cloudsoup

The Creative Zen thing Helen bought me lasted about 12 hours. I dropped it on the wooden floor of our hallway and it broke. The inherent fragility of a spinning hard disk in a small portable player puts me off them.

The Nano, cracked

And my Nano broke, too – the interior screen cracked and spread the LCD black goo over the inside like an ink cloud, making the display unreadable. Helen’s never had a problem with her iPod – apart from having to replace the battery – but I’m a little more careless with them, I guess.

So now I have a SanDisk 6Gb player for about the price of a Nano – but the battery life’s better and is replaceable, it plays formats other than MP3 and has a built-in sound recorder. And its memory is Flash-based. And its casing is considerably more robust than the Nano, the thin consumptive weakling beside the Sansa’s sturdy frame. I’ve already dropped it several times and sat on it. It’s working fine – and, unlike the Nano, it doesn’t scratch easily.

Now I have another problem. I’ve switched to Ubuntu and AmaroK is recommended as an iTunes replacement but AmaroK doesn’t recognise my MP3 player. It recognises iPods, apparently, but not my SanDisk. And in order to mount the device I have to switch he SanDisk player into a mode which doesn’t allow me to transfer playlists. Then again, reading the Wikipedia page about it, I see that Integrated iPod, iRiver iFP, njb, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (default MP3 players) support is claimed…

Perhps I don’t know what I’m doing. There’s a strong possibility of that. If anyone’s solved the problem or has another solution, do let me know.

Kubuntu, Ubuntu, sudo, Synaptic Package Manager, symbolic links: just some of the delights when you turn seriously to Ubuntu. I’m still on Breezy Badger and I need to upgrade to Dapper Drake.

Sigh…

By the way,

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 22,065 people with the name David Jones in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Tinariwen

Helen bought me a couple of CDs to rip onto the new Creative mp3 player – a CD by Angelique Kidjo with Malaika on, and another by Tinariwen. I’d seen them perform on the tv recording of the Roll Back Malaria concert, held in Senegal.

They stood out that night amongst the other performers; I didn’t know Malaika was a traditional Swahili song, didn’t know Kidjo’s reputation, didn’t know about the peculiar background of Tinariwen, didn’t know what to expect.

Angelique Kidjo’s voice is as good as I thought it was that night. Reminds me in a way of Amalia Rodrigues singing Fado. Tinariwen’s stuff is an odd mixture of North African and Mississippi Blues; must try and find out more about Arabic music.

Another small victory for the forces of Unreason. From ‘The Guardian’

Packaging on homeopathic products will be allowed to describe the illnesses they claim to be able to treat under a controversial licensing scheme … but doctors and scientists say it will legitimise products that have no scientific evidence to support their claims

Homeopathic licensing alarms doctors

This is how homeopathic concoctions are prepared. The ‘remedy’ is combined with water in a succession of dilutions and shaken between each dilution, in the case of soluble substances. Originally, each dilution would be in the ratio of 1 part to 100; these days, in the West, dilutions of 1 part in 50,000 is common.

Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy, proposed 30 successive dilutions each at 1 part to 100. That is, dilution by a factor of 100³⁰, or 10⁶⁰. To consume a single molecule of a homeopathic remedy at at this 30C solution you’d need to drink about 30,000 litres of water. Chemically, a 30C solution is identical to water.

Homeopaths, undeterred by arithmetic, try to fight their corner. For example, a recent press statement from the Society of Homeopaths objects to Professor Michael Baum’s calling homeopathy an ‘implausible‘ treatment with no convincing evidence of effectiveness:

This is like licensing a witches’ brew as a medicine so long as the bat wings are sterile

Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery, University College London

The Society pointed to ‘a large study at the end of 2005, of the outcomes from 6,500 patients at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital, over a period of six years, in which 75% reported improvement‘.

In fact, this ‘study’ at Bristol was no more than a customer satisfaction survey. It did not used a control group, a particularly problemmatic omission as many of the presenting conditions were chronic and/or cyclical and would have shown some improvement anyway. It demonstrated selection bias, as only patients who had elected to receive homeopathic treatment were interviewed. There was no initial assessment of the patients at the start, so the study is subject to recall bias. Patients may be inclined to supply answers the assume the researcher is looking for, introducing another bias. Patients who attended a first appointment but who didn’t return were ignored.

And this is the first study the homeopaths turned to to defend their hokum.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Links:

• Wikipedia, Homeopathy
• Excluding Bias, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science
• Society of Witchcraft Homeopaths

The actress and singer, Crystal Bernard, and her sister Robin, when kids, sang songs written by her evangelical minister father, Jerry Bernard to his congregations.

It seems her father was a pretty fundamentalist preacher of the Southern US Baptist-type but the songs he wrote, against evolution, against other faiths, sects and schisms, were really rather good, pretty funny, and well-performed.

From Ubu Web, here are The Monkey Song and The Ecumenical Movement – just click on the MP3 icon at the top right of the page.