They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Water in the Pill

Pharmacist Scott Gavura reviews a paper titled “Against Homeopathy — A Utilitarian Perspective” from the journal Bioethics about when it might be ethical to use homeopathy in a clinical  setting.

Homeopathy is based on the “theory” that “like cures like.”  In essence, find a substance that produces symptoms similar to those of a cold, and that substance should help to cure the cold itself.  Furthermore, homeopathy states that the more a substance is diluted in water the  more potent it becomes, which is, of course, bunk.  Claims like these (and those of many other homeopathic fantasies) fly in the face of everything we know about basic physics.  (Here is a search for “homeopathy” from Neurologica Blog; Steven Novella has done more writing on the topic than anyone else I know of, and his blogs are a terrific resource for anyone interested in the evolving fight … Read more

When George Orwell’s famous protagonist from 1984, Winston Smith, begins to read The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, supposedly penned by the revolutionary Emmanuel Goldstein, Orwell writes that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know. Granted, Winston arrives at this revelation while hiding from the eyes [and telescreens] of the oppressive government of Oceania, but despite the obvious political differences between 1984 and life in our Information Age, Lawrence Lessig’s Code: Version 2.0 (also known as Codev2) often elicits the same sensation and serves, in no small part, to vocalize many of our nagging intuitions and fears about the internet.

When the World Wide Web first popped up in the late 1980s and 90s, there was a feeling that this was the new Wild West, that cyberspace would be unregulated and anonymous for the rest of its days. I was … Read more