I wonder what Sense About Science have got to say about the revelations on tonight’s Panorama. It seems that GlaxoSmithKline attempted to show that Seroxat worked for depressed children despite their own studies showing that it actually trebled the risk of suicide.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007
I just watched a great video on You Tube. It was made by an autistic woman about language and how autistic people are perceived. It really is worth watching.
When I was ten my parents lived in a small modern house at the end of a terrace. My bedroom was really a box-room built above the stairs and so about a third of the floor area was occupied by a metre high platform that was actually the ceiling of the staircase below. Before the box-room became a bedroom my Dad had built his gun cupboard in the corner of the room above this platform.
I was ten, the cupboard contained guns. I don’t remember how long it took me to figure out a way of opening it but I was pretty pleased with myself when I finally did. There was a bolt-action .303 rifle in there and a semi-automatic pistol wrapped in a cloth. I knew how to work the rifle but the pistol was a seductive enigma. The safety catch was pretty obvious but I couldn’t figure out how to determine whether or not it was loaded. I didn’t know how to take the magazine out and I wasn’t really strong enough to pull back the slide and see if the chamber was empty. Also, although I was irresistibly drawn to it I was actually quite scared of that gun.
One day I was sitting on my bed fiddling with the pistol, wondering how to find out if it was loaded without actually firing it, when I noticed that I could slightly push in the knurled button on the front of the gun below the muzzle. I was holding the pistol between my knees with the barrel pointing straight at me and when I looked closely I could see that if I pushed the button in with my thumb it could be turned. I pushed it harder and suddenly there was a terrific crack and a terrible pain in my forehead. I fell backwards onto the floor.
I wasn’t dead. I felt my forehead and there was a sort of dent but no blood. I was very confused but when I looked at the gun I realised what had happened. There was a very powerful and oily spring behind the knurled button and it was now lying on the floor. It was the button itself that had hit me, not a bullet. Later on, when I looked in the mirror, I discovered that the button had made a very clear impression in the centre of my forehead. I was delighted and relieved to have survived, but terrified as it dawned on me that I had to find a way of getting that spring back into the gun and hiding the tell-tale injury when I went downstairs for tea.
I’m afraid that I can’t remember now how I accomplished either of those things but at the time I believed that I had got away with it. However, now that I’m a parent myself I realise that there are a great many things your children think you don’t know that you actually do, so maybe my parents decided not to do anything because they thought I had learned my lesson. I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t.
Note: The pistol in the picture above is the only one I could find with the view I wanted but it is of an American gun made by Union Switch & Signal. I think that my Dad’s gun was a rather lovely Star Model A Super pistol, made in Spain.
The crazy mixed up world of racial politics is getting itself involved with music again. Usually the only time you hear people talking about race and music is during the MOBO (Music of Black Origin) awards and I’ve always been a bit doubtful about them. Since the music that is nominated for MOBOs is invariably the product of Asian studio electronics I’ve always felt that they should be called the MOJO awards, which also sounds better. But maybe that’s just being mean-spirited.
Anyway, this plug-in for iTunes is designed to allow people to make sure that they’re listening to a proper racial mix of music. It downloads the racial origins of the tracks in your library from a database and tags them accordingly. You can then create a Smart Playlist that contains your desired racial mix.
Of course, cynics might claim that people could use this software to enforce strict racial purity in the music that they play but that seems unlikely to me. After all, you must have bought all the music in your library so why would you want to filter some of it out? Hmmmm. I wonder if Jade Goody has a copy of this.
When I’m writing music I usually set up a studio somewhere around the house with whatever equipment I need. At the moment it’s in the spare room and I’m using my most rare and valuable keyboard, a Yamaha VL1. It is a physical modelling synthesiser, great for woodwind sounds, and was so expensive (£4000 in 1994!) when they brought it out that they didn’t sell very many at all. You hardly ever see them for sale but I was lucky enough to be feeling rather flush when my friend Rick Chew decided to sell his about ten years ago. I don’t use it very often and about five years ago I knocked it off its stand and cracked the LCD screen. I thought it was doomed but the brilliant people at the Yamaha Music service department shipped over the last remaining spare screen from their head office in Japan.
Anyway, jump forward to yesterday. It’s my little daughter Amelia’s birthday party. Children all over the house. Boys. One of them comes and says that he wants to show me something that one of the other boys (who shall remain nameless) has done. I go into the spare room and there, on the floor, is my precious VL1, shards of broken keys lying alongside. I felt faint and sick, not metaphorically but actually like being sick. I didn’t shout at anyone but I was grieving all night.
This morning I phoned up the Yamaha spares department with not much hope in my heart. “Which keys do you need?” said the woman, “An F and a G? We have them both in stock, £3.25 each.” I couldn’t believe it. I was so overjoyed I could barely contain myself. So hooray for Yamaha and don’t forget when you’re shopping that it sometimes pays to spend.
I’m just coming to the end of the loveliest book I’ve read for ages. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 is a collection of small writings, not all short stories, and every single one is brilliant. I think it may be even better than Granta although to be fair it is drawing from a much wider range of material and is only produced once a year. In any case, it challenges any preconceptions one might have about the state of intellectual life in the US. The authors in here are witty, sophisticated, wise and outward-looking, it’s like George Bush never happened. I’m going to be so sad when I get to the last page. But then, of course, there’s always this year’s edition to look forward to.
Pastor George Hargreaves was talking on Radio 4 on Tuesday from a demonstration that he helped to organise outside the House of Lords. He and his fellow protestors were objecting to a new law that will make it illegal to discriminate against gay people. He made his money as a song writer and he had his biggest hit in 1985 with “So Macho” sung by Sinitta. He still makes £10,000 a month in royalties from the song and let’s face it, that’s almost entirely from plays on Gaydar radio.
In his interview Mr Hargreaves said that one of the problems with the new law is that it would prevent him from denying a gay singer the right to record a gay version of his song. This song:
So Macho
He’s got to be
So Macho
He’s got to be big and strong enough to turn me on
He’s got to have, big blue eyes
Be able to satisfy
He’s got to be big and strong enough to turn me on.
Luckily the protest didn’t succeed and so we can look forward to ever camper versions of the song from the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael and even Mark Feehily out of Westlife, while Pastor Hargreaves can look forward to bigger and bigger royalty cheques. Isn’t it great when everyone can be a winner?
Sense About Science is in the news again. The pressure group describes itself as an “independent charitable trust” that responds to the “misrepresentation of science and scientific evidence”. The story they’re promoting at the moment, about how celebrities should check their facts with Sense About Science before supporting campaigns that do “more harm than good”, even managed to get their spokeswoman Tracey Brown onto the Today programme. Her previous job was at the London-based PR company Regester Larkin. They are “a specialist reputation management consultancy”, which sounds so like the fictional Prentiss McCabe of Absolute Power that I can’t help wondering whether there’s a connection. Their clients have included many of the bad boys of industry, all big employers of scientists: ExxonMobil, Aventis CropScience, Aventis Pharma, Bayer Inc, Pfizer and Shell Chemicals. I don’t think they mentioned that in the introduction to her interview.
The board of Sense About Science also includes Dr Peter Marsh, a Scientist/PR man par excellence. He runs a PR firm which calls itself MCM Research. GMWatch, who really hate MCM, have this to say about them.
On its website MCM says that it is ‘well-known for its research aimed at positive communication and PR initiatives’. Its website used to be more explicit about what it had to offer: ‘Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR initiatives? MCM conducts social/psychological research on the positive aspects of your business… The results do not read like PR literature… Our reports are credible, interesting and entertaining in their own right. This is why they capture the imagination of the media and your customers.’
If you have a look at the SIRC site, also run by Peter Marsh, you’ll see that they are very good at coming up with titillating stories that journalists often pick up without asking themselves who paid for the research and why. In fact you may be surprised at how many of the science stories that you thought journalists had come up with were actually rewrites of the handy “free bulletins and news updates” e-mails that the SIRC sends out.
Is it any wonder that many people prefer to believe what celebrities say rather than scientists? At least the celebs don’t claim to be impartial, they may be wrong but they aren’t crooked. These quasi-scientific PR companies are bad news for science and bad news for journalism. After all, who would you rather believe, an actor who says that she prefers to eat food that doesn’t contain pesticides or a scientist working for a pesticide manufacturer who says that they’re not bad for you?
The BBC has published a namby-pamby article about what to do if a dog attacks you. They suggest that you put your hands in your pockets and turn away. I prefer the advice Richard Ballantine gave in his excellent Richard’s Bicycle Book. He points out that humans are bigger than dogs and thus should be able to win any fight. With big dogs he suggests that you stick your fist down their throat so that they choke. With a whole arm in their mouth they won’t have enough leverage to do much damage. With smaller dogs he says you can quite easily break their sternum by pulling their front legs sharply apart, or with tiny dogs you could wave your bicycle pump around until they grab hold of it with their teeth and then dash their brains out on the pavement.
If you’re a dog lover and are tempted to comment I’d point out that I’m talking here about self-defence against attacking dogs. My youngest daughter has been literally terrified three times in the last two weeks by nasty yappy dogs that jumped up in her face in places where they should have been kept on a lead, in every case the owners acted as though it was her fault and didn’t apologise. Saying that it’s the owners and not the dogs that are to blame is like saying it’s not guns that kill people, but people. In other words, of course a dog can be safely and responsibly owned, it’s just that they frequently aren’t.
I don’t think that dog ownership is sufficiently well regulated and until any dog (or its revolting by-products) can be easily and definitely traced to a specific owner I don’t think that they should be allowed to roam freely in our cities.
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