Scalpels over the Ruhr

Earlier this month I had an operation and a few days in hospital. I did not expect an especially jolly week but I was not nervous, because what had to be done to me was not at all life-threatening, though everyone knows that there is always some risk with operations: if something goes wrong, even little things such as having a mole removed, say, can leave you crippled for life, while clumsy work on an ingrowing toenail can kill you. Anyway, I felt it was unlikely that the sort of emergency that crops up frequently in TV hospital dramas would arise in my case, with cries of "Quick, nurse, intubate!" or, from a worried anaesthetist, a quiet "I say, he's gone rather a funny colour...".

They decided to give me an epidural. I'd had one of these years ago, but on that occasion I also had a general anaesthetic; this time I was fully conscious throughout so that during the operation I could listen to the conversation of the theatre staff, a rare privilege.

They had all courteously introduced themselves to me as they bustled about in the ante-room but I can remember only a couple of the names; there seemed to be at least three surgeons, an anaesthetist, two or three other men whose function I forget, and two female nurses.

From the way they chatted to each other it was clear that here was a happy team with mutual respect; their discussion was of course serious but lightened with an occasional quip. They were not as persistently jokey as some proctologists and colo-rectal surgeons I have encountered, but when you think of where the latter spend their working lives it is not surprising that they acquire huge repertoires of funny stories to get them through the day.

After the introductions the head honcho asked the team to gather round and then proceeded to give them a pre-op chat. None of the team were old enough to have been WWII bomber pilots, but the general tone was very similar to a Wing Commander's briefing, though using different words to describe a very different sort of operation:

Right, settle down, chaps, smoke if you want to.
Tonight, it's Dortmund again. We're going over in two waves: I shall lead the first and Squadron Leader Wilmington the second. The first will drop incendiaries and the second 5,000-pounders.
Keep your eyes open for fighters as soon as we're over Germany, and there'll be heavy ack-ack over the target.
Weather will be......

...and so on. It was all most interesting and impressive. I would have liked to have joined in with questions or helpful comments, but I was too shy.

[Of course, smoking would not have been allowed in the theatre; you can't, anyway, when you're wearing a mask.]

. 

Great inventions of the last hundred years

Much of my long life has been devoted to the preparation and execution of deeds of unsolicited benevolence, with occasionally, for a change, some completely justified malicious actions causing great distress to the ungodly. In between these tasks I have had many utterly brilliant ideas come to me, often when I am having an attack of OAB. Any of them would make the world a better place. Sadly, it was never possible for me to take any of them forward to a patentable or even marketable stage for various reasons, the most usual one being that to achieve this would call for great energy, hard work, drive, some relevant skill or knowledge, and iron determination. None of these things are within my range and that prevented me from getting any further.

Here are four of them; skip the first if you are easily disgusted:

1  Pukejoy
Everyone knows how awful it is when you think you are about to be sick; you dread the pain and humiliation and the horrid taste you are left with. If you sip a glass of Pukejoy it will neither bring on nor delay the event, but it will ease the expulsion and leave in your mouth une sensation de fraicheur agréable with an overtone of  lemon, spearmint or kiwi fruit.

2  Tyresave
When an aircraft's landing wheels hit the tarmac there is a puff of smoke; this is the tyres burning rubber as they have to accelerate from zero to the landing speed in fraction of a second, and is why the hugely expensive tyres have to be replaced frequently.
It would be quite simple to fit vanes to the wheels, so designed that they will start to revolve in the slipstream as soon as they are lowered. The speed at which they revolve will depend on the speed of the aircraft, so with careful design they will hit the tarmac at exactly the speed needed to ensure that there is no puff of smoke.

3  Styenka Razin
This is the name of an old Russian song to which I intended to write some English lyrics and HERE I explain how Dusty Springfield's brother stopped me from doing so

4  Patients' Symptom Reporting System
This is based on three undeniable facts: that doctors' time is precious, that the waiting room reading matter is always depressing, and that an increasing number of patients would like to tell  tell a computer what is wrong with them rather than a doctor.
In the waiting room there would be a couple of old PCs donated by local firms and a notice would ask patients if they would like to record their symptoms. Those that do can sit down at a screen and switch on: there is no logging on and they are not asked to type in their name: instead, a question appears: What seems to be the trouble? There are a dozen answers offered and the patient chooses one, perhaps my elbow hurts. More questions come up: what they are depends on  the answer given to the first; these might be all the time?, or just when you bend it?, etc. Then so on until the questions have been answered, or the patient is called by the doctor, or just gets fed up. The last button is pressed and the program prints a report and deletes all the information that has been put in. The patient trots into the doctor with it; reading it takes him 30 seconds and he can then carry on the consultation, having saved himself the first  three minutes.

As I explained, none of these brilliant ideas will ever be exploited by me. Of course, someone else might take them up and try, and unless he can produce a document dated prior to this post proving that he thought of them himself then I shall call in m'learned friends; I might well be open to offers over 40%.

My drug habit

I came very late to drug addiction: in my teens and twenties I was too innocent to notice what was going on. Once at a party a girl passed me a lighted cigarette, which I obligingly stubbed out for her; she told me irritably that it was her last joint and I felt an awful fool.

Later, when travelling overseas, I found out what kif, ganja, blow, toot, christina, dagga, Miss Emma and all the rest were, by being offered them or by being told about them by knowing friends, or learning that the rather pleasant smell I had noticed was caused by the airheads puffing away around us.

But in the last few years, and particularly in the last few months, I have become a major player on the drugs scene, not as a burnout or a paper boy or a pusher, but certainly as a user. When people notice my erratic behaviour and ask me what I'm on I usually reply "Oh, just a bit of pot at weekends", because to give the whole list would take too long. Here it is:


Swallowed daily: Metformin, Ibuprofen, Simvastatin, Ramipril, Finasteride, Lansoprazole (Omeprazole), Tamsulosin (Stronazon), Nembeterin (Cholisterin)
Swallowed three days in every fortnight: Odansetron, Dexamethason
Swallowed when required: Metoclopamide, Loperamide
Dripped in for two hours once a fortnight: Oxaliplatin and calcium folinate (folinic acid)
Pumped in for two days in every fortnight: Fluorourcil

(Curiously, there is very little main-lining involved and no sniffing up the nose, so I suppose I'm not considered a serious user.)

I shall be finished with some of these substances in August (I dread the cold turkey), but the rest I must continue with until I go to that great pharmacy in the sky. The cost of all this to the NHS must be enormous, perhaps equivalent to the maintenance of a medium-sized primary school or a battalion of the Coldstream Guards. But still, if I had become addicted to, say, crack cocaine, I might have taken up mugging or burglary which would have cost the taxpayer much more in the long run, so I don't feel too bad about it.

(I do not want OMF to lose its hard-won reputation for frivolous and trivial writing; it s widely respected as The Blog That Cannot be Trusted. The above list is perfectly accurate except for one drug I have included which does not yet exist. It will be used for the treatment of obstreosis of the ductal tract (tertiary), if someone invents it.)

Well done, Craig lad!

It is difficult to see why the faithful are so unhappy about Dr Craig Venter's attempt to play at God by creating life. I mean, anyone who takes a good look at the range of life forms currently cluttering our planet—wombats, vultures, squids, Tories, tapeworms and all the rest of his unsavoury creations—must see that the first (and only, until now) holder of the top life-creator's appointment made a complete hash of the task; it is clear that it is time for someone else to be given a chance to have a go, and a top American geneticist with a neat and modest moustache/beard combo is just the sort of chap who is likely to come up with some much superior life forms, particularly with the financial support that he has secured from ExxonMobil; just think what God could have done if he'd had that kind of backing!

And, of course, he has made a much more sensible choice of raw material; God's attempt to create life "in his own image" was a no-no from the start, as he didn't actually have much of an image at the time. So it is not surprising that he finished up with the jumbled mess that we call Life on Earth. Dr Venter wisely chose to start with a common bacterium, synthesize its DNA, insert the strands into yeast and then into E Coli to make a synthetic genome, add a quotation from James Joyce and transfer the whole thing into an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats. It's obvious now, a child can see that this is the way to go, but conceiving it from scratch must have taken great imagination.

Anyway, bingo! We now have a synthetic life form with which we can do wondrous things, in all probability. And of course the boys at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, will be taking precautions to make sure that their little fellows can't get out and cause a nasty outbreak of goat mastitis; still, even this would be less of a menace than the frog infestations, swarms of gnats, festering boils, locusts and all the other horrors which the original creator used to keep his creations properly grateful for his infinite mercy.

An early (unsuccessful) experiment at the J. Craig Venter Institute

Summary Care Records: Include me out

Like all those of my generation (the one that grew up listening to ITMA every Friday), I have always kept myself at the cutting edge of technological and social advances, striving constantly to be among the first to be involved in every new development. Therefore I was pleased—and flattered—when I received an official invitation to participate at a very early stage in an exciting new initiative.

The invitation gave details of the impending introduction of the Summary Care Records which are to be prepared for everyone over 16; they will initially contain basic information about your health and will then be updated cumulatively with summaries of all the care you receive under the NHS. The covering letter quoted my NHS number and explained that anyone doubtful about the confidentiality of these records can refuse to have one by obtaining an opt-out form and sending it to his GP.

Well, I'm doubtful. I don't care if anyone knows, for example, that I have two false knees (rather proud of them, actually), but I do care that the records could contain information which might be used for, say, identity theft. We all know that virtually every IT project commissioned by the NHS has been characterised by grotesque incompetence in conception and implementation, has wasted huge sums of money, and has ended in failure; there is no reason to suppose that the Summary Care Records will be any different. So all the brave talk about strict security measures is not reassuring. If you think these comments are unreasonable, note this:

By the same post as my package and my wife's, two others came through our letterbox. The envelopes were identical in appearance to ours and presumably enclosed similar items. They bore our correct address, postcode and all, but the addressees were two gentlemen of whom I had never heard; I shall call them John and Digby Phish-Hacker, for those are not their names. So before the project is even launched, material marked PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL has been sent to someone whom it does not concern and who has no right to see it.

If the NHS Care Records Office has already sent John and Digby's letters to our address, how can we be sure that they have not done, or will do, something else equally crass, like allocate our NHS Numbers to them? So I am exercising my option to have nothing to do with SCRs. I put the wrongly addressed envelopes back in the post unopened, marked Return To Sender, and I hope the matter ends there, both for me and the Phish-Hackers, wherever and whoever they may be.

I shall of course complain to the NHS Careless Records Office. If I receive no acknowledgement, I will just assume that one has been written but was sent to yet another wrong address, or posted without a stamp.

Advice for country vets

Samuel Johnson exhibited a rare lack of self-assurance when he gave this definition: "A disease, I suppose, of cattle".

We shall never know whether his supposition was justified, for the word has disappeared from our language; at least, the OED knows it not, though perhaps in some dark corner of rural Somerset that terrible scourge headgargle is still rife and therefore the word remains common currency.

Anyway, the doctor's doubts about its exact meaning did not prevent him from quoting the remedy: "For the headgargle, give powder of fenugreek. Mortimer." He does not tell us which Mortimer made this recommendation but it is worth committing to memory; every vegetarian cook worth his Noirmoutier salt has powder of fenugreek to hand (for flavouring his purée of mung beans) and should know how handy it will be if headgargle breaks out.

Rotten ideas

I have long enjoyed Martin Gardiner's notes on ridiculous or pointless devices which someone must have been so proud of, or so hopeful for, that he spent money on registering them with the US Patent Office records; there are some examples described here.

Half the fun of these is that their inventors are absolutely serious; these are not jokes or hoaxes, there really are talented and industrious engineers who believe that the world is waiting for their machine for washing animals, or their pillow with breasts, but I have recently discovered a long-established website called Halfbakery featuring equally ludicrous inventions which are not to be taken seriously. In this case the point is that it is, "a community-based ideas bank used by people who wish to propose and develop (not always serious) half-baked inventions. Among many similar such sites (e.g., WorthIdea, ShouldExist, whynot.net, globalideasbank.org, idea-a-day.com), it has distinguished itself by minimalism, irreverence, and a cast of regulars whose takes on suggested inventions are often funnier than the original submission". Wikipedia describes it in more detail here.

An example is the Hullaballoon, a tractor-balloon driven airship:
"A personal airship both lofted and propelled, at a leisurely pace, by a series of balloons tethered to a conveyor belt which moves along the vertically-oriented perimeter of the longitudinal axis of the craft. Each balloon inflates as it moves from the underside of the ship, up around the prow, reaching peak inflation above the center of the ship. The balloons then deflate as they move around and down the backside."

Dangerous drugs

For some years now I have been a user, regularly and in some cases daily, of a number of drugs. All of them are legal and not intended to give me any kind of fun but merely to alleviate some symptoms I have or to prevent various minor ailments from getting any worse. This is fine; taking them is a small inconvenience, they don't cost me anything, and all of them seem to work or at least to do me no harm.

But I had no idea how potentially dangerous they all are because I had never read the leaflets that came with them; three a day after meals seemed all I needed to know. The other day in an idle moment I glanced at one and, filled with alarm, immediately settled down to read the lot, taking particular note of the warnings about side effects.

It seems that some or all of these wonder products might well induce nastier things than those they had been so successful in treating: unless I was very lucky they could land me with diarrhoea, constipation, giddiness, intestinal bleeding, stomach cramps, various kinds of ulcers, aching limbs, migraines, insomnia, mood swings, palpitations, confusion, itching, drowsiness and fits.

There was no mention of a plague of boils, but otherwise this sounds just like the sort of thing that Jehovah used to visit upon tribes who had displeased him, or on anyone who happened to be around when he was in one of his wrathful moods. Happily, I haven't noticed any such effects while I have been on these drugs—well, a bit of confusion perhaps, and an occasional itch, though nothing that a good scratch doesn't cure—oh, and I get severe attacks of drowsiness after a good lunch. So I suppose I don't need to worry.

The instructions say that if these things do crop up you just have to stop taking the tablets and tell your GP, and if necessary that's what I'll do. After all, the print was very small so the dangers must be slight and the manufacturers know that no-one will read the leaflets; the whole point is that if some poor fellow does suddenly succumb to several of these unpleasant things after swallowing one of their nostrums they can just say: well, tough, we did warn you.

Climate, energy and all that

Lewis Page in The Register writes about a book being written by Professor David J C MacKay, who has weighed into the ever-louder and more unruly climate/energy debate with several things that so far have been mostly lacking: hard numbers, willingness to upset all sides, and an attempt to see whether any of the various proposals made would actually work. Mackay, of the Cambridge University Department of Physics, holds a PhD in computation from Cal Tech and a starred first in Physics, so we can take it that he knows his numbers. And, as he points out, numbers are typically lacking in current discussion around carbon emissions and energy use.

He’s coming at the issues from a green/ecological viewpoint, but climate-change sceptics who are nonetheless concerned about the UK becoming dependent on Russian gas and Saudi oil—as the North Sea starts to play out—will also find his analysis interesting. Eliminating carbon largely equates to eliminating gas and oil use. “I don’t really mind too much what your plan is,” MacKay says. “But it’s got to add up.” He says he’s largely letting his machine-learning lab at Cambridge run itself these days, and is personally spending most of his time on trying out different energy scenarios.

The book is called Sustainable Energy—without the hot air, and you can download it here (a .pdf file of about 14MB, or there is a synopsis here). It isn’t quite finished yet, and Mackay says he’s always glad to hear from someone who has something to add or has spotted a mistake.

The Green Party, or Greenpeace, might want to give him their comments on one of the plans he discusses, starting on page 209 (Plan G, Producing lots of electricity):
Some people say ‘we don’t want nuclear power, and we don’t want coal!’ It sounds a reasonable goal, but we need a plan to deliver it. I call this plan ‘Plan G’, because I guess the Green Party don’t want nuclear or coal, though I think not all Greens would like the rest of the plan. Greenpeace, I know, love wind, so plan G is dedicated to them too, because it has lots of wind.

Mackay is not at all judgemental in comparing the various options: he just gives you the figures. But those for Plan G suggest that the Green Party hasn't studied them.

There is little point in arguing about these matters with anyone who has not taken the trouble to read Sustainable Energy right through and ponder its content. And, in case anyone asks me, no, I haven't. But I shall, any time soon.

No "reform"

A resounding raspberry was delivered in the House of Commons last night to Cardinal O'Connor, David Cameron, Ruth Kelly, Nadine Dorries and other assorted nasties who had proposed amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Many of these were disingenuous, part of a campaign to scupper the bill altogether or to use debate on it to block or reverse enlightened changes.

Happily, all were defeated. They were free votes and it is encouraging to see that a majority of Labour MPs do still have consciences in good working order. It is unlikely that many of these were influenced by the fact that the Prime Minister shares their views, but Gordon Brown will have had a much needed boost to his morale.

The Periodic Table

With its Saturday edition The Guardian gave away a pretty multicoloured chart of the periodic table. I remember finding the one on the wall of my classroom a depressing sight, partly because it had over the years turned a rather nasty shade of beige. It may even have contributed towards my lifelong dislike of chemistry, which then and now seems to me to be basically about uninteresting substances in menacing little glass jars. It is pleasant to think that thousands of classrooms will now have a lovely new chart, replacing the faded and dusty one that's been pinned up there for years.

But even smartened up, it's not something that lifts the heart. It took the combined talents of Sir Arthur Sullivan, Tom Lehrer and Mike Stanfill to make The Elements really amusing. If my chemistry teacher had presented something like this to the class I might have paid more attention to his lessons, though I doubt if it would have influenced my career choice (which turned out to be a big mistake anyway).

Patently obvious

Tipi Eisberg, a contributor to Martin G's Really Magazine, normally reviews the more intriguing American patent applications but has recently started selecting some and showing only the drawings, leaving readers to guess what purpose the devices are intended to serve. That this is not always easy may be judged by looking at the three currently selected (Week 08); you can find the answers by clicking on the drawings, but I will spoil these puzzles by revealing that these patents cover, respectively, an electronic device for training animals, a helmet for wearing in the water which enables you to squirt stuff at other swimmers, and a method of gas stunning chickens before slaughtering them.

But the simplest inventions are always the best, and my current favourite is An Apparatus for Improving the Taste of Beverages. Martin is greatly taken by the idea, as everyone may well be, of turning a bottle of plonk into something really good by putting a magnet in it.

One reason why I like this one is that although it is indeed very simple, its description runs to one sentence of 399 words; I like long sentences. The longest one I have ever posted was a mere 164, but that was in 2004, when I was young.

[Unaccountably, I missed Disposable protector for engaging a clogged toilet and containing splashes in the clogged toilet occurring during unclogging of the clogged toilet by a plunger when Martin published it at the end of 2007.]

Rhyming the Rhythm Method

When writing the other day about a Prophylactic Poetry Competition to celebrate the opening of National Contraceptive Awareness Week, I was quite wrong to suggest that it would not attract many entries: in fact, there were more than fifty.

I have to say, though, that the standard of those selected as winners and runners-up was not very high; most of them had uncertain metre and defective rhymes. I mean, "silly" with "willy" is OK if a bit obvious, but "johnny" with "funny" should have been grounds for instant disqualification.

Anyway, none of those I saw were in the same class as the one I submitted on behalf of one of my correspondents whom I know only as Outeast; he couldn't enter it himself because he lives outside the UK* and couldn't afford the stamp, so he sent it to me in a comment on this post. Pity he didn't win, because I had promised him that the prize would have gone to the Save the Children Fund.

The competition was clearly a success, but I am less certain about the NCA week which has just begun. It may well be that preparations have been hindered by death threats from the Vatican's hit squads, and that at this very moment heavy mobs from Opus Dei are tearing down the displays.

They do these things better in the United States. For instance, over there during National Gall Bladder Week every Main Street has its parade (with the Cholecyst Queen), its banners, and stalls manned by top brass from the Gall Bladder Society of America.

Let the final poetic word on contraception go to Tom Lehrer, who ended his version of the Boy Scouts Marching Song with:
....If you're looking for adventure of a new and different kind,
And you chance to meet a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined,
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared....Be Prepared!

* I have no idea where; indeed, I know very little about him. Or her? I have an idea that she may actually be a young Turkish widow whom I remember meeting once some years ago under curious circumstances in the Levant. I do know that he/she is a poet of note: a sonnet of his/hers is included among THESE.

Poetic licence

I never expect anything in the way of thrills or titillation when I scan through my local newspaper, but this week there wasn't even much in the way of interest: a naughty vicar, "Gales damage a school roof", "Doris is 104" and "Builder head-butted off-duty policeman", and that was about it.

Until, with a shock, I encountered an item which left me open-mouthed and which, if TV news and the national papers are on their toes, must surely soon become a hot topic throughout the country. I leave out the names, but here is the piece (honest, no kidding):

Wordsmiths are being invited to compete in a prophylactic poetry competition to win £50 in vouchers. [Our local] Primary Care Trust's chlamydia screening programme and [-]'s Pharmacy have joined forces to run the contest which covers two age groups. Young people aged between 16 and 25 are being asked to pen a poem using the word chlamydia, while over 25s are called upon to write a piece containing the word contraception, or a form of contraception.

There are several things to be said about this. For one thing, the rules are somewhat vague: Do they really mean any sort of poem, or do they want some verses which rhyme and/or scan? Must chlamydia be used in its proper context and refer to the infection or can it be treated as just a word? It would make things much easier if could be used as a proper name, so that you could submit a sentimental ode titled To Chlamydia, with a line similar to the one Ernest Dowson very nearly wrote: I have been true to thee, Chlamydia, in my fashion.

If it must be used as a medical term, on the other hand, then the poems would have to outline the bacteriological background, symptoms and treatment (what else is there to write about on this subject?), and references to C. trachomatis, purulent exudate and Azithromycin would have to be featured; these are very tricky things to work into even the loosest rhyming scheme or metre.

For the older competitors, contraception as a subject offers lots of possibilities, since no particular approach is specified. The poem could be lyrical, romantic, theologically controversial or merely practical. In the latter case, the various methods alone provide plenty to say; references to them in popular song go back to 1930, with Ira Gershwin's lyrics to I Got Rhythm.

This competition seems to me to be much more difficult than one I set before Christmas, and that attracted only five entries. Somehow the sponsors will have to ensure that there are at least two entries in their Prophylactic Poetry Contest, even if they have to write them themselves, for the winning poems are to be displayed at the town's main shopping centre on February 9th to mark National Contraceptive Awareness Week. Anyway, I shall not fail to be there to see how the young poets of the town have risen to the challenge.

Euphemism in the drugs trade

...or, if you prefer it, the pharmaceutical industry.

My first job after leaving the army was with an American firm which had been started early in the twentieth century in the United States by a man pushing a medicine cart round the mid-West, giving away samples of his One-minute Cough Cure and similar wonders. By the time I joined it, it was a small but successful company exporting world-wide from a factory in South London.

They sold a range of proprietary pharmaceuticals (which used to be called patent medicines)—pills, powders and ointments, all useful remedies for minor ailments. Their really big seller was Pills for the Kidneys and Bladder, which contained a variety of herbal compounds of proven efficacy such as Pichi and Buchu. It was recommended for, among other things, the relief of a certain geriatric problem which we described coyly as “Getting Up Nights”. (I was young then: my problem in those days was Getting Up Mornings.)

These pills contained, among their perfectly respectable ingredients, methylene blue. This is a urinary antiseptic of genuine therapeutic value, but it also made a major contribution towards the pills’ popularity in six continents because it turned your pee bright blue. In most markets we made the point discreetly in our advertising: “...within a few hours of taking the pills you will see the good they are doing you”, but in the Far East and Africa we were more blunt: “The Blue Comes Through”.

The company still exists with the same name (which was the surname of the character played by George Sanders in All about Eve*) but is now part of a group whose skincare, feminine hygiene and oral care brands are marketed from Sweden. The group claims the usual sort of thing: “commitment to innovation, brand development and quality”, but these banalities are feeble successors to the (literally) colourful boasts of earlier days.

There are further revelations  HERE about my work for this company.

[*But the line about a bumpy night was not a reference to the nocturnal geriatric problem.]

One for the diary

Really Magazine reports that The University of British Columbia, the main centre for A/r/tographic Research, is running a course from January to April 2008 which will examine :

... the relational ways of knowing inherent in the renderings and reflections found in a/r/tography as an approach to research that is attentive to the sensual, tactile, auditory, performative and unsaid aspects of artist-teacher lives.

As any fule no, a/r/tography “develops the relationship between embodiment and ethics as a being-with”. I am not too proud to admit that I find this a fairly difficult concept to grasp, though Really Magazine kindly supplies a link HERE to some further explanatory notes (called, of course, renderings) with some rather pretty backgrounds (you have to run your mouse over the numbers to reveal them).

Unfortunately, I have several major commitments in January, and anyway the course is probably already over-subscribed.

We don’t do symptoms

I had this itch in my ear, you see. Not really life-threatening but annoying and perhaps a bit worrying. Had an ear-wig burrowed inside, as earwigs are alleged to do, and laid eggs which, when hatched, would come marching out in serried ranks in the middle of the night as fully-grown forficula auricularia*? Even learning, on looking up the things in Wikipedia, that “Interestingly, the male of the species has two identical, fully-functional and independently-operable penises” did not reconcile me to the prospect, and anyway I didn’t think the information was all that interesting, except perhaps to female earwigs.

So I resolved to get help. Some internet sources identified the problem as swimmer’s ear, and the American Academy of Family Physicians went into much detail, recommending a 2% solution of acetic acid; as I had never done any swimming, and didn’t much like the idea of filling my ear up with vinegar, I felt I should look elsewhere for advice, and sent an email to NHS Direct.

I suppose this service seemed like a good idea at the time it was set up, saving busy doctors from having to listen to trivial complaints by providing medical advice on the telephone or through a website, but it seems unlikely to be serving much purpose. I have never heard of anyone who has found it useful, and my own experience of it was not gratifying: I simply said that my hearing was OK and that I had no earache and asked “..so why does my ear itch?”, and got back a standard letter saying, in effect, “This is not the sort of question we can deal with”.

This seemed remarkably feeble of them, as in their blurb they invite you to “…Get an assessment of what your current symptoms may be the cause of..**”. I suppose, with over two million enquiries a month, they simply cannot give specific advice to many; one imagines a call centre where hundreds of teenagers sit at consoles with a array of buttons to press from which they can choose a standard pre-recorded message or an email (in any one of the twelve languages they say they use), like the one I had, or others saying Don’t worry, it’ll get better on its own, or Call an ambulance NOW, or Don’t scratch it, leave it ALONE, or even just Dear Sir, You have the pox, Yours faithfully.

In my case they could have said Sounds like a minor infection, see your GP and he will prescribe something which will cure it in a trice. Anyway, I did, he did, and it did.

But of course this would have meant a bit of typing; easier to press the button to send the We don’t want to know email.

All this has reminded me of a very old Jewish joke, but I’ll keep that for another time.


* forficulae auriculariae?
** “Get an assessment of what your current symptoms may be the cause of...” This is disgracefully careless writing: symptoms don’t cause anything: they meant to say “..may be caused by”.

Good letters bring success

Most people are aware that if your surname begins with a letter in the first half of the alphabet then you have a better chance in life, simply because having your name crop up near the top of written lists, or having it called out before others, must in some circumstances confer an advantage.

I had not realised before that there is something called the Name Letter Effect (NLE) which is said to work in other, subtler, ways, and involves not merely your surname but your monogram—all your initials. Martin Gardiner in Really Magazine quotes from and gives links to several pieces of research on this phenomenon.

The most recent of them resulted in a paper published in this month’s edition of the journal Psychological Science by Leif D. Nelson of the University of California and Joseph P. Simmons of the Yale School of Management , which they childishly titled Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success. It found that “law students with initials which represented poor grades in exam results did less well than their colleagues whose initials included As and Bs” and generally “people perform worse when their initials match objectively undesirable performance outcomes”.

I was tempted to download a copy of the research but a glance at the Abstract warned me that it is unlikely be a thumping good read:
People like their names enough to unconsciously approach consciously-avoided name-resembling outcomes. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players with strikeout-signifying K-initials strike out more than others. All students want A's, but C- and D-initialed students find initial-resembling outcomes less aversive and achieve lower GPAs, particularly if they like their initials. Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, C- and D-initialed students go to lower ranked law schools than their A- and B-initialed counterparts .… These findings provide striking evidence that unconscious wants can insidiously undermine conscious pursuits.

Back in 2005, the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine had a paper entitled Monogrammic Determinism? describing research in which students had to categorise some initials according to unpleasantness. Unsurprisingly, they rated initials such as P.I.G. and Z.I.T. as severely negative. Next, the researchers correlated the unfortunate initials with death records from the California Department of Health Services mortality database stretching back to 1905.
So did having an undesirable set of initials mean that you might D.I.E. earlier? No, it didn’t, so let’s move on.

The concept goes back much further. In 1984 Joszf M Nuttin, the founder of the Laboratorium voor Experimentele Sociale Psychologie, in Belgium, reported on NLE to the General Meeting of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. Here again, I cannot comment, because a glance at the Abstract made me decide that Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: The name letter effect was not something I wanted to spend a long weekend with:
Mere belongingness to self is tested as a sufficient condition for the enhancement of the attractiveness of visual letter stimuli….The effect is obtained in the absence of awareness of the Gestalt of any name, thus challenging current understanding of fundamental affective processes.

So there you have it, or possibly don’t. Why was I interested in these enquiries into trivial and probably rather pointless matters, you may ask? Well, because they illustrate the point that sociological research, whatever degree of correlation is found in two sets of data, is never more than generalisation, and tells you nothing about a specific case. My initials, you see, are AAB: I have yet to make my first million, my academic achievement consisted of failing the same degree twice, and my sporting career began when I was ten with the discovery that rugger is a very rough game indeed and that cricket is played with a very hard ball, and went downhill from there.

Or take precautions while you're waiting

This notice in my local hospital might have been less likely to be misunderstood if the last three words had come immediately after "radiographer".

When galaxies collide...

…this is the sort of thing you see through the Hubble telescope. At least, it would be if you were orbiting the earth and the Hubble telescope was for looking through and not for taking pictures.

This beautiful colliding pair is called Arp 87 and is 300 million light years away in the constellation of Leo. Phil Plait tells you about it in Bad Astronomy, which in this instance is an inappropriately named website.