, and move ideas forward, or help brush the bad ones aside. The alternative medicine university courses I have approached have simply, flatly, refused to tell me the most basic things, like what they teach and how.

It’s because of this culture, not funding, that the “research” on herbal remedies is inadequate. Huge numbers of “trials” are produced, at great expense, but the trials are inept, they are not “fair tests”, they have inadequate “blinding” and “randomisation”, positive results alone are “cherry-picked”, and worse.

An inept trial, bound by design to give a false positive result, costs just as much as a fair test of a treatment. And these problems are endemic: one study looked at the entire cannon of research on traditional Chinese medicine, and found 1100 papers: not one single trial published in China, in the entire history of research into traditional treatments, had ever found a test treatment to be ineffective. Not a single one.

Herbal pills contain bioactive compounds which can have real effects, but it is these differences of style, not content, that divide alternative therapies from medicine: and it will ever be the same.

I want to market JUMPING SNAKE ACTUAL PEANUT BRITTLE. You open the can and there is actual peanut brittle inside. Hilarious and lucrative. If I had time I would do up a graphic for this joke.

My Sendak homage to Lovecraft got posted on Boingboing.net and some other sites today, so I got a lot of emails from people who I hope will buy a shirt! Is this you? If so, please read on!

I already have some printed but I can print on pretty much whatever colour and size shirt you like. The print is in black so it works best on white, off-white, tan/beige, light (stone) blue, light (serene) green, and to a lesser extent, red. Size S, M, L, XL shirts are $15 US (all prices here are US). XXL and larger are a few dollars more. I primarily use Gildan 2000 cotton shirts, you can see the full range of colours at:
http://technosport.com/product_details.asp?PID=207&CatID=1&Dis=1

I have some “specialty” shirts as follows:
1 Fairline “ringer” size L, red with black trim. Classy! $18
3 American Apparel “melange gym tee” in green, size XL only. $19
3 XXXL khaki/sagestone $18

The image that I normally print on shirts looks like this:

You’ll notice it has text on it. I can take that off if you don’t want it. You have to specifically ask to have it removed though or by default you will get it!

SHIPPING for ONE shirt:
to US: $7
to Canada: $6-10 depending on latitude. Or is it longitude?
international: $8 by boat or $15 by air.
If you want to order more than one shirt I’ll happily recalculate shipping.

PayPal to thickets@uniserve.com

Hooray for commerce and supporting the arts! And by arts, I mean me. Also please note I have many more tentacular shirts & other Lovecraftian items (like CDs for my Cthulhu Rock band) at http://stores.ebay.com/Dead-Space-God

Attention Thickets fans! The website has been completely revamped. www.thickets.net
Do have a look and feel free to make suggestions. Also, the forum had to be completely replaced but I’m in the slow process of manually transferring all the relevant data. Please register and post so it doesn’t look like I’m the only one on the boards…that’s just sad!

from: http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2874112.ece

Now a website designed to monitor editorial changes made on Wikipedia has found thousands of self-serving edits and traced them to their original source. It has turned out to be hugely embarrassing for armies of political spin doctors and corproate revisionists who believed their censorial interventions had gone unnoticed.

The website, Wikiscanner, was designed by Virgil Griffith, a graduate student from the California Institute of Technology, who downloaded the entire encyclopaedia, isolating the internet-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses.

He matched those IP addresses with public net-address services and helped uncover the world’s biggest spinning operation.

Mr Griffith says: “I came up with the idea when I heard about Congressmen getting caught for white-washing their Wikipedia pages. ”

Wikipedia says Mr Griffith has found something they had long suspected. A Wikipedia spokes-man said: “Wikipedia is only a working draft of history, it is constantly changing and so relies on volunteers editing the pages. But deliberate attempts to remove facts or reasonable interpretation of facts is considered vandalism. We are dealing with this kind of thing all time, so that our volunteer workers are changing edits back when we think they should be changed. But it’s not perfect, it is just more transparent than some people realise.”

Wikiscanner has analysed a database of 34.4 million edits performed by 2.6 million organisations or individuals since 2002.

Exxon Mobil and the giant oil slick

An IP address that belongs to ExxonMobil, the oil giant, is linked to sweeping changes to an entry on the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. An allegation that the company “has not yet paid the $5 billion in spill damages it owes to the 32,000 Alaskan fishermen” was replaced with references to the funds the company has paid out.

The Republican Party and Iraq

The Republican Party edited Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party entry so it made it clear that the US-led invasion was not a “US-led occupation” but a “US-led liberation.”

Diebold and the dubious voting machines

Voting-machine company Diebold apparently excised long paragraphs detailing the US security industry’s concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company’s chief executive’s fundraising for President Bush. The text, deleted in November 2005, was very rapidly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, “Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism.”

The Israeli government and the West Bank wall

A computer linked to the Israeli government twice tried to delete an entire article about the West Bank wall that was critical of the policy. An edit from the same address also modified the entry for Hizbollah describing all its operations as being “mostly military in nature”.

The gun lobby and fatal shootings

The National Rifle Association of America doctored concerns about its role in the increase in gun fatalities by replacing the passage with a reference to the association’s conservation work in America.

MySpace and self-censorship

Someone working from an IP address linked to MySpace appears to have been so irritated by references to the social networking website’s over-censorial policy that they removed a paragraph accusing MySpace of censorship.

The church’s child abuse cover-up

Barbara Alton, assistant to Episcopal Bishop Charles Bennison, in America, deleted information concerning a cover-up of child sexual abuse, allegations that the Bishop misappropriated $11.6 million in trust funds, and evidence of other scandals. When challenged about this, Alton claims she was ordered to delete the information by Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori.

Nestle and corporate criticism

Someone from Nestle removed criticisms of some of the company’s controversial business practices, which have all subsequently been re-added.

The FBI and Guantánamo

The FBI has removed aerial images of the Guantánamo Bay Naval base in Cuba.

Scientologists and sensitivity

Computers with IP addresses traced to the Church of Scientology were used to expunge critical paragraphs about the cult’s world-wide operations.

I went to the old apartment a couple weeks ago to see if I could claim one piece of furniture that I thought I wouldn’t need, but I do. My key to the building worked fine, but the lock to my apartment had been changed. There were two tenants in the foyer having a conversation and I’m pretty sure they gave me a look when I went in and out. They probably heard (saw?) that my apartment was trashed and they probably thought it was my idea. Isn’t it ironic how I let the apartment unlocked so that the other tenants could take, gratis, whatever they thought useful out of it, and that it turns out someone took that opportunity to wreck the place and now I have, as the Japanese say, lost face. No good deed goes unpunished.

Except that Stewie gave me his Playstation 2 free and clear, as well as Guitar Hero + GH2. Today for no real reason I searched Craigslist for some of the games on IGN’s Top 25 PS2 Games of All Time (thanks Geisel) and picked up God of War and Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. Silly me, I forgot that I didn’t have any controllers! So that’s next on the list. Once that happens I’ll have to find some multiplayer games and have some video game parties.

Also, Mr Chris Woods gave me a brand spanking new bike, which I have been enjoying for the past couple of days! It was purchased for his dad a couple years ago but sadly he’s not well enough to enjoy it, so it was bestowed to me. It’s got a little problem with the gears not settling quietly into place but everything else is spiffy, and the seat has a shock absorber on it which makes my somewhat temerarious riding style much more comfortable. LUCKY ME!

And it looks like this:

Also, cartoon fans, Rocket Robin Hood is being released on DVD in October! WOAH! Both seasons, complete sets! This, but no full set of The Real Ghostbusters, where’s the justice?