Translations

Sticker svin, a photo by Kristjan Wager on Flickr.

I am currently reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos, which is about translations (NY Times has a book review of it here).

While reading the book, I couldn't help think of this sticker which I took a picture of some months ago (the black one), since it is a good example of the problems with translations.

The sticker was in a Danish bar, and translated into English it would be "klistermærke swine" - yes the first word would be the Danish word, since the word sticker is not Danish, but English.

Of course, translating the text would make absolutely no sense, because the whole point is to make a linguistic joke. "Sticker" sounds similar to the Danish word for snitch ("stikker"). Snitches are often referred to as "stikker svin" which means "snitch swine".

As people can see, the brilliance of the sticker text looses a lot in translation (well, all of it, really), but trust me, I laughed out loud when I saw it.

Speaking ill of the dead

Jerry Coyne has written a couple of posts about the death of Lynn Margulis over at his blog Why Evolution is True. The first one was rather respectful of her contributions to science and ignored her less than stellar contributions to science. The second post went into more details about her flaws.

In the comment section to the first post I dared to make the statement that Margulis was not a great scientist, but rather someone who made a great contribution to science, but otherwise promoted quackery such as HIV/AIDS-denial. Or as I put it:

I would think that great scientists as a minimum should be able to apply critical thinking to subjects, and be able to understand the scientific literature, even if outside their area of expertise.

Margulis was a HIV/AIDS-denier and a 9/11 conspiracy nut. She also frequently showed disregard towards the scientific method, and claimed that her ideas were dismissed because they flew against orthodoxy.

She did some great contributions to science, but as a scientists, she had deep, serious flaws, and promoted opinions which were not only wrong, but dangerous (e.g. HIV/AIDS-denial).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn't taken too kindly by some of Margulis' friends and colleagues, who obviously felt that I was insulting the memory of their great friend. Or as one Michael J. Chapman put it:

I was Lynn’s friend and co-author for 20 years (look us up on Amazon). I also team-taught her courses on symbiogenesis, Gaia theory and protists. The comments here display a level of understanding of her work that might earn, at best, a C+ in one of her undergraduate courses. At worst, by contrast, are cowards who can’t even wait a while before slamming the departed. Yes I mean you, Kristjan Wager, so clearly envious of her fame, so clearly unworthy to lick the grime off her porch steps.

This comment speaks to the general idea of not speaking ill of the dead, and saying that if you do so, you have some kind of base motives for it. Well, fuck that - I don't play that game. If someone don't earn my respect during life, they certainly don't earn my respect by dying.

Personally I don't give a rat's ass about Lynn Margulis' contributions to science. I am not a scientist, and don't claim to be one. What I do care about is how she used her status, gained through her contributions to science, to promote dangerous ideas. She denied that there was such a thing as a HIV virus, using her reputation of "thinking outside the box" to indicate that other scientists were just dismissing her ideas because she flew against orthodoxy - something she had done before, and won.

I dislike all quacks, but if there is one sort of quacks I really hate, it's HIV/AIDS-deniers.

The family and friends of Lynn Margulis have lost someone close to them, but the rest of the world has just lost another quack. A quack who had contributed to the science in the past, but had gone on to endanger other people by promoting dangerous, and wrong, ideas, putting other people at risk.

I won't apologize for saying that.

How to hold a children's birthday party

David Snowden uses the example of a children's birthday party as an example to explain complexity theory

Reversed roles

Note: I should probably point out that in the following piece, I will follow the Danish tendency to not use peoples’ titles. For people not living in Denmark, this might seem disrespectful, and if it is perceived as such, I apologize, but the habit of not doing so is too ingrained in me, for me to start doing so now.

I was considering calling this piece “through the looking glass”, but that would have connotations of weirdness which I found inappropriate, since what I wanted to was to indicate that I had experienced the “other side” of the divide for once.

What divide you ask?

The gender divide. The gender divide in technology to be more specific.

People who have followed my blogs and twitter stream are probably aware that I am an out-and-open feminist, and that I regularly criticize my field (programming and IT consulting) for how women are marginalized, e.g. by the male dominance when speakers are picked for conferences.

This year I participated in such a conference; the GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark (the conference was formerly known as JAOO). Here the lineup of speakers was also heavily tilting towards men, but it is one of the conferences which actively tries to get female speakers, and they had managed to get some really great ones, including Linda Rising, Rebecca Parsons, and Telle Whitney.

Telle Whitney held a talk on women in IT, and all three of them participated in a meeting with the Ada Aarhus group, which was held after the talks on the second day of the conference.

I went to the talk, and participated in the Ada Aarhus meeting, and both of these things introduced me to the concept of being the outsider. Something which I understood, or at least thought I did, yet which I hadn’t really experienced before. I cant say I enjoyed the experience, but it was certainly enlightening, and it forced me to re-evaluate what I thought I understood on this subject.

Before going into how this happened, I want to back away a bit, and give a brief introduction to myself and that part of my background which is relevant.

First of all, as the sidebar says, I am a Danish IT consultant in my thirties. For those interested in the details, I am a .NET consultant, working mostly with large financial or public systems.

What the sidebar doesn’t mention, but which many people know, is that while I am Danish, I am also Australian. My mother was Australian, and while I grew up in Denmark, my childhood was a mixture of cultures - not only Danish and Australian, but also several others, since my childhood friends were also mostly of mixed backgrounds as well (though all with Western backgrounds).

This upbringing has left me unable to entirely relate to a typical Danish upbringing.

It is the small things that usually trips me up - the children's’ stories and songs that I haven’t heard, and the ones that I grew up with instead (would you believe that most Danish children don’t grow up with neither The Wizard of Oz nor Snugglepot and Cuddlepie?) - but it is also the inability of many to look beyond the borders, and think globally. The distrust of foreign things and multi-culturalism that people hold, thinking that anything foreign must be dangerous or less good.

This means that I am the outsider in some cases. But given that fact that I’ve grown up in Denmark not entirely so, and since I look Danish, I can always act in ways which allows me to fit in.

Going back to the woman in IT talk, Whitney talked about what companies and individuals could do to ensure women could advance in IT. A subject I feel strongly about. Yet when listening to the talk, I kept feeling that I was left out - that Whitney wasn’t talking neither to nor about me. The reason was that I am not in a position to make company decisions, and that the individuals that Whitney was talking to, about what they could do, was the women. Not the men. All the recommendations didn’t relate to me and daily life.

You know why? Because it wasn’t about me!

I knew this at an intellectual level. Yet I hadn’t realized the full impact until I experienced being left out. It bothered me more than I thought it would. My privilege kicked in, and I felt a bit of resentment at the gut level, while knowing fully well that this was how it ought to be, at the intellectual level.

If this was how I felt during a 50 minute talk, how must it not be for people who experience it day in and day out? E.g. women whose wishes and needs are ignored or LGBT people who live in a heteronormative society.

I cannot in any way pretend that I can relate to how they feel. But I can say that I understand it a little better now.

The Asa Aarhus group meeting, where both Linda Rising and Rebecca Parsons gave brilliant talks, just strengthening my understanding of this, and my realization of how little I can relate to how it would feel to experience this every day.

Blogroll have been temporarily removed

I have temporarily removed the blogroll, as it was out of date, with many dead links, and because it linked to blogs that I no longer wants to be associated with.

There are diferent views on blogrolls and on whether they can be considered an endorsement or not. Well, I am of the opinion that while I don't have to be in complete agreement with everything a blogger on the blogroll does, and can disagree on things like e.g. politics and religion, I am implicitly endorsing the behavior or style of the blogs on my blogroll.

This means that while I will link to Republican blogs or blogs run by religious bloggers, I won't link to blogs which contains racist, bigoted, or misogynist language, and which allows for a comment culture where that sort of language is tolerated. Some of the blogs which used to be on my blogroll, has unfortunately gone down that road.

Internet lawyering

If there is one type of behavior on the internet that drives me nuts, then it's internet lawyering. By this, I mean people making a big deal about the possibility of something or other being something else than it obviously is, trying to interpretet everything in the best light, and insisting that it's a valid approach, or rather that it's the only valid approach.

This is the sort of behavior where people try to convince others that inviting someone to your hotel room for coffee at 4AM could just be an offer for a caffeinated drink, and that we should ignore the whole cultural baggage (as shown in e.g. movies) associated with such an offer.

It's the same behavior which allows people to claim that people like Pat Condell isn't necessarily supporting a racist, xenophobic party when he endorses them, because it could be that he only supports some of their policies (ignoring the fact that their entire platform is based on racism and xenophobia).

Well, guess what? We don't have to buy into this bullshit. We are allowed to think for ourselves, putting things into the greater context. We are not participating in some fantasy courtroom, where we have to prove things, and where your "clever" evasions will save your client*.

Most of us happens to be reasonably intelligent people, and we have learned to read between the lines, so stop insulting our intelligence.


*Of course, in a real courtroom, this tactic wouldn't work neither. Judges are generally not stupid people, and while the e.g. US courts call for proving people guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, it doesn't mean that the judge and jury have to pretend that there can't be a non-literate meaning to what people say.

Repost: Nothing in Medicine Makes Sense in the Light of Homeopathy

Note: Due to an upcoming job change, and a number of deadlines before then, I don't have time to do any blogging at the moment. Instead I will try to re-post some of my better posts from the past. The original post can be found here

I am not the first person to state this, but I think that it's important that we all keep up saying this: Testing of homeopathic medicine should end.

Why do I say this? Well, for a very simple reason: There is no evidence that homeopathy works. And what's more, the whole concept of homeopathy flies against everything we know about chemistry, physics, and physiology.

This blog post is triggered by a truly abysmal study where homeopathic medicine was compared to proper medicine used for treating moderate to severe depressions - there were numerous flaws in the study (which I plan to address in a later post), but the fundamental problem was that it was comparing medicine with remedies based on nonsense.

There is a famous essay by Theodosius Dobzhansky called "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", which goes on to explain how our knowledge of biology wouldn't make sense except if evolution is true. One could write a similar essay, called say "Nothing in Medicine Makes Sense in the Light of Homeopathy", in which one explains how all our knowledge of medicine and physiology doesn't make sense if homeopathy is true.

I don't think this can be stressed enough.

It's not just a matter of science not understanding homeopathy. If homeopathy was true, it would mean that the basic building blocks upon which our knowledge is built would be wrong.

Given we know that this is not the case, homeopathy must be wrong. No, that's too mild; homeopathy must be absolute nonsense.

The basic concepts of homeopathy are things like "like cures like", miasms, and and the concept of "memory" in water, all of which is nonsense.

"Like cures like" (or law of similars) is the idea that medicine should be based upon things which gives the same symptoms as the original disease. This was perhaps plausible back when Hahnemann first proposed it two hundred years ago, but we now know that there is no truth to this idea. Sometimes the medicine will be based upon substances which gives similar symptoms, but mostly it won't.

Miasms are an old concept, in which diseases are caused by pollution or bad air. This idea was replaced by the germ theory of diseases, and is not taken serious by anyone except for certain branches of alternative "medicine" such as homeopathy, where they have added their own twists to the concept, but still stay largely true to the old Medieval concept.

The "memory" of water (or sugar for that matter) is the explanation used to explain how homeopathic medicine can have any effect. Homeopathic remedies are based upon the concept of diluting, in which the remedies are diluted to a degree where none of the original molecules are left (see this rather poor Wikipedia article for the numbers).

Oh, and the homeopaths also claim that the more diluted a remedy is, the more potent it is. Yes, this is really what they claim. No, it doesn't make any sense.

So, all in all, we know that homeopathy doesn't work. So, why the hell are we continuing to test it against proper medicine?

There are a lot of alternative "medicines" which might work, even if the concepts they are based upon are nonsense (e.g. acupuncture), and it makes sense to test these (so far, the effect of acupuncture seems to be placebo), but this is most certainly not the case with homeopathy. There is no way in which that can work.

Homeopaths might claim otherwise, but then it's up to them to explain how our basic understanding of chemistry, physics, physiology, and medicine is wrong in this matter, and yet works in every other case. In other words, it's up to the homeopaths to propose new theories in which homeopathy works, and which still supports our current state of knowledge, and until then, they should be ignored.

Not shunned, but ignored. Like we ignore perpetual motion machine builders, flat-earthers, and other weirdos.

Conventional medicine is not perfect, and our knowledge is expanding all the time, but theories like the germ theory of diseases are well established through science. We understand the mechanisms at play, and this knowledge enables us to fight diseases more efficiently. Much like our understanding of vira has helped us fighting other diseases more efficiently.

Why does claims of memory in water and strength through dilution bring to the table? In what ways are they expanding our knowledge? What diseases are we able to cure because of them? Nothing, none, and none are the answers. So stop bringing them to the table. Instead focus on the many valid ideas, which don't fly in the face of all the collective knowledge of the sciences.

Woos like to bring up Nobel Laureates Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, and their discovery that ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori as an example of how outsiders can turn conventional knowledge on its head.

This is of course pure wishful thinking from their side. Marshall and Warren were very much part of the established scientific community, and while their proposal was received skeptically at first, it was not dismissed out of hand for some very simple reasons:

• It was built upon evidence.


• The mechanisms etc. all worked within conventional science and the mechanisms known at the time.


• There seemed to be some problems with the prevalent hypothesis at the time.

In other words, not only did they work within the established science, they actually addressed some known issues and presented evidence for their claims.

Yes, it took some time (and a very drastic demonstration) to convince people, but the scientific and medical community was very willing to be convinced, and as soon as there were sufficient evidence, the new explanation was universally accepted in quite a short time.

This is how it is done.

So, in what way has proponents of homeopathy done any of this?

The truth is that most people with a basic understanding of science understands that homeopathy is nonsense of the worst order, yet money is still spent on testing this nonsense, demonstrating again and again that it doesn't work. Why? We know that it doesn't work, since we understand the fundamental flaws in the premises behind homeopathy, and we know that homeopathic remedies are nothing but water, alcohol, or sugar (depending on whether they are liquid or in pill form), so they cannot work any better than placebo - they ARE placebo.

Let's put an end to this.

All it does is to lend credibility to homeopathy in the eyes of observers who don't know any better. They think that since homeopathic remedies are continuously being tested, there must be something to them. Why do we let this misconception continue? Science wins nothing from these sham studies, and it only lends cranks an aura of respectability. Stop it.

Yes, I am very passionate about this - we are allowing a lie to continue perpetually. That's wrong. Homeopathy has been around for 200 years, providing no value to society as a whole, and generally decreasing the general level of health, and it's time to stand up and say so.

It goes without saying that I have only contempt for hospitals and doctors who provide homeopathic remedies to their patients. Homeopathic practitioners are usually acting in good faith, believing in their nonsense, but doctors and nurses should know better - they have an education behind them, which provides them with the knowledge necessary to understand what nonsense homeopathy is.

Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub

It is with some pride and happiness that I can announce that Copenhagen now has a 'Skeptics in the Pub' event. Skeptics in the Pub (or just SitP for short) is an informal event where skeptics can gather together and discuss subjects related to skepticism and science, while drinking beverages of their choice.

As the wikipedia article linked to above tells you, SitP has been around for quite a while, mostly in Anglo-Saxon countries. These events have strengthened the skeptic networks in the communities where they take place, and makes it easier for skeptics to connect to each other and share knowledge and views.

I have been aware of the event for a while, and have thought that Denmark would benefit from such an event, since pseudo-science and quackery is quite widespread here, while open skepticism is frowned upon as being impolite.

Then I visited Perth, Australia, a couple of years ago, and was lucky enough to be able to participate in two SitP events while being there (one of them was actually a 'Skeptics in the Park', with a nice BBQ in King´s Park), and this experience strengthened my resolve to start one up in Copenhagen.

During the 'Gods and Politics' conference in Copenhagen last year I overheard the head of the Danish atheistic society (Ateistisk Selskab), Stinus Lindgreen, talk with someone else about his next goal being to start up SitP in Copenhagen. Obviously I suggested we partner up in this venture, and we have now finally realized this goal. Along the way, we got TrineBM (who some of you will know from the comments at Pharyngula and Why Evolution is True) to help us.

The first instance of the Copenhagen SitP will be on June 8th at 7PM, where associate professor Mikael Rothstein, from the Univesity of Copenhagen, will talk about UFOs. Rothstein has written, among other things, a book on UFOs ('UFOer og rumvæsener').
The event will take place at Ørsted Ølbar.

The schedule so far (all are at 19:00 at Ørsted Ølbar):
June 8th: Mikael Rothstein
July 13th: No speaker, but socializing
August 10th: Lone Frank

Please note that all events will be in Danish

The facebook page for Copenhagen Skeptics in the Pub can be found here.

Knowing when to listen

Anyone who have meet me can tell you that I'm not a quite person. I talk a lot, am opinionated, love to debate, and am probably slightly obnoxious in some peoples' opinion. People who know me better, can also tell you that I am generally a good conversationist, which is not the same.

Conversations are different from someone talking or from people debating. If someone just talks, the listeners are passive recipients. Debates on the other hand, are about convincing the other people involved about a given point. Conversations require something else - they require listening and thinking about what is being said, before responding. The listening and thinking part seems to be the hard part. Responding comes naturally.

So, what is the point of this post?

Well, the point is simply to point out that people in a position of privilege (e.g. me - a white, heterosexual man) need to learn to hold a conversation if they want to understand the challenges facing non-privileged people and/or to face their own privileges and the advantages they give.

When an organization, a group, or a conference wants to understand why there are so few participants from a given non-privileged group (women, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, physically challenged etc.), then they shouldn't have a debate within their own group, but instead try to seek out a conversation with people from said non-privileged group. During that conversation they should listen, and think, and ask for clarifications, and think some more. And then they should respond. Respond in a way that doesn't stop the conversation. Respond in a way that doesn't dismiss or diminish the challenges people from the non-privileged group face. Respond in a way which doesn't move the focus away from the subject. Respond in a way that demonstrates a genuine interest in understand, and in having a conversation.

If this is done, there can be a conversation. A conversation which will benefit all participants. A conversation which might lead to changes. A conversation which matters.

If you´re not interested in investing that effort into the conversation, then don't bother. Non-privileged people don't need to be told, again, by a privileged person that they are imagining things, too sensitive, or that they don't really have it as hard as the privileged person.

Homeopaths are dangerous for your health

Let's be frank here - I have little love for pseudo-scientists and people promoting quackery of any type, but I reserve a special dislike for homeopaths.

Why you might ask?

Well, first of all, because of their ways of distorting scientific and medical research to support their ridiculous claims, even when their whole discipline flies against everything we know about science.

It's also because of their smugness, claiming that scientists (and science-literate people) are close-minded and unable to face the truth and/or in the pocket of "big pharma" (never mind the fact that homeopathy is a billion dollar business with practically no costs involved).

But mostly it's because of the danger they pose to the people they fool with their pseudo- and anti-scientific nonsense.

This danger comes not in the form of the so-called remedies they offer, but through convincing people that those remedies can cure things better than real medical remedies. Of course, homeopaths will claim that they are not saying that people shouldn't use those remedies, but that is bullshit. If you convince people that your remedy works better than normal remedies, without the side-effects that real medicine has, then obviously people will choose to use your remedies instead.

So, what set this rant off? Well, Edzard Ernst linked this page in a tweet. Warning: it takes you to natural news, which is a quack website of the worst order.

The title of the page is "Homeopathy may offer the best radiation treatment" - this is a dangerous claim, and hopefully no one who believes it will ever be in a position to make a decision based upon it.

As bad as the headline is, the content of the article might be even worse.

Homeopathy is a truly diverse and deeply effective natural health care system for every illness under the sun. Including radiation. How is this possible?

That's easy: it's not. One useful advice is that if someone make a claim that something can cure everything, don't believe them. It's simply not possible. Even anti-biotic, the life-safer with a wide range of uses, is useless against many things.

Homeopathic treatment doesn't treat the illness. It treats the person (or animal) with the illness. There is a subtle, but deeply important difference. And it means that the labeling of an illness is of little importance to homeopaths.

What exactly is the difference between treating an illness and a person? None of course. It's not like medicine makes the illness feel better, rather it either kills of the organisms responsible for the illness or it heps the body able to fight back.

So no, there is no difference, and to claim so, is bullshit.

But first it's important to realise that as we are all mortal, not every person can be curatively treated.

That's the only honest thing in the entire article.

Although much good can be done by experienced homeopathic home prescribing, protecting against radiation poisoning may not be one of them. This is much too serious.

"may not be one of them"? Radiation poisoning is the effect of exposure to ionizing radiation in too high doses - how the heck is sugar pills or water going to protect against that? The only protection is to avoid it (or to have some kind of barrier).

The best protection from this problem, which will probably be with us for many years,

Oh really - probably "for many years"? Yes, I'd think so - radiation exists in nature, and it's not like we humans haven't helped create more radioactive stuff.

is to ensure you improve on other areas of health care, such as

- a species specific, quality, natural diet
- a quality natural supplement, preferably a plant based superfood, which also has detoxing capabilities, such as blue-green algae, chlorella, spirulina
- exercise regularly
- if you are in the fast lane, slow down, perhaps learn to meditate
- make quality time for you (to smell the roses) or take up something you love to do, perhaps always wanted to do, but never had the time or money

Notice something about all these advices? None of them are any help in avoiding radiation poisoning. None. Some of them are quite sensible for avoiding stress and other lifestyle related disorders, but for radiation? You got to be kidding me.

With this healthy regime in place, the likelihood of suffering bad radiation poisoning will lessen, even in the worst affected areas.

No. You could probably argue that general health have an effect on how badly affected you will be, but in bad cases the poisoning will be fatal, no matter how healthy you are.

People who suffer from radiation sickness tend to have some symptoms which will be common to everyone (the early ones are nausea and vomiting, followed by headache and fever). Even these early signs are common to other illnesses, such as food poisoning and gastric flu.

These can then be followed by dizziness and weakness, symptoms that are still common to other less serious ailments. Finally you can experience blood in the vomit and stools, hair loss, chronic infections and poor healing capability.

All of these symptoms are only for milder radiation poisoning (with a fairly large survival chance). The more severe poisonings also includes things like purpura, cognitive impairment, and even ataxia.

These are all common radiation sickness symptoms that you can see in people who are receiving radiation treatment.

Except much worse of course, as people receiving chemotherapy are getting radiation under much more controlled circumstances, and in smaller doses than what trigger radiation poisoning.

The more uncommon symptoms, which will point to your most appropriate homeopathic medicine may include any of the following:

- an enormous fear of death which prevents you sleeping
- an aversion to being on your own
- a desire or aversion for a particular food or drink, including its temperature
- worsening of the complaints during a specific time of day or night
- an increased intolerance to variations in environmental temperature
- if the complaints are more one sided
- the nature of your nausea (constant or intermittent)
- the nature of your vomit (saliva, undigested food, frothy, black, bloody, etc)
- how you feel after vomiting (better, no improvement)
- along with many others.

None of these symptoms have anything to do with radiation poisoning. None.

I think I have found the source of the confusion - the author of the article is confusing radiation poisoning with anxiety. Since anxiety can often be helped with placebo treatments, homeopathy could probably help there. Radiation poisoning on the other hand, can't be treated by placebo.

Because of the complex nature of health and the seriousness of radiation sickness, the best treatment may come from an experienced and knowledgeable homeopath. S/he will base your treatment on a variety of your personal symptoms and traits. It is targeted for you specifically. Ten different people who suffer from radiation sickness are each likely to receive a different medicine.

Let me make this very clear: radiation poisoning is extremely rare, and usually only occur under circumstances where the risk is well known. If you somehow happen to be unlucky enough to somehow be at risk of radiation poisoning seek medical help immediately. Don't go to a homeopathy quack who offers platitudes about targeting you specifically - if you really are poisoned you a) won't be helped by placebo, b) won't have much time to get proper help. Yes, you can survive milder forms of radiative poisoning without medical intervention, but your survival chance will rise drastically if you get proper treatment.

Whether your radiation sickness comes from the environment or from a medical treatment, you can lessen it or perhaps cure it completely, with good homeopathic treatment.

No, you can't. You really can't. Claiming otherwise is lying, and it is dangerous to the health of others.