>> Hahaha! Isn't China that country that *has* an alphabet, but it's 
>> 22,000 characters or something absurd?
> 
> No, it's not an alphabet. It's writing, but there aren't phonetic 
> letters you rearrange to make words, which is what "alphabet" means. 
> From the greek Alpha Beta.

They're ideograms not phonograms, but I'm not aware that this 
disqualifies them as an "alphabet". It is after all a finite set of 
symbols having well-defined meanings - they just don't mean phonetics.

>> Notice the huge gap in the middle, and the much smaller gap between 
>> then and now? I'm sure other mathematicians *existed*, they just 
>> weren't especially famous... ;-)
> 
> Well, anyone whose name we still know 500+ years later would probably 
> fall under "especially famous" for me. Of course there might be a big 
> gap when you list individual mathematicians. You're not graphing famous 
> mathematicians.
> 
> http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Full_Chron.html

Most of the people in that list, I've never heard of. And I've heard of 
people like Chebyshev that most people wouldn't recognise.

Maybe it's just that all the people who discovered stuff that you'd 
learn about in an extremely basic math course lived a long time ago? For 
example, Andrew Wiles famously proved Fermat's Last Theorum - or rather, 
proved that all modular forms are elliptic. But apparently only a few 
people alive can actually comprehend the proof, so...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>>   The placebo effect also causes measurable chemical changes in the body.
> 
> Interestingly, I've read that the placebo effect has been getting 
> measurably stronger over the last few decades. How's *that* for a 
> mind-screw?

People are becoming more gullible?

Which would seem weird, given all the conspiracy theories...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> I get the feeling that there are some things acupuncture can be used for
>> in modern medicine, and others that it shouldn't be used for.
> 
> The problem, as I pointed out to someone else, is that you have a *lot*
> of medical doctors doing these sorts of studies, but not all of them are
> scientifically trained. 

Okay, this is where we are at odds. I am not talking about a general
practitioner conducting flawed studies. Maybe I have odd doctors, but
they read peer review journals and try to keep up with new techniques
that have been researched and presented at conferences, not just ideas
that have been batted around the office. Living near a teaching hospital
has that advantage.

Yes, I know of GPs who will recommend non-traditional medicine in a
'Give it a try while we do the other major tests to find out what is
wrong.' manner as palliative care, not as a treatment.

> Point being, would you trust someone doing a study, who has no training
> in running proper studies, and also believes in homeopathy? This isn't
> always the case, which makes things even more confused, but all too
> often you find the people behind the studies are either believers in
> other quack, or funded by such.

No, I wouldn't true a flawed study. Quackery is a separate problem from
non-traditional medicine, even if some quacks are pushing
non-traditional cures.

> If, and this is a big if, it actually does do something in some obscure cases, I am
still not sure that the unfortunate side effect of finding this out, that of having a
huge number of people insist that it still does work for allergies, and pointing at
non-related studies of something that it does work for, is worth the relatively small
benefit that might be gained from it. 

That I have to disagree with. People claim and believe that new drugs do
all sorts of things that they just can't, and we let those individuals
promote and sell the drugs to doctors! If a treatment works, knowing
about it is worth the fact that some people out there may try to spin
things their own ways. Unfortunately, that happens, but it will happen
with any treatment, new or old or rediscovered.

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> Yes you can. Every time a doctor gives out some antibiotics for a viral
>> infection, that's a placebo. Sugar pills were found to have roughly the
>> same effective treatment rate for mild depression and anxiety. So
>> someone gets a mild anti-depressant for times when they are just feeling
>> blue, another placebo.
>>
> If a doctor is giving out antibiotics for a viral infection then, yes,
> they would be lying.. You give people anti-virals for viruses, which
> isn't the same thing.

Never taken a child to the doctor for a cold, or seen a mother who is
convinced that a green runny nose and a 100.1 F fever is grounds for
emergency rooms? Most head colds, sinus infections, ear infections, and
so on, are viral and not bacterial. Yet family doctors still hand out
scripts for simple antibiotics.

>As for sugar pills... Yes, in "rare" occasions
> this has been done, but its usually with a) people that don't have
> anything wrong with them in the first place, but think they do, or b)
> .... I am not sure, but its not as an alternative to *real* treatment,
> and it is an ethics issue, which, as I understand it, gets argued a lot.

There was a study on the effectiveness of anti-depressants on mild
depression. I can dig that up if you like. The sugar pill test was in a
double blind study, not open treatment. However, if the drugs are only
as useful as a sugar pill, why not skip the side effects?

> And no, I am not saying that you would advocate replacement of real
> treatment with fake ones. What I am saying is that there are already
> doctors that have fallen for the quack pseudoscience and false claims of
> many "alternative" treatments, and they *do* often advocate for the
> replacement of real medication/treatments with the ones that don't work.
> This needs to be stopped, not accelerated.

Agreed, but getting rid of "alternative" therapies will not do that. I
can picture it now: "Oh no, my super secret acupuncture tricks are so
useful, that the drug companies lobbied to have my license revoked!" I
mean, if we are talking about quacks, lets pick the very fringe of them.

> That is in fact the biggest problem. You can *test* whether certain
> things have improved, you can't *test* if the patient's perception of
> their minor aches and pains have *actually* improved from some
> treatment, because the mere belief that it should improve can skew their
> own perceptions, even if the actual pain experienced is *mechanically*
> the same. In other words, if you could measure how much pain the nerves
> where generating, it would be the same, but the *perception* of the pain
> differed. This creates a real mess with this stuff, and makes even real,
> but marginal, medications problematic to test, in some cases. They have
> to have an effect that rises "over" a specific threshold of, "This could
> just be perception, not effect."

Morphine works the same way, it doesn't stop the pain from occurring at
the site, it just blocks it on the way to the brain. Modern narcotics
don't even dissolve into the body and are metabolized into pain killing
alkaloids.

And there is a method to measure the amount and types of endorphins in
the blood. So, testing the means by which pain is reduced is not all
that difficult. Testing the amount of pain reduced in the brain versus
the amount reduced at trauma site is difficult but, when comparing it to
the standard analgesics, that isn't an issue.

> You have to take the subjective perceptions of both out of the equation,
> as much as possible, to come up with a valid study. Most of these
> studies, sadly, do neither.

Which studies do neither? Maybe we are reading different studies.

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>> Darren New wrote:
>>>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>>>> Invisible wrote:
>>>>>> (There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But 
>>>>>> now scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical 
>>>>>> changes in the body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as 
>>>>>> that sounds...)
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> It is nonsense.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for clearing that up for us. I guess all the actual medical 
>>>> doctors can stop looking into it now.
>>>>
>>> Yep.. 
>>
>> <long 100% nonsequitur rant deleted>
>>
>> Wow. OK, I think I'll just give up now.
>>
> Sigh.. Not a rant, but an explanation. As I said, your "medical doctors" 
> are almost universally not trained scientists, they are a sort of 
> technician.

I completely understood what you said.  It was entirely unrelated to what 
*I* was saying.

> That clearer for you?

I completely understood and even *agreed* with what you said. That doesn't 
make it any more related to what I was saying. If it's a non sequitur, it 
doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Wolfram limits the number of people's names you're allowed to use. The 
> list has to be short, so it's kind of arbitrary which people you choose 
> to include.

Right.

> Euclid, Archimedes and Pythagorus are ancient Greek. Then there's a gap 
> of about 1,000 years, 

You mean, "And then I chose a gap of about 1,000 years."

Watch:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113, ...

Wow! Look at that big gap in the prime numbers!

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> They're ideograms not phonograms, but I'm not aware that this 
> disqualifies them as an "alphabet".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

In short: Yes.

> Most of the people in that list, I've never heard of.

And, as we know, you have an *excellent* mathematical education. ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Though I am no Buddhist myself, I prefer the Buddhist view (which might even 
be true): some questions about life and the universe are unanswerable.

> Putting it the other way... the scientists *do* know that they are correct 
> (or at least, very nearly correct), so why are they worried about 
> creationists?

I am not worried by the idea of creationism itself, but I am worried by the 
creationist movement. I am very worried by religious people with a mission - 
no good did ever come from zealots, whatever the god they pray to. If you 
believe a god created this world, big bang, evolution and all, this is 
entirely your affair. But there is no real evidence for this. So why should 
a mere belief be taught at school? Belief is for church, not for the world.

I have never heard of a scientist publicly burning a Christian (or a 
Creationist) for his beliefs at the stake, applauded and urged on by a crowd 
of fellow scientists. The reverse situation has been true only too often. So 
why do you wonder about scientists being afraid of Creationists, especially 
Christian ones? If people should be starting to believe in these unprovable 
"theories" (which are no theories at all, just mere beliefs), then the next 
inquisition, witch hunts and crusades will soon be at hand. So any sane 
human should worry about the Christian Creationist movement. One of the few 
things Karl Marx was right about: religion is opiate for the masses. People 
can be controled more easily if they believe.

If you are a true Christian, a true believer, then this can lead to terrible 
conclusions and horrible deeds, which are nonetheless completely logical and 
justified. My favourite "pearl" of applied Christian wisdom:

"Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." - "Kill them all, the Lord 
will recognise His own." (Arnaud-Amaury, papal legate, when ordering the 
slaughter of many thousand men, women and children - "Heretics" and 
"Christians" alike)

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On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:05:35 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Even nowadays, it surprises me (in some sense) that religious people
>> object to the teaching of evolution here. You'd think if creationism
>> were *true* and they *really* believed it, they wouldn't be worried
>> about *science*.
>> 
>> Why would the church lock up Galileo if they thought his observations
>> and deductions were factually incorrect?
> 
> Putting it the other way... the scientists *do* know that they are
> correct (or at least, very nearly correct), so why are they worried
> about creationists?

Because there are those who think that what should be taught in schools 
is decided by popular vote rather than through the application of common 
sense.

That's how you end up with "Creation Science" being taught as a part of 
*science* curriculum in some of the more backwards states in the US as an 
"alternative theory to evolution".  When you have people who have zero 
expertise in science dictating what should be taught in science classes, 
then progress is retarded.

Jim

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Putting it the other way... the scientists *do* know that they are 
> correct (or at least, very nearly correct), so why are they worried 
> about creationists?

If scientists know there are no demons, why are they worried about being 
burned at the stake?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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