The power of the placebo

Why Placebos Work Wonders
From Weight Loss To Fertility, New Legitimacy For ‘Fake’ Treatments
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577128873886471982.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

More and more evidence is mounting that the placebo effect is ‘real’ in the sense that it has actual, measurable physiological effects. However, as mentioned at the end of this article, perception is quite key as medically induced asthma suffers reported feeling better with placebo treatments even though their lungs didn’t show any clinical benefit. I would suppose the more complex the issue the more likely the placebo would have impact (meaning placebo for a heart attack is not likely to show much efficacy, while a placebo for something more nebulous (like menopause, something else mentioned in the article (not that I am claiming menopause isn’t real, but the symptoms are more difficult to measure)) it might be much more effective.

Endlessly optimistic

A dearth of posts lately, but there is a reason for it I will now bore you with… For those reader(s) who aren’t aware, my lovely wife and I have built a house out in the Virginia countryside (see http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/property/ for wwaaaayyy too much information). We were supposed to move there once the house was finished and pay off all or most of the costs from the sale of our Maryland house (thus allowing me to get a job I actually enjoy, but likely at 1/2 to 1/3 of what I am making now), but economic events overtook and now we too and fro two hours one-way each weekend. I try not to get too upset, I never had any intention of owing two homes and if it wasn’t for the fact that I really really want to be in our country house, I would have tried selling the place years ago. Anyway, because we are basically stuck having to work in the DC metropolitan rat hole in order to afford our two houses (and three mortgages) and my ridiculous pay in the intelligence community allows it, we decided to continue with some construction projects out at the ranch.

Thus, we decided to build a greenhouse/pool (greenhouse for me, pool for my wife). After around a year and a half trying to fit the project within our budget (it underwent some serious changes in design over that period) we got to something we felt we could afford (or rather, something we felt we could pay off in about 4 years, presuming we both stay employed as we are today). We officially broke ground April 2011, but due to various events, controllable or otherwise, have yet to actually get the damn foundation completed. We took the last 5 days off in an attempt to get the footers completed, but the work was too much and instead of pouring all the concrete footers yesterday as I had planned (hoped), we are now looking at pouring this Friday and only doing about half the footers. I sadly underestimated (that should be my epitaph) the amount of effort it would take to prep each footer hole (they all had to have the mud from the recent rains all dug out down to undisturbed earth, doanchano) so we only just finished setting the last form last night as the sun went down (in the freezing wind with temps below 32F). Despite all that work (probably 6 hours a day (can’t do more, when the sun goes down the temps drop like a stone in our little frost pocket)) we didn’t even bother trying to get the footer holes prepped in the pool area, the reason why we have been at this for 9 months, boring through feet of rock, because the sides of the excavation slumped into the holes we so tediously prepared and there was no prayer of being able to get that done in the time allotted. Thus, we will be dividing the footer pour in half and might wind up leaving the pool footers until spring (though I suppose we might be able to devise some sort of retaining wall to keep the sides from filling up the holes).

So, 5 days of back breaking work later, we _still_ haven’t got the damn footers poured and we are now only looking at doing half of them. I have thought many, many times about filling the pit backup with dirt and calling it quits. Just writing this makes me want to do so.

Ron Paul for President?

Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/

I strongly recommend this article for reading whether you be liberal or conservative. If you have any respect for our Constitution, like the idea of being able to compete on a level playing field and wish to have any influence in the operation of our government, you can’t possibly support any of our mainstream Presidential candidates _except_ for Ron Paul. As much as it sticks in my craw to say so (the guy is a fruit cake on the highest level), I have to contend that he is starting to become the best candidate of the abysmal lot we have to choose from. The mainstream GOP candidates all want to out Obama Obama, which means even more oligarchy, less privacy, more wealth transfer from the middle class to the rich, etc. Of course, since Obama has been doing this for 3 years now, no rational human can possibly think that he won’t continue exactly the same course for the next 5 years, so anyone who casts a vote for Obama is casting a vote thusly:

Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.

While any vote for a conventional GOP candidate is voting for all the first part along with destruction of our social safety net, eroding environmental protections, giving up a woman’s control over her body (why is it they want the govt to keep its hands off their guns, but they are happy to have the govt’s hands in their women’s wombs?), etc. Only by voting for Ron Paul is there any sort of daylight between the direction the Dems and GOP are taking us now and the place I am sure that everyone who isn’t part of the oligarchy would like to go (why people continue to support the idea of giving billion dollar handouts to the wealthy is OK but supporting needy people is a travesty just boggles my mind).

So I guess I am in the position where I find the lesser of all evils (and a lot of Paul’s stuff is quite evil, but the others are way more evil) is to support Ron Paul.

Ron Paul for President! At least he won’t sell you out!

Nervousness as a communicable disease

World on the verge of a nervous breakdown
Capitalism’s ceaseless quest to cut costs made us more jittery in 2011, and there’s no relief in sight.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/30/world_on_the_verge_of_a_nervous_breakdown/singleton/

I like this part a lot:

…after the great global crash of 2008, traders everywhere are in a state of permanent PTSD.

I hadn’t looked at the markets this way before and I feel this view provides a lot of insight. It seems that better information actually leads to worse decision making. I have read a bit about that before that people make better decisions when they have fewer choices, something that is counter-intuitive in our society today. I guess that with the swamp of data that is flooding the marketplaces (another good quote: “…a story reporting how U.S. stock traders were increasingly setting their alarm clocks for the middle of the night, in order to absorb the latest news from Europe as soon as it started to break…”) people are settling into analysis paralysis, then leaping into action when they perceive the market has made a decision, then, whether that was a good decision or not, dropping back into analysis paralysis until the next panic move by the market. When I was in graduate school I tried to make the argument that Wall Street traders were moving as a herd (a concept greeted with derision by my professor and the other finance majors in the class; I still think I am right), perhaps that was the early stages of what this author was talking about (that was almost 20 years ago, boy do I feel old when I say crap like that!). Of course, if you can predict the movement of the herd then you can make a pile of money and it was my intent, at that time, to try to work on that sort of problem, but I never got around to it (back then I had no idea I wouldn’t be making a living in my chosen profession (biotechnology management)).

I guess volatility is the new norm and we should get used to wild swings in the market. The vast majority of the time it is just moving money from the pocket of one wealthy idiot into the pocket of another, but occasionally there are really large systemic movements that trigger the herd to head toward a cliff (the failure to bail out Lehman Brothers, for instance). Of course, since our government is in the pocket of the morons heading off the cliff you can expect more taxpayer bailouts in order to keep our society from following the idiot traders off the cliff.

No fishy deserts!

Study says evolution theory all wet
A UO scientist says fish probably made the transition to land in a wooded, humid environment, not a desert
http://www.registerguard.com/web/updates/27378888-55/fish-retallack-desert-pond-popular.html.csp

I almost didn’t blog on this because it seems rather ‘Duh!’ to me, but figured, what the heck, perhaps my reader might be interested if he missed the article. While the article mentions that there were no _vertebrate_ predators to interfere with the movement of the vertebrate transition from fish to amphibian, as I recall things insects have been existing on land for millions of years (probably 10’s of millions of years) before the first proto-amphibian dragged its sorry carcass out of the water. I don’t know about you, but I would be very unhappy today meeting a hungry dragon fly that has a 3 ft wing span and I can run and dodge way better than any fish. I imagine that without the protection of the roots, branches, etc. mentioned in the article those fish attempting to explore new environmental niches probably would have just made the predatory insects very happy to have high protein, easy to digest meals. So, in addition to the arguments outlined in the article supporting the not-out-of-the-desert theory, clearly protection from predatory insects needs to be taken into account, further bolstering the author’s argument in spite of himself.

A sad tale on erosion of privacy

And the continued solidification of our Great Police State Nation…

2011: The Year Intellectual Property Trumped Civil Liberties
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/civil-liberties-ip/

One could hope that the pendulum will swing back at some point, but I lack faith that our oligarchy will allow that. It is a rather depressing read, so those of you who want to maintain the fantasy that things aren’t as bad as they really are should avoid reading it.

Eating advice for us oldsters…

Study: Vitamins, Omega-3s may keep brain from shrinking
http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/story/2011-12-29/Study-Vitamins-Omega-3s-may-keep-brain-from-shrinking/52264894/1

Of course, we don’t want to encourage any young people to follow this advice 😉 We oldsters need whatever advantage we can get!

This part sucks a bit though:

…the study suggests it makes good sense to limit trans fats, which are often found in fried foods, doughnuts, pastries, pizza dough, cookies, crackers and stick margarines and shortenings, and to eat lots of fruits, vegetables and fatty fish.

What was that?

The 6 Weirdest Things That Are Ruining Your Memory
http://www.cracked.com/article_19583_the-6-weirdest-things-that-are-ruining-your-memory.html

Another Cracked article I just can’t pass up posting. Be sure to check out the pictures and captions, they are half the amusement of the article!

It amazes me how much people credit human memory. Anyone who has done more than a few minutes of research into the capabilities of human memory know that it isn’t worth a damn and is probably actually worst than random noise (because you will morph your memories over time based on the input you have received). Too bad people get convicted all the time based on such useless information, but what the heck there are just too damn many of us anyway, we need some method of reducing the population, right?

Alien footprints

SETI to Scour the Moon for Alien Footprints?
http://news.discovery.com/space/seti-to-scour-the-moon-for-alien-tech-111227.html

Of course, it is a long shot, as the article states:

If these hypothetical aliens are advanced enough to traverse the vast distances between the stars, and if they decided to pay the Earth-moon system a visit over the past few million years, they may have used the lunar surface as an ideal observation post.

Still, why not look? It isn’t quite like looking under the lamp because that is where the light is, but if there were any visitors that spent any significant time here, it is quite likely they would have checked out the moon as it is quite unusual based on what information astronomers have on moons around other planets.

Health care can’t be competitive

Why health care competition won’t work
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/27/opinion/etzioni-health-care-competition/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

I was quite skeptical when I read the title, but decided to read it anyway since it is a subject I follow fairly closely. It is quite interesting in looking at the psychology of health care users and to me the conclusion is quite clear, for-profit health care can never provide acceptable care over the long run. Only having non-profit organizations that make decisions based on the greatest good for the greatest number at the least cost could possibly provide the best care overall. I believe that we here in the US have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that maximizing the money spent on health care does not actually increase the health of the population (indeed, in my mind, it clearly is reducing the health of the population). It seems we need to move to a paradigm where any new drug/treatment must prove itself to not only be better than any alternative, but its cost/benefit ratio has to be superior as well. I believe that in our highly politicized environment this is the socialist idea of ‘evidence based medicine’ and is being denigrated by our current crop of (idiotic) GOP candidates. Of course, since our society is turning anti-science, it makes perfect sense that scientific measurements of health outcome should be considered inferior to any other way of measuring such things.